A Mild Winter's Day

It's been a bit quiet down at The Hive since the winter weather set in on November the 24th. 

LandofSpike has had the occasional glimpse of the odd worker peeking out of the entrance but, in general, the bees are hunkered down indoors and are not venturing out.

The BeesofSpike winter hive. A super full of stores and top feeder still
in place. Entrance professionally secured with duct tape.

But today, December the 15th, the weather's taken a turn for the better.
After a spell where the nighttime temperatures have regularly been below freezing, suddenly it's a balmy 10.9C in The Apiary and the bees have been back out flying again in decent numbers. 

Somewhere in the area there must be plants in bloom because foragers have been returning with pollen. 
The mortuary bees have been busy too, taking the opportunity to clear out some casualties. 

And some of the flyers just seem to be enjoying getting out in the fresh air after being cooped up for the last few of 

weeks.

After three weeks indoors, a rare chance to stretch their wings 

Interestingly, the sound of their buzzing seems to be at a lower, less urgent, tone. 

Somehow, it gives the impression that they're more languid.

LandofSpike isn't sure why this is happening or whether it's of any significance.

Maybe it's a winter thing.

Or maybe they're a bit jaded after their long confinement. 

However, it is genuinely lovely to see them flying and to see that, so far, they're wintering well.

What's That On My Landing Board?

The BeesofSpike Apiary has had a steady stream of visitors this summer.

There have been humans, of course.

Not many guests have escaped Spike Towers this year without undergoing a guided tour of the Apiary, whether they wanted one or not.

Freddie the cat has approached with caution and has tended to scale the perimeter fence for a look inside rather than venturing through the front door.

Generally, unless LandofSpike or BKJ1 are there to protect him he gives the Apiary a wide berth .

This is about as close as Freddie is prepared to get

And there have been wasps.

But not many of them.

LandofSpike has seen a grand total of no more than 5 individual wasps in the Apiary, perhaps only 10 of the blighters in the entire grounds of Spike Acres all summer.

If he'd had a Waspinator he'd have been hailing it as the most effective product on the planet but as he has yet to invest in one, he's going to put this waspy absence down to the miserably wet spring and summer.

However, and with due deference to that cat, those people and the wasps, some visitors are more interesting than others.

And the LandofSpike Wildlife Photography Team has managed to secure footage of two of this year's finest, so with no further ado we can present...

Specimen A:

This rather large beastie was lurking around the landing board and entrance on the morning of 9th July.

30mm long including antennae  

The Colony had only been in place for little more than a week, had already been diagnosed with a substantial varroa infestation and was in the middle of the wettest summer since records began so LandofSpike was feeling a little edgy. 
There was probably a choice of 4 reasons why it was there:

a) it was an enemy of the hive and was angling on laying its eggs inside the hive with that seriously large ovipositor.

b) it was an enemy of the hive and was angling on getting inside the hive to eat or kill the bees.

c) it liked pollen and was attracted by the pollen-y smell of whatever was inside that little doorway.

d) it was bushed out and just happened to be having a rest on the landing board.

So, just in case it was about to dart into the hive and start spreading chaos and disorder LandofSpike scooped it up with his trusty Queen Clip, incarcerated it in a handy jar and took it back to the Spike Towers Research Laboratories for analysis.

It wasn't best pleased at being inside the jar

Once the Big Boys' Book of Insects had been scoured for a match, its two pairs of wings narrowed it down to Order Hymenoptera and the absence of a 'wasp waist' pointed towards it being a Sawfly.

A bit stout around the middle

Pachyprotasis rapae was thought to be the most likely match but no-one was particularly certain.

However, it was certain that the big sticky out bit on the stern was the insect's ovipositor which meant that it was a female.

Most adult sawflies feed mainly on pollen so it's not hard to see why it might have been drawn to a big box full of the stuff.

Having ascertained it was no threat to the hive, Ms Sawfly was liberated back into the wild, but at the Eastern Borders of Spike Acres, well away from the Apiary, just in case.

Specimen B:

This behemoth of a hoverfly was hanging around the gates on the morning of 4th September.

It probably measured in at somewhere approaching 25mm in length.

Hmm, perhaps those bees won't notice me...

It was persistently curious about whatever might be inside the hive. However, the guard bees seemed to have the situation under control so LandofSpike didn't deem it necessary to intervene and implement a capture. 

He and BKJ1 contented themselves with taking a few photos and watching its attempts to appear nonchalant.

Identification was pretty easy. This mighty minibeast was Volucella pellucens, or the Pellucid hoverfly, and is one of the largest of Britain's flies. 

Hoverflies are nectar feeders so all that nectar-related bee activity was probably hypnotically fascinating for it. 

