1 Main flow – enough supers on hives?

2 Reduce entrances on nuclei/weak hives

3 Monitor varroa population/mite drop

4 Open mesh floors

Writing these notes in the second week of June, it is quite difficult to predict when plants and trees will begin flowering – for many years now everything has flowered very early, up to a month early in some cases. We had a hot spell of weather at the end of May, and the oilseed rape yielded very well – I have just finished extracting 260 pounds honey from my 2 hives in the garden, and the honey in the final two supers was definitely becoming very viscous (another week and it would probably have become solid). I, and I’m sure other beekeepers, am always getting caught in the perennial problem of  ‘if I don’t get it off within a week it may start to crystallise in the comb, but if I take it too early it will not have less than 20% water content and so will not be saleable’. Perhaps they could genetically modify the plant so that it produced a nectar that was lower in glucose and higher in fructose, then rapidly crystallising honey would not be a problem.

At the last beginners meeting at the association apiary we all saw how easy it was to accidently kill a queen bee; a hive was being dismantled prior to inspection and on trying to lift the final super it was found that the plastic excluder was still stuck to the underside even though the hive tool had been inserted all the way round to try and free it. The super was lowered back down and the excluder fully freed, but on removal of the super we found the queen jammed with her thorax firmly wedged in one of the slots – dead of course! The lesson to be learned is that you MUST make sure the excluder is fully free before lifting the final super, and the top bars are clear of bees before replacing it after the inspection. Needless to say this is not a problem with framed wire excluders, which I prefer to use.

It is noticeable that over the years the so-called ‘June gap’ just doesn’t seem to happen anymore, and we are more likely to have a late July/August gap.

From about the second or third week of June to the middle of July, limes, blackberry, sweet chestnut, summer flowering (spring-sown) oilseed rape, white clover and a huge variety of cultivated and wild flowers will bloom. If the weather is hot, and there has been enough rainfall in the preceeding weeks/months, (and there certainly has this year!), you can expect a good, steady flow.  Bees will be fully occupied, with a constant stream of foragers coming and going from the hives, and they can be handled with the minimum of fuss. However, more often than not, the weather is changeable and the bees become frustrated by being couped up in the hive unable to forage freely, with a consequent falling off in their good behaviour.

Advice this month is to make sure they have enough supers for the incoming nectar. As we get towards the middle of July, I would refrain from adding any more as the nectar flow will usually slow and finally stop altogether, and you don’t want a number of half-full supers to extract, but be prepared to be flexible.

Once the flows have all but stopped, the bees will turn their attention to defending their hoard, and for up to a week, can be unapproachable. If there is no good reason for disturbing them, then I would leave them alone to get on with ripening and sealing the honey. With little income, bees will now be on the look-out for free sweets, so it will pay you to make sure that all hive parts fit together well without any gaps through which bees can gain entry – it is amazing how quickly robbing bees can clear a hive out of all its honey. By the same token, ensure that bees gain no access to cleared (or clearing) supers, even for only a few minutes, by covering all supers until they can be removed to a bee-tight building. The excitement caused by allowing bees access to honey at this time of the year will make sure you don’t do it again!

Any hive that is low on numbers of bees, and all nuclei, should have their entrances reduced so that they can keep robbing bees (and wasps) out. If you become aware of robbing in progress (a lot of activity around a couple of hives when all others are quiet), then try to ascertain who is the robber and who is doing the robbing, close up the hive being robbed (with ventilation – leave the varroa tray out, with just the mesh in place, for instance) trapping as many of the robbers inside as possible, then temporarily move the hive to another apiary or site at least 3 miles away. The trapped bees doing the robbing will now treat this hive as their own. Now go back to the original apiary and temporarily reduce ALL the entrances – they can, if desired, be opened again after a few days. The removed hive can be returned after a few weeks or so, by which time the robbing bees should have forgotten their old site.

Monitor the varroa situation very carefully this month – if your uncapped drone brood indicates that the mite population may be getting out of hand (it is the percentage of infected drone cells rather than the number of mites that you need to ascertain), or occasional bees are seen falling from the hive entrances with deformed wings,

then you must treat as soon as possible; if there is still honey on the hive, then check the literature to see whether your preferred treatment has a withdrawal period for honey.

At the end of July/beginning of August, some colonies may slow or stop their queen from laying, so if you check a colony and find only sealed brood and no queen, eggs or larvae, do not jump to the conclusion that they are queenless. Nearly all of the queenless hives that I have examined have shown bees clustering thickly over the brood combs, such that it is difficult to see the comb underneath (bees do not normally cluster in large numbers in the broodnest unless preparing to swarm or it is cold). If the bees look and behave normally, then they are probably fine.

For a few years I ran my hives on open-mesh floors, only replacing the collecting trays when treating with Apiguard. Leaving the collecting tray out means that all the hive debris falls clear of the hive, along with any live mites (up to 20% mites drop off or are knocked or brushed off the bees – they can’t return if they fall through an open mesh floor).  Leaving the collecting trays out also reduces the incidence of wax moth to almost nil. I did not detect any detrimental effect on colony behaviour or temper – if anything they were slightly better behaved. In hot weather they don’t cluster all up the hive front and nectar is ripened more quickly; top ventilation is not required at any time of year.  Unfortunately, they have no effect on the swarming urge of the bees! However, I have gone back to leaving the collecting trays in all year, cleaning them at least once a week. I nearly lost my bees during the winter of 2010/2011, and the weather just doesn’t seem warm enough during the greater part of the summer to warrant leaving the bees unprotected below. I also found that combs were never fully drawn to the bottom bar if the collecting tray was left out.

If you keep your bees in an out-apiary then rearing your own queens is a very good idea. You don’t need to do grafting – de-queen a colony that you can afford to produce less honey, destroy any queen cells they make themselves, then add a frame of eggs/very young larvae from your best colony. They will make queen cells on this frame, and once they are sealed you can carefully cut them out and put them in Apideas with a small number of workers.  Once the queens have emerged, mated and are laying they can be introduced to small nuclei and left to build up slowly. A judgement can then be made on their relative docility (don’t use smoke), and any that fall short of your expectations can be culled. The others can be used to re-queen your hives in the autumn, and any left over can be kept in nuclei over the winter in case of losses; any surplus nuclei can be sold in the spring.

If, like me, you only have a couple of hives in your back garden then you will probably feel it is safer to get your queens from a reliable bee breeder to guarantee docility. I would personally recommend Buckfast queens from Ged Marshall as they also have the advantage of very low swarming and high productivity along with the aforementioned docility.

• Extract any later rape honey
• Keep checking for queen cells
• Swarm collection
• Add more supers to hives if necessary

Well, no sooner did Thames Water announce an official drought, complete with hosepipe ban and threats of worse to come, than we have the wettest April since records began. The hosepipe ban is still in force, but we are now no longer in an official drought! All the water has ensured a very heavy flow from the rape, albeit a little intermittent due to the weather. The net effect is that an awful lot of colonies have started swarm preparations, including my largest hive – in fact their queen completely disappeared after maintaining a 10 frame broodnest for several weeks, and she didn’t leave with a swarm! I did what I always do on first finding queen cells – go through and destroy all of them so long as there are cells containing eggs or 1-2 day larvae. A week later I checked again – no open brood and lots of various size queen cells, so I selected one large sealed cell on the bottom of a comb and destroyed all the others (a bit risky as there is no way of telling if it is viable or not – better to leave an unsealed cell, but this time there wasn’t one). I will check again in a fortnight to see that all is well.

You should have finished extracting any early rape honey by the time you read these notes, but if there is no nearby source of income for the bees after the rape, then you need to keep checking them to make sure they don’t starve – just because the weather is nice and it is June does not mean they will be alright if left for a couple of weeks. Feed any colonies that feel light, especially if the weather is not good. Bees kept near gardens will usually manage alright, but those on farmland need watching. A better idea is to keep a super above the excluder that is never extracted – it saves the worry of starvation and the bees seem to forage much more freely if they already have a good store of honey.

Keep up your inspections for queen cells, as also brood diseases, and monitor the varroa situation.

During the course of the season, you may be asked to remove a swarm from someone’s garden. The call may be to a genuine swarm, or a bumblebees or wasps nest. If the ‘swarm’ is found to be a bumblebees nest, then I would try and persuade the person to leave them where they are, emphasising that they do not swarm, and unless the nest is disturbed, are very unlikely to sting anyone. (this is not true of the recently introduced tree bumblebee which will attack without provocation!). Most bumblebee nests die off naturally by the middle of August (they peak around mid-July). If the nest is wasps, I would again try to leave them alone, but if they are close to the house or public footpath, then they can be destroyed at dusk by pouring a jar of petrol down the entrance hole. This is assuming the nest is in the ground – anywhere else and I would leave them to the pest control people.

If there really is a swarm, then they can be shaken into a suitable receptacle (skep or cardboard box), left to finish flying for the day, and collected at dusk. Swarms should always be hived on foundation, as they make such a good job of drawing it into comb, but if you are unsure of the source of the swarm then I would keep them away from your other hives – they may be carrying disease, and often seem to be bad-tempered or followy.

I am often asked what hive I use and if I would ever change to a different one based on my experience with it. The hive I use is a modified commercial broodbox with national supers above, and the only other hive I might be tempted with is a standard national; I still maintain that a single national broodbox is just too small for a lot of the queens in use today, and so I would need to use a double broodbox (which of course is too big!). I can’t see any major disadvantages with the system I first started with, as it is so easy, if necessary, to reduce the space in the large brood box by the use of a dummy frame(or even two as I use in my commercial boxes), but impossible to increase the available space in a standard national broodbox without adding another box on top, so necessitating a 22 comb inspection if the queen needs to be found; for a beginner to have to contemplate this defies all reason (it is reassuring for beginners to see the queen at each inspection, helping to build confidence for when it becomes necessary).

I will also put my head on the block and say that I would never contemplate using a zinc queen excluder (although I know a number of experienced beekeepers who will use nothing else). My own preference is to use a framed wire excluder, but just make sure you get one from one of the big bee equipment manufacturers – I have seen quite a few really bad ones in my time where there is more than a bee space on one side, or a bee space that is divided equally between both sides! The result is always masses of brace comb and a less than removable excluder. There should be a bee space on one side with the wire flush with the other.

HONEYBEE DEFENCE – part of an abstract from a scientific paper – seems that drones play the more crucial role in the inheritance of bad temper; all the more reason to requeen aggressive colonies BEFORE they produce drones!

‘Honey bee nest defence involves guard bees that specialize in olfaction-based nestmate recognition and alarm-pheromone-mediated recruitment of nestmates to sting. Stinging is influenced by visual, tactile and olfactory stimuli. Both quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping and behavioural studies point to guarding behaviour as a key factor in colony stinging response (I think most of us already knew that!).

Results of reciprocal F1 crosses show that paternally inherited genes have a greater influence on colony stinging response than maternally inherited genes. The most active alarm pheromone component, iso-amyl acetate (IAA) causes increased respiration and may induce stress analgesia in bees. IAA primes worker bees for ‘fight or flight’.

1 Regular check for queen cells/swarm control/clipped queens

2 Check for brood disease, esp. EFB

3 Add supers ahead of requirement

4 Clear/extract/replace supers after oilseed rape flow

5 Monitor varroa situation

We are having another wonderful spring again, and the bees are building up quickly, foraging on cherries, plum and increasingly oilseed rape. One of my 2 hives occupies a brood and 4 supers at present (first cross Buckfast) so they will need frequent checking for queen cells – the other hive is about where I would expect them to be for the time of year..

This month, you should be checking your hives at weekly (if you have an unclipped queen) or 10 day intervals (if she is clipped) to spot the first signs that the bees are preparing to swarm (bees will not normally swarm until they have drones on the wing, so you probably don’t need to check hives that haven’t produced any yet). Remember, it only takes 8 days from the queen laying in a queen-cell to the time it is sealed, and on that day, or the first fine sunny day thereafter if it happens to be dull and wet, the old queen will usually leave the hive with between a third and a half of the workers. They will cluster for a while (anything from a few hours to one or two days) quite close to the hive whilst scout bees search for a suitable new home, and if not captured by the beekeeper, will leave for an unknown destination. This is the scenario if the queen’s wings have not been clipped. If, however, the queen’s wings have been clipped, then when the swarm emerges, either the queen will drop onto the grass and be lost, in which case the swarm will return and await the first virgin to emerge before they can swarm, or the bees will find the queen and cluster around her very close to the hive. You can see by this that clipping a queen’s wings might buy you up to 5 or 6 extra days before the bees can swarm again, but you need to be vigilant. Also, do keep well ahead of the bees when supering so that you do not force them to swarm in the first place.

On finding occupied queen cells, you need to make an artificial swarm (see April’s notes) unless you can visit your apiary daily and so pick up any swarms that emerge. For ease of manipulation, allowing the bees to swarm, collecting them in a container and hiving them in the evening cannot be bettered, but it isn’t always possible or desirable if neighbours might get involved or the bees are in a distant, infrequently visited out-apiary.

If you have an aggressive hive that you dread inspecting, a simple method of re-queening it without finding the queen is to cut out a good queen cell from one of your more amenable hives that is preparing to swarm, place this carefully in a queen cell protector (available from the bee equipment manufacturers), then make an indentation in a brood frame in the aggressive hive and press the queen cell in its protector into the gap you created. You will need to have gone through this stock and removed any of its own queen cells first.  Close the hive and don’t go near the broodnest for a month, after which you can check and see if you have a new queen – in a surprising number of cases a virgin queen will emerge and kill your resident queen and after mating should settle down to lay, although nothing is 100% certain with bees. Moving the hive across the apiary so that it loses most of its flying bees will ensure it doesn’t swarm and I am sure other beekeepers can think of more variations on this theme.

Fields of oilseed rape will have been in flower for 3 weeks or more, and supers should have been added well in advance of them being needed. From the middle of this month, you will hopefully have full supers to extract – so long as the combs are at least 2/3 sealed, and no drops fly out if you gently shake the frame horizontally over the hive, then it should be ok to clear the bees and remove the super/s.  Clearing bees can be achieved using porter escapes or one of the more rapid methods based on the canadian clearer boards; I have had a lot of success using a Thorne’s fume board impregnated with ‘Bee Quick’, but it does need warm weather to be totally effective; if the sun isn’t shining then the board can be warmed using a blow torch. I have also read that you can impregnate a cloth with Bee Quick and put the cloth into a smoker (unlit of course) – by operating the bellows you will vapourise the solution and clear the bees from the super. Whichever method you use, you should aim to remove and extract the supers as quickly as possible if the bees have been foraging on oilseed rape– if the supers being cleared are left unoccupied for long, and especially if the nights are cold, then the honey can become very viscous and difficult to extract. After a week, you will probably find them well on the way to becoming totally granulated.

Whilst you are inspecting your hives, do carry out a disease check of the brood, especially looking at three or four frames containing larvae after shaking off most of the bees, to check for European foul brood, for at this time of the year it is much easier to spot.

Lastly, don’t forget to keep monitoring the varroa levels in your hives, and if the counts indicate that the mite population in your hives is reaching a critical level, then you need to do something to lower the population. Making a shook swarm in a fresh broodbox and then treating the displaced bees and brood in the original broodbox with Apiguard will control the mite population.  Using mesh floors on all your colonies may keep mite numbers at a reduced level, but you must clean the collecting tray at least weekly if problems with wax moth are to be avoided or perhaps leave the collecting tray out altogether.

1         Carry out thorough inspection of colonies

2         Check for queen cells – swarm control/supersedure

3         Monitor varroa population – mite drop

4         Keep a look out for Small Hive Beetle

The pussy willows have just started flowering here (12^th March) and the bees have started foraging a little more freely. This has certainly been one of the mildest winters I can remember, and one of the driest.

April heralds the start of the beekeeping year insofar as regular inspections/manipulations are concerned. There should be days this month that are warm enough to carry out your first full inspections of the hives; if the bees are active and you feel comfortable in a T-shirt, then it should be alright.  For beginners, it is an excellent time of year to familiarise yourselves with the internal workings of the hive, as bees should behave quite placidly, being far too busy to react to what you are doing. Indeed, I would view any hive that was troublesome at this time of year as not worth keeping, and requeen it immediately – bees that are unmanageable in April will be ten times worse in July!

Make sure you have the smoker going well and gently open the first hive.

As you work through the broodnest you should be trying to answer five basic questions:

1. Is the queen present and laying? If you don’t see the queen, but have seen eggs, one per cell, then all is well. If you do spot the queen, then now is a very good time to mark her – this year’s official colour is yellow.  If you like to clip your queens as part of swarm control, you should do this as well; clipping a queen’s wings will not prevent the bees from swarming, but it will buy you valuable time; just remove about a third of each of the big wings. I have personally only ever clipped a queen’s wings once in the whole time I have kept bees, and they promptly superseded her. However, a good number of beekeepers regularly clip their queens without incurring any problems.
2. Is the colony building up well, or as fast as other colonies in the apiary? When you examine the bees you will probably find a few very advanced colonies, one or two weak ones, but by far the majority somewhere in the middle.  The more advanced colonies may well have one or more supers on already (and will be quick to make swarming preparations once conditions are right) – the medium-sized ones will probably be ready for their first (it is in this group that those bees with a less pronounced tendency to swarm will be found), but it is the weak colonies that demand careful scrutiny to ascertain what is holding them back.  Scattered brood would indicate a poor queen, and a large amount of drone brood mixed in with worker brood would point to an old queen who has run out of sperm, or an imperfectly mated queen from the previous year.  If the colony occupies at least 2/3 of the brood chamber then it is probably worth saving it, and I would either a) buy in a queen (that would have to be an imported queen) and introduce her using an introduction cage, after first removing the old queen (recent research has indicated that there is no need to remove the attendant workers for successful introduction), b) unite them to another colony, so long as both are healthy, killing the failing queen or c) transfer a frame of eggs from one of your best colonies and let them rear their own queen.
3. Are there any signs of brood disease or other abnormality? The advice here is to become familiar with the appearance of normal brood, then anything abnormal should be obvious. Shaking most of the bees from a frame or two will enable you to see the brood more clearly – just make sure the queen is not on the frame.  Most good bee books give a description of brood diseases. If you think you may have a problem, please do ask a more experienced association member or your seasonal bee inspector.
4. Has the colony sufficient room? If the colony occupies nearly all of the available space, then put a super on (above an excluder if it is the first) when you have finished the inspection; bees should not be using all the space available to them in the spring – putting a super on too early is better than putting one on too late.
5. Has the colony sufficient stores to see it through to the next inspection? If in doubt, feed a gallon of syrup.

Swarm control. Towards the end of the month, some of the colonies may start swarming preparations, especially if the queen is in her second full season ( Thorne’s stock a device that can be fitted to a hive to trap the queen if she tries to leave with a swarm – might be worth a try if you are not around for a while and want to ensure you don’t lose a swarm). If you see several occupied queen cells, then you must make some sort of division or the bees will do it for you in a few days’ time.  You can do this by taking the frame with the queen, minus queen cells, and putting her into a fresh broodbox with drawn comb (preferable) or foundation on the original site, moving the old box with queen cells to one side; leave any supers with the old box. However, after several years, I have found that it is more successful to just put the queen alone into the new box, so long as it has some drawn comb and the bees are flying well; a frame of young bees can be shaken in with advantage. Temporarily pinning a strip of queen excluder over the entrance or placing a queen excluder under the broodbox for 24 hours will stop them absconding. These bees should be fed to enable them to draw out the foundation quickly and to prevent starvation should the weather turn bad.  If brood is provided, all the colonies I have dealt with have continued to rear more cells on any young brood, and their ‘swarm fever’ continue unabated.

At the end of a further week, the old box is moved to the other side of the new broodbox, whereupon all those bees that have learnt to fly will return to their old hive position, and thence to the new hive; the supers can now be placed on the new box. You can, at this point, either remove all but one queen cell in the old box, or divide the box into nuclei so that some form of selection can be made from the resulting queens.

Another option when finding queen cells, and my preferred method as it requires far less equipment, is to remove the queen on the frame she is on, minus any queen cells, and put this into a nucleus hive with another frame of sealed brood and two or three empty combs; this lot must be fed if there was not a lot of food on the transferred combs. In this case, the original box is left to rear its own queen, removing all but one queen cell a week later (in this case the bees should go on storing honey). Before removing the surplus queen cells, a nucleus could be made up from a couple of frames with a second queen cell, as an insurance against mishaps.

If, however, you see only one or two occupied queen cells, and these are on the face of the comb rather than on the edge, it is probable that the bees are arranging to supersede their queen. In this instance, I would leave them to get on with the job, but just keep an eye on them in case they change their minds and go the swarming route instead.

Varroa. Keep monitoring the varroa situation, and by far the most accurate way of doing this is by uncapping a patch or two of drone brood with an uncapping fork and looking for mites on the pupae. Counting natural mite fall over a week or two can lull you into a false sense of security and lead you to believe that your bees are fine (see BBKA newsletter for October 2007 – article on use of open mesh floors).  Also, do keep a wary eye out for Small Hive Beetle.

Food stores will have been used during this active period and Lilian and John Valentine together with help from John Eustace, Martin Miller and Jane Greenhalgh have been restocking all our colonies with Ambrosia Fodant and also treating them with Oxalic Acid to knock down any remaining Varrao. Colonies treated for Varrao amounted to 72 including the Association colonies and those colonies left on the Beginners apiary.

Treating with Oxalic Acid

For some of those whose hives were included it was the first occasion they had experienced the winter treatment of Oxalic Acid so it will stand them in good stead for any future treatments. It was evident when treated that most colonies were strong and in some cases there were even 9 or 10 seams of bees. This bodes well for spring and the hope that most will come through the winter, however we have still some weeks to get through before then and at the time of writing colder weather is forecast including severe frosts.

During the next few weeks (subject to weather) it is hoped that the Teaching Apiary can be completely re-fenced with Chestnut fencing. A volunteer working party will be arranged to carry out the work and tidy the apiary for spring. If you wish to volunteer please contact John Valentine, tel 01235 767524.

For those members who know the size of the Teaching apiary, you will wonder how this amount of fencing is being paid for, I can assure you that the apiary is self financing from the sales of honey that was produced at the apiary last year. We do still have a few buckets of Association honey for sale if anyone is interested in purchasing a bucket or two.

During December John Eustace, Ric Hiscott and John Valentine renewed fencing posts and installed a Dutch Gate on the Beginners apiary. Ric spent most of his time on his stomach removing dirt from the hole for a strong gate post which should last for a considerable time and it will now be easier to gain access and move hives on/of site.

2         Check for brood disease, esp. EFB

3         Add supers as required

4         Clear/extract/replace supers after oilseed rape flow

5         Monitor Varroa situation

We are having a wonderful spring at the moment, and the bees are building up quickly, foraging on cherries, plum and increasingly oilseed rape. In fact even my hive that started with a tiny cluster no bigger than a couple of cupful’s of bees has expanded to occupy more than 2/3 of a national super.

                This month, you should be checking your hives at weekly (if you have an unclipped queen) or at 10 day intervals (if she is clipped) