This week sees the shortest day of the year, time for winter treatment with oxalic acid. My varroa treatment strategy has evolved over the few years I have been keeping bees. I found this summer that two hives with very low seven day varroa counts still had evidence of deformed wing virus or phoretic mites so I have rather less faith in counting. My plan now is to use a thymol-based treatment in August and oxalic acid in December, regardless of the varroa counts. In this I have been influenced mainly by David Evans (https://theapiarist.org) and Rusty Burlew (https://www.honeybeesuite.com). It is worth reading David's two recents posts on the why and the how of winter varroa treatment. The direct link to the later of the two articles seems to be playing up but you can get to his blog here. At this time of year we expect the bees to have little or no brood, important because oxalic acid does not get to mites in sealed brood. I treated my bees on a cold frosty day earlier in the week, chosen so all the bees would be at home and well clustered. The whole process is over very quickly so with my own bees there was no chance to take photos. On the same day I met Sue and Ian at the local association apiary to treat the hives there. I wrote about the dosing two years ago but using the recommended dilution of Api-Bioxal it works out at 5ml per seam of bees. The oxalic acid is trickled from a 5ml syringe or a trickle bottle. Here Sue is removing the crown board,
then charging the 5ml chamber in the trickle bottle,
and dribbling the 5ml along the seam of bees.
We have found it helpful to use a finger to mark the next seam to be done, so we don't lose track while recharging the bottle and miss out a seam or treat one twice.
Sue also trickled any bees hiding on the underside of the crown board. All that remained was to replace the crown board, heft the hive, and add some fondant if necessary.
David Evans also recommends doing daily varroa counts over the next few days to check on the efficacy of treatment but otherwise the bees can be left in peace until next spring.
My bees have been busy bringing in pollen in the last few days in colours from cream to yellow to orange and I think this is where some of it has been coming from. I wrote about Kniphofia caulescensa couple of years ago and thought I would post a few more photos from yesterday. This plant has been in situ for about three years and this year has 20 flower spikes.
It is a favourite flower for honey bees in my garden this late in the season as it provides lots of nectar as well as pollen. Each flower contains a large drop of nectar and the bees often go half way in to get at it.
Many of the bees were collecting pollen.
The bees have to share with worker wasps
and the occasional drowsy queen buff-tailed bumblebee.
The bees can go back to their hive but both the wasps and the bumblebees are homeless so they sleep in the flowers at night. The wasps will soon all be dead and the bumblebees will hibernate until next spring.
Just over a year ago I began my experiment with foundationless brood frames, using a design copied from David Evans' blog. There is no starter strip but a key is provided by lollipop sticks to encourage the bees to build straight comb. Two vertical bamboo skewers divide the frame into three and provide an anchor to improve stability once the bees have attached the sides of the comb to them. I was fascinated a year ago by the variation in cell size and orientation and promised to post an update. I have continued to use foundationless frames and following David Evans' advice I don't put in two adjacent to each other. I either alternate with frames with foundation or put them between two drawn frames to ensure the bees don't have an excuse for building comb out of line. Below is a frame I removed at the start of this season when I did a Bailey comb change, after it had been in place for less than a year. It is interesting to see how dark the comb is after less than 12 months' use as brood comb. Note that the middle part of the triptych shows worker comb in "normal" orientation; the right hand panel is worker comb in the top 3/4 and drone comb at the bottom, again in "normal" orientation; and the left panel is mostly drone comb but rotated through 90° (or 30°, depending how you look at it!).
These other photos were taken during an inspection last weekend. This frame has drone comb on the right, sideways worker comb in the centre, and sideways drone comb on the left.
This one has worker-sized comb left and right but with different orientation, and drone comb in the centre.
Another has mostly worker comb but drone-sized cells at the left and right edges.
This one is a honey comb but still shows variation in cell size and orientation.
Another with stores, but this time all worker-sized comb.
This is all worker brood.
And this is a mixture of worker and drone brood.
Given that no one bee is in charge of construction, it would be fascinating to know how the bees decide which size comb to build and which way up it should be. I have been encouraged by this experience and I'll continue to use foundationless frames. As I said in last year's post, the potential advantages are:
The bees produce their own wax. Recycled commercial wax may contain residues of chemicals and pesticides.
The bees can decide when and where they want to produce worker brood or drone brood. Generally they will produce more drone brood than when constrained by worker brood foundation.
The bees can decide the cell size for worker and drone brood.
Comb production is said to be faster if there is no foundation.
The queen will lay earlier.
Foundationless frames are cheaper to make.
They will be much easier to recycle - just melt out the wax and they're ready to go.
The potential disadvantages are:
They take slightly longer to make.
The comb is more fragile until the bees have fixed it securely to the sides and the bottom of the frame so the beekeeper has to be careful during manipulation.
The bees raise more drones, especially in spring. This is probably not a problem but a fact. I have a lot of drones in the apiary. Given that my bees are very well behaved this is probably a good thing but it gets quite noisy when they are all flying about.
This is not something you see every day - a queen beside a sealed queen cell.
Two days ago I did my first inspections of the year, taking advantage of the warm weather. In the first hive the queen was on the very first frame, a sign that things were getting crowded. The colony in hive three, by contrast, was small with lots of room and stores but not so many bees. I found three frames with brood, including eggs, larvae and sealed cells but on the first of these there was a well developed queen cell containing a fair-sized larva. I assumed this must be a supersedure cell but couldn't see the queen, even though the hive wasn't very busy. As the weather has stayed warm and I wanted to check on what was going on I had another look today. The queen cell was now sealed and a couple of inches away was the queen. (Most of her paint had worn off, perhaps partly explaining why I missed her the first time.) As I watched she walked across to the queen cell and appeared to take an interest in it. I whipped out the camera but this was the only shot I got of her on the cell before she moved.
Here she is partly underneath the queen cell.
The bees are a bit stroppy which is out of character and might also suggest a failing queen. My plan now is to leave them alone for three weeks. The new queen should emerge in 7 or 8 days from now and be mated in the following week, weather permitting. It will be interesting to see who is in charge when I next look in.
My bees have been making the most of the recent mild sunny weather. Although we are still officially in winter they think it is spring. The first warm sunny day of the year with bees foraging on the snowdrops in the wood is cheering and usually sees my first bee photos of the year.
Snowdrops produce a lot of pollen and the bees get plastered in it. As a result they have to spend a lot of time cleaning up. The photos and videos provide an opportunity to see how they do it, typically hanging from a flower by one front foot and using the other five legs to move the pollen back and stow it in the corbiculae.
Here are a couple of videos.
When all is done they fly back to the hives to unload - only a few metres away.
It is normal to see a few dead bees outside the hives at this time of year. Any winter bees that haven't made it through the winter are pushed out of the entrance by the undertakers. However, this afternoon I was surprised to see one corpse outside hive 3 that looked a bit larger than the others.
When I turned it over it was the queen. She was marked last summer and was present and correct at my last inspection at the end of September.
Obviously something has gone wrong but I won't be able to do an inspection for the next few weeks. I expect to find either that the queen was superseded and there is a new unmarked queen, or that the new queen was produced too late to get mated and is a drone-layer, or that the colony is queenless. If I find anything interesting I'll report back here.
