Last Honey Harvest

This is the contraption I use to extract honey from the frames of honeycomb so that it can run off as liquid honey and be bottled for use. It's a simple centrifuge which holds two frames of honey, and can then be spun round by means of  me turning a handle and the liquid honey is thrown out to the sides of the drum and runs down to the bottom. But before this can happen the frames of honey comb  have to be uncapped, that is, the sealed cells  where the bees have stored the honey have to be broken open, so that the honey can drain out, a job most easily managed by slicing off  the top layer of was with a serrated knife. Here I'm slicing off the top layer of wax with a bread knife.

As you might imagine this is all quite a faff, you have to cover the whole area of the kitchen with newspaper, or you end up with annoying bits of sticky floor which are impossible to clean. Plus the equipment has to be cleaned and stored. One of the main reasons why I'm keen to adopt the natural beekeeping methods and use a top bar hive, with which I will harvest honey on the comb, and not bother so much with the centrifuge.

Anyway I'm happy with my harvest of honey this year, the girls have done really well for me, but they will soon be preparing for winter which will entail expelling all the drones (males) from the hive as  they do no work and are not needed for mating, and the remaining female workers will  settle down to a winter of safeguarding the queen, looking after the hive and waiting for the spring. I will shortly be checking them for evidence of Varroa mite, and treating them appropriately if I need to, before seeing them bedded in for the winter with a plentiful food supply, and a nice warm watertight hive.  

Wasps and The Waspinator

I had a visit from the Wiltshire Council Pest Control Department this morning. Which is not as alarming as it sounds, it was the Wasp Lady as I call her, a lovely lady who gets rid of wasps nests in difficult positions.  I don't mean she does it standing on one leg, it's the nest that's in the difficult position, in the roof space once again, same as last year. The Wasp Lady is kitted up in bee suit, or wasp suit I suppose, and a spray on the end of a long lance which enables her to reach up to the roof level. It costs £50, but is a necessary expense for me to protect my beehives from wasp invasion.

As I've mentioned before, wasps are a bit of a menace if you're a beekeeper, as they usually turn to robbing the beehives at some stage during the summer. I always wait to see if this will happen before ringing the council, as I would otherwise leave the wasps well alone, but I have found that my strong hive has a battalion of guard bees at the hive entrance fending off the wasps quite successfully, but my other hive, the weaker one is looking  pretty much overwhelmed by the invasion. Wasps steal not only honey from beehives, but being carnivores they also eat the larvae, and even the bees,  and over time can destroy a weak colony of bees. In fact we have two wasp nests in the garden, but the other one is in the ground and I can deal with this one myself. It's an easy matter to don my bee suit, and spray the nest with a proprietory wasp nest destroyer, best time to do it is at dusk when fewer insects are flying.

At least this is what I've had to do until I discovered the Waspinator recommended on Sarah Raven's website, and anything that's good enough for the sainted Sarah is good enough for me. They are imitation wasp nests which are apparently very effective at convincing wasps that the area is already occupied by another colony and so they give it a wide berth. Frankly it sounds pretty improbable but they are sold out on Sarah Raven** though still available from the manufacturers direct, so I've just sent off for a couple of Waspinators, and I will see whether they work and report back in due course. It would be lovely to have something that just kept wasps away, and didn't involve toxic chemicals and/or wholesale death and destruction. Generally speaking I'm in favour of life, rather than death, even for wasps.

**See comment below

Honey Harvest

I have two bee hives in my garden most of the time, and rather like Alan Bennet's dad, who always had an everyday suit and a best suit which he referred to as "my suit" and "my other suit" respectively, my hives always seem to be "the Hive" and "the other Hive". Except in my case "the Hive" is the good one and "the other Hive" is not so good.

I was very pleased to find enough honey for a decent harvest in the Hive, when I did my inspection the other day. Not so good in the Other Hive, which still appears not to have a laying queen, despite my earlier efforts, so I have transferred another  frame of eggs and larvae from the Good Hive to the Other Hive, in the hope that this will encourage the bees to select one of the eggs and nurture it into a queen which they do by feeding with royal jelly and generally mollycoddling her. Quite democratic when you think about it, she's really just a bee like any other but  is selected to be treated differently, and if I were Richard Dawkins, I would no doubt see this as evidence of  Nurture over Nature, or am I thinking of Steven Pinker?

Anyway Bee queens, rather like The Queen, are very well looked after by vast numbers of servants, and also work very hard indeed, (but without the dodgy relatives). It may even be truer to say that everyone is her relative since everyone is either her sibling or her offspring (I'm obviously back to the bee queen here) - she is the only one who can lay the fertile eggs which will ensure the future of the hive. I really need to set up a bait hive to see if I can attract a passing swarm, as one good hive isn't enough of an insurance against possible future losses. Even small beekeepers like me should always try to have at least two good hives at any one time. One hive and one "other" just isn't safe enough really.

I've made so much marmalade and jam this year, that I've run out of jars, so I have stored all my honey temporarilly in large preserving jars for the time being, and I will decant it into smaller jars in due course. If  I do get another super of honey to harvest I will have too much for myself and my family/friends and will have some to sell, which will be the first for quite a while. But I always make certain that I leave more than enough to last the bees over the winter. It is possible to feed bees on sugar syrup, and indeed commercially this is always done, but I much prefer to let the bees have the food they have worked so hard to make, and only feed sugar syrup in an emergency.
What a good egg I am.

The Bee Inspector Cometh..

I had a visit from the County Bee Inspector yesterday. (For anyone from overseas, we have a system in the UK of Bee Inspectors funded by the government, whose job it is to help and advise beekeepers, monitor disease, and so on.) It sounds a great system, but Bee Inspectors are pretty thin on the ground, I think we have half a dozen or so to cover four counties in this area, and this was the first time I've had a visit in the five years I've been beekeeping.

So I was very pleased to meet Robert, who examined my bees and took some samples to take away for lab testing, and was a fount of information and practical advice. He was completely non- judgemental of my somewhat ancient and rather tatty equipment, which was a relief, as I thought he might tell me to replace it all.  Beekeeping can be quite an expensive pastime, one of the reasons I am keen to move to top bar hives, and pursue more natural beekeeping methods.

I was so busy with Robert that I forgot to take any photos, so here's a rather boring photo of one of my hives.

Anyway for the time being the results for my hives were that one has a bad case of varroa which Robert has suggested I treat by doing a "shook swarm", which will effectively give the bees new varroa free frames to live in. I don't have enough spare frames to do this so I've sent off for some new ones and will perform the shook swarm as soon as they arrive. My other hive seems to have a virgin queen who isn't laying any eggs, and the solution for this was to transfer a frame of brood from the other hive so that the bees can raise a new queen from this if the current one doesn't get on with it in the next day or two.

O Frabjious Day! Another Swarm!

I'm thrilled to announce that I have today captured my first swarm!

I was busy in the veg garden, when I first heard the noise, I looked up and saw a huge cloud of bees directly over one of my two hives. At first I thought my own bees had swarmed, but I knew, having looked at them just a couple of days ago, that it could not be them, and the swarm were probably attracted by the bee smells, and were checking out the hive to see whether it was vacant. Having found it occupied, they moved off down the garden, then across the lane and into a sycamore tree in the hedgerow, followed by me, with a cardboard box and a white sheet. I was lucky in that the bees were in an accessible spot, and I was able to knock most of the bees off quite easily into the box. I left the box for an hour or so for the stragglers to go in and then brought it back to the garden where I put them into a spare hive. This is the second swarm I've had this year, but the first one I've actually collected myself as the first one just arrived in the hive all by itself. So now I feel like I'm a Proper Beekeeper!

Sorry no pics, was too anxious to get it done properly to think about the camera!

How to start beekeeping for free (almost)

I'm really pleased with the progress being made by my bees this year. Having started the year with no bees I now have two thriving colonies, one nucleus of Carniolian bees which I bought, and the other a swarm which came in of its own accord. The swarm is doing extremley well, and has filled up a box and a half with eggs and brood, and almost a full super with honey. I forgot to put the queen excluder on and they seem to be doing so well that I thought I would just let them get on, and they have kept the brood to the bottom and the honey stores in the top super, so all is well. They also seem to be very good tempered bees and I almost feel I could handle them without gloves and bee suit. The carniolian bees are making plenty of brood but have not yet filled up the brood box although their wax is a beautiful pure white.



I have been doing quite a bit of research about bees recently, and have come to the conclusion that I will change my way of keeping bees quite radically in view of what I have learned. Most people are aware of the concern about the welfare of bees worldwide, and many suspects including pests, disease, global warming, poor husbandry, and pesticide use have been suggested. I think it quite likely that most of these are contributory factors and that bees are indeed the "canaries in the coalmine" early warning to us all about the dangers of not caring for our environment. It was interesting to me that when this problem first appeared in the press and on the news some time ago, it was suggested that the difficulties were largely caused by "bad beekeepeers", messing about in their back gardens and not doing a proper job. There were "inefficient amateur beekeepers" allowing the varroa mite to run riot in the population. This reminded me of the way that amateur poultry keepers were set up to be the scapegoats for last years H5N1 or bird flu, before the danger turned out in fact to be closer to intensive factory farms like Bernard Matthews. And then of course this year's great profit making scam for Roche and Glaxo Smith Kline, H1N1 or Swine flu and so on and so on... Sorry, I'm digressing into Rant Mode... Amateur poultry keepers, beekeepers, and gardeners are not the culprits in these scenarios but more often the last bastions of common sense, traditional and local knowledge and practice, many of whom make a substantial contribution to the future of healthy food production and protection of the environment. OK rant over, but to get back to bees - there are similarities between keeping poultry and bees, and it's not just that they both have wings.

Picture from the Barefoot Beekeeper by Phil Chandler showing the author and one of his home made Top Bar Beehives


Before the Reverend Langstroth invented the modern wooden framed beehive so familiar to us all, bees were kept in basketwork skeps where they were free to make whatever kind of honeycomb they wanted. But in return for the wooden framed hive we now give them we have taken away their freedom to live in the way they have chosen to live for thousands of years, and it seems to me that if we keep them like chickens are kept in battery farms, it will all be for the worse. We put them in homes not of their own devizing, try to control and alter their natural behaviors to suit ourselves, transport them around the countryside to pollinate various different crops, sprayed with chemicals, robbed of their precious honey for which we substitute refined white sugar. It's no wonder bees are suffering, it would be amazing if they were not with this kind of treatment. We now largely accept that keeping chickens in tiny cages gives us an inferior product, causes harm to the environment, is less healthy to eat, and is immoral. It's pretty much the same for bees. If we think bees are "just insects", and consider them in welfare terms, we must at least consider the consequences to the wider environment of their being abused.



I've been keeping bees for a few years now and it has always seemed somehow not quite right to me in some way. Now I know why. I now find it appears to be entirely possible to keep bees in a much more natural and "non interventionist" way, by using simple Top Bar Hives and giving up the slightly obsessive control freak style of the modern hive. I'm definately going to give it a try and anyone who is interested in finding out more about these issues should take a look at the Barefoot Beekeeper by Phil Chandler, and the associated web site for natural beekeeping at http://www.biobees.com/ And if you are interested in keeping bees in a simple, natural, and (not the least important consideration these days) inexpensive way, have a look at Phil's book. He describes how you can start beekeeping without any of the expensive equipment you may have thought you needed and how to make what you do need yourself, if you're even a tiny bit handy or have access to someone who is, neither of which applies to me, unfortunately.



And as a final sad footnote, it even seems that the very people who have been entrusted with looking to the welfare of bees, the BBKA The British Beekeepers Association, are in league with chemical companies like Bayer who produce agricultural chemicals and pesticides of proven danger to bees!! See http://vimeo.com/1158245 I have written to the BBKA and will not be renewing my membership.

Bees Bees Everywhere

My one remaining bee colony gave up the ghost earlier this year, and so I decided to invest in a nucleus of Carnolian bees from the lovely Mike at EasyBee in Gloucester. Carnolian bees are supposed to be gentle and non aggressive, so I was very happy to pick up the new bees this morning, and was looking forward to transferring them to the new hive later in the day. "Feed 'em and keep 'em warm" was Mike's advice as I drove off with the box of buzzing bees in the boot of the car.

Imagine my surprise when I went to get a couple of bits from the "bee area" of the hen run, to find the old beehive fully occupied!! A swarm must have come in during the last day or so. and taken up residence in the old hive. I had a quick look at them, and couldn't find the queen, but then I never can, there were no eggs or larvae, but then there wouldn't be if they had just arrived. So I quickly closed up the hive and left them to it, hoping for the best. I've put my new Carnolian bees down at the other end of the vegetable garden, just to avoid any antagonism between the two new sets of bees. So I've gone from no bees to loads of bees in the space of just a few days. I'll have to see how the two hives compare.

The four baby ducklings that hatched out in the incubator a week or so ago are doing well, and eating for England. Their home has moved from the side of the Aga, where it was really in the way, to the other side of the kitchen and then today out into the hall by the front door. I'm hoping they will grow a few feathers soon and can go outside in the run and eventually join the three other adults. If one at least of them turns out to be a drake we might be able to breed from them next year. My two adult black ducks are real stunners and I'm hoping for a good black drake to go with them.