Interestingly, the larvae of this hoverfly live in wasp nests and bumblebee nests but fortunately not in honeybee hives.

So it may have been wondering whether or not these were wasps or bumblebees and if the hive would make a viable nursery.      

Or it could have just been after some nectar. 

Ultimately, it was just a bit too daft to get past the defences.

The Pellucid hoverfly does not possess Ninja-like powers of self-concealment

So, apart from the now vanquished varroa and a bit of waxmoth, both of which came bundled with my 5 frame nuc as a rather unwelcome added extra, that just about covers the visitors to the hive for the time being.

Next up, it's 'How to Light a Smoker First Time, Every Time".

A Long Overdue Update from the BeesofSpike Apiary

The BeesofSpike are back online.

LandofSpike would like to offer his sincere apologies for his absence from the blogosphere over the last few weeks and for the lack of news from the BeesofSpike. 

This isn't due to a lack of action in the Apiary nor is it due to any Bee-related disasters. In fact, the BeesofSpike are now in the best of health, the colony has expanded excellently and the bees are currently storing up plenty of provisions in readiness for the winter.

LandofSpike's work in the Apiary has continued unabated but he has unfortunately been unable to devote any time to the blog due mainly to the demands of the BeeKeeperJuniors' summer holidays and a sizeable workload in the pesky WorldofReality.

Fortunately he has taken meticulous BeeNotes and will, in time, be able to transcribe all the action to the Land of Bees blog. 

He has also, whenever possible, photographed the important elements of his inspections, his day-to-day observations and any other bee-related activity. 

It was good to see new comb appearing on the new frames

In addition, he and the ever present BKJ1, have recorded every inspection with the trusty CamcorderofSpike.

BKJ1, inspecting

So, with the excuses out of the way, LandofSpike can now reveal that, since our last post, the bees have been doing just fine.

There she is... the important looking one in the middle

Once the good weather kicked in on July 20th and once the mite situation was under control the colony started to thrive. 

The bees eventually moved into top gear for the end of the summer.

The new comb and stores of honey have been appearing at an ever increasing pace and the new Super has filled extremely quickly.

LandofSpike has decided to leave his Bees with the Super in place for the winter. The focus for this year is to get the colony through the winter and leaving them with a big box of full and heavy frames of capped honey seems to be an obvious choice.

Honey production up and running

They are currently harvesting the final pollen of the year.

Close to the Apiary, the grounds of Spike Towers are home to large swathes of ivy so the workers are stocking up while they can.

I counted them all out and I counted them all back

The BeesofSpike have developed a seasonal taste for syrup and they are consequently taking down industrial amounts of 2:1 sugar solution from the top feeder.

Their concerted effort at draining it dry started in the first week of September and they've been at it ever since.

BeesofSpike workers taking syrup from the feeder

LandofSpike has today returned from the local supermarket with his sixth 5 kilo pack of cane sugar of the Autumn. 
He has made up yet another batch of syrup and is just waiting for it to cool before refilling the feeder in the morning.
Details of their syrup consumption will be dealt with in a separate post and will also include the methodology for preparing the feed.

A familiar sight in the LandofSpike kitchens over the past month

The varroa count is down to about 1 per day, which means that the Apiguard has done its job perfectly. The All Clear has been sounded and the colony should be able to overwinter without fear of mite attack.

There is consequently now no sign of DWV (deformed wing virus) which, whilst the varroa had hold, had afflicted some BeesofSpike workers.

A week's worth of Varroa in mid September. All hail Apiguard

The Drones have all now been booted out. 
This took place around the end of August and the start of September.

Watching workers escorting drones to the edge of the landing board then encouraging them, nightclub bouncer style, to take off into the blue, was fascinating. 

You could almost see the workers dusting off their hands as they swaggered back to the hive, job done.

No way back for the Drones

LandofSpike's smoker technique has also improved.

From a shaky, hit and miss start, he has developed a sure fire, works-every-time method. There will shortly be a smoker-dedicated post revealing his methods to a waiting world.

Foolproof smoker lighting technique soon to be revealed!

Right, that's all for now.
It's been a rather sketchy, and not particularly cohesive, précis of the recent activity in the Apiary but hopefully it gets us up to speed on the current situation.

There is an awful lot more BeesofSpike info to upload in the near future so LandofSpike is going to try and sort it into bite-size chunks.

The next post will be along very shortly.

Get Thee Behind Me, Jet Stream

Somewhere the sun is shining, 

So, honey, don't you cry,

We'll find a silver lining,

The clouds will soon roll by. 

So sang Elsie Carlisle, vocalist for the rather excellent Ambrose and his Orchestra in 1935.

And now, seventy seven years later, the clouds are indeed about to roll by. 
And the place where the sun is about to shine is right above the BeesofSpike Apiary.

Yes indeed, the English summer is, eventually, almost here.
This is due to the Jet Stream finally shuffling back up into its customary, more northerly, position after having lingered too far south for far too long.

And happily, it's taking its appalling weather with it.

No more of this for a while

It has rained every day at the BeesofSpike Apiary since the bees arrived.

The Apiary's newly laid grass has more or less disappeared, and the yet-to-be-named Hive Number One stands glumly in a depressing sea of mud.

But all is about to change.

Today, Friday 20 July, apart from being Mrs LandofSpike's birthday (Many happy returns, of course) marks the end of the interminable Jet Stream-induced rainy season.

And about time too

Tomorrow, it will be sunny all day. 

And the forecast is set fair for as far into the future as LandofSpike's weather-predicting seaweeds can tell.

The BeesofSpike will like this.

It's at last a chance to get a concerted spell of foraging under their belts before they have to hunker down for their first winter at the Apiary.

A BeesofSpike forager finally out and about, collecting pollen from the privet hedge two gardens down

The Honeymoon's Over

LandofSpike's first seven days of beekeepery have not been the best of times for his lovely new Buckfast bees.

This post was meant to recount the transfer of his colony from the travel nuc to the main BeesofSpike hive.
The transfer was totally successful but unforeseen events mean that the report must wait a bit longer.

I find myself instead documenting a week of problems for the BeesofSpike. 

Problem Number 1: Appalling Weather for Bees

The weather has been atrocious over the last week.

Yesterday was the worst of the lot, it chucked it down all day. 

Just like today. 

It's still raining now, as I type.

In fact, it has tipped it down every day for the whole week. 

It was even raining when the BBC Weather Report was claiming that it was sunny.

And the forecast for next week looks just as bad.

And all the while that it's raining my workers are unable to forage.

This is bad news for a small colony of bees that are already into July and have got limited time to get themselves strong enough to survive the winter.

The bees need every bit of good weather they can get.

Although even in the rain we can see them trying their best.

In the meantime I've been leaving the varroa board in place.

The varroa board is the sliding removable tray at the very bottom of the hive that catches everything that would otherwise fall to the ground.

In this way I can monitor what's going on inside the hive by analysing what drops out of the hive.

And after a particularly heavy rainstorm i found... 

Problem Number 2: Rain Incursion

There was water on the varroa board.

That shouldn't be there.

Drat

Surely the hive wasn't leaking from above. 

It wasn't.
Therefore it could only be one of two things.

Or both of them.

a) the hive entrance is quite open at the front and it's possible rain could get in that way.

b) the tray protrudes from the back of the hive by approximately 3cm so rain can fall directly onto the rear of it.

So, to protect the back, I put a length of 2x1 across the width of the hive stand, just above the tray, to act as a little roof.

For the front, I put a couple of tiles under the back feet of the stand to tilt the hive forwards a bit. 
I now realise that setting it up meticulously spirit-level horizontal was a bit of a mistake.

Hopefully the slope will encourage sitting water to not drain into the hive.

On further advice from Beeguru1 I'm going to tilt it forward a bit more tomorrow. 

As much as 15* is fine so the bees will have to get used to being on a bit of a slope, although hopefully a slope is better than a puddle.

On further inspection of their varroa board, i noticed that along with some encouraging pollen and wax debris, a couple of legs, two wings, an antenna and other assorted detritus, that there seemed to be more varroa activity than i was expecting.

Problem Number 3: Varroa Mites

When varroa mites drop to the bottom of the hive they fall through the cunning wire mesh screen and get trapped on the oily surface of the varroa board.

Not nice

Yesterday, across the whole board, I counted approximately 15 mites.

I cleaned and reinserted the board and today, 24 hrs later, there were about 17 new ones.

And magnified, using the LandofSpike makeshift optical device. Really not nice

In addition, this morning, I found a bee on the landing board, struggling to walk and staggering in circles.

It had stunted wings and a varroa mite onboard its back. 

A BeesofSpike worker, fatally damaged, varroa mite on wing

Two ominous mite counts and that poor sad bee infested with that grisly little beast pointed to only one conclusion.

I consulted Beeguru1 and he confirmed that it looked like the colony had a varroa infestation and that we needed to get it treated double-quick.

It's therefore time to get some Apiguard into the hive.
I've got some on order but I need it now. That means a trip across town to the local(ish) Bee Supplies Shop on Monday morning so the fightback against varroa can start as soon as possible.

And so the honeymoon period's over rather sooner than I expected.

My poor bees most certainly arrived at the BeesofSpike Apiary with varroa already on board.

But hopefully, this is where their luck starts to change.

Seeing just that one horribly damaged and distressed bee really underlined for me the consequences of getting it wrong. I've now got a chance to put it right.

Every crisis can become an opportunity, a crisitunity, as Homer Simpson once said.

The more things that go wrong, the more I learn and the better and more capable a beekeeper I become.

Which would imply that after a first week of appalling weather, water incursion and a varroa infestation, if it continues at this rate, I'll soon be the most experienced and battle-hardened beekeeper in the country.

New Arrivals at Spike Towers

Saturday 30 June, 7:33 a.m.

The doorbell at Spike Towers rings loud and long.

BKJ2, having been up and about for quite a while, and being much faster than her old Dad, gets to the door first and throws it open.

On the step is The Royal Mail Special Delivery Guy clutching a reasonably sized and well sealed parcel. 

The parcel has dark, meshed-over holes on three sides and a large (and grammatically ambiguous) "FRAGILE BEES KEEP COOL" label covering its fourth side.

BKJ2 turns and launches herself into a Paul Revere-style charge through the house, announcing joyously, and at high volume that, "The Bees Have Arrived!" 

It's an alarm call that propels an instantly awake BKJ1 to the front door faster than the proverbial speeding bullet. 

The Postman, fair play to him, seems totally unfazed by the whole experience. 
He gets BKJ2 to make her mark on his electronic signing device and he listens politely as she excitedly tells him just what's in the box.
LandofSpike suspects that he may well already know.

Job done, Mr Postman breezes off.

So with the front door now firmly closed, LandofSpike, BKJ1 and BKJ2 are left standing in the entrance hall of Spike Towers looking at, and listening to, their New Box.

It's buzzing.

Or, to be more precise, whatever's inside the box is buzzing, and it's doing it rather loudly.

Buzzing

The box, as BKJ2 has already told us, contains the prospective new residents of the BeesofSpike Apiary.

A Five Frame Nucleus of Buckfast Honeybees.

It is, of course, these little fellers that are making all the noise.

They've had a long overnight journey from the Welsh Borders so they're entitled to be a little grumpy.

But their journey is almost over.

Mrs LandofSpike now appears and firmly but calmly, informs LandofSpike that it would be best if he, and his box, were to relocate themselves into the garden at the earliest possible opportunity, preferably a long way from the house.

Calming down... nowhere near the house

Again, fair play, because the loud buzzing noise does seem like a rather angry loud buzzing noise.

So off to the newly christened BeesofSpike Apiary they go.

LandofSpike lashes the box to the hive stand with his Hive Securing Strap, just in case it decides to topple off sideways.

Best to be on the safe side...

Nicely strapped down

That done, LandofSpike left the bees to settle in their traveling box for a few hours, and having missed breakfast in all the excitement, took the opportunity to grab himself a cup of tea and a large, nutritious snack. 

LandofSpike was now alone with his bees.

He read his instructions so he could plan what to do next.

Then he read them again. 

And then he read them again.

Several further rereads later, he suited up and decided it was about time he opened the box.

He had no idea what to expect but his task eventually proved to be extremely simple.

Y'see, LandofSpike might have been a tad apprehensive, but those bees, well, they knew what to do.

The door's under that label

The Nuc was still strapped to the hive stand, with its currently sealed and hidden entrance positioned as close as possible to where the entrance of the hive proper would be situated.

On the front of the Nuc, the big sticker which said "open using flap below" told LandofSpike where the door was concealed. It was possible to feel the edges under the exterior packaging.

The packaging was removed and the small entrance was revealed.

There it is

LandofSpike looked at the door for a long time and then, with the point of a craft knife, he gently and carefully flicked it open...

And the bees came out.

LandofSpike stood and watched.

And out they come

Still coming out

They seemed pleased that their confinement was over and set about immediately checking out the area, flying around the Apiary and crawling all over their box.

They were busy but not angry in the slightest.

However closely they were watched by the bloke in the white spacesuit, however many close up photos of them he took, they totally ignored him, so keen were they to get on with their Beestuff.

Are we still in Wales?

After a short while LandofSpike noticed that something special was happening.

A group of bees were standing by the door, their heads down, their abdomens pointing upwards and they were beating their wings.

They were fanning the Queen's pheromones from the hive into the air to announce to the colony that this was now their new home.

Later on that day bees started returning with pollen on their legs and it was obvious that they were now also already happily foraging.

With a seemingly happy flight of bees now bedding in, LandofSpike decided to leave them to settle overnight. 

Tomorrow, it would be time to transfer them, on their 5 frames, into their new permanent home.

Their momentous move will be documented in the next exciting instalment of the BeesofSpike, coming soon to this very blog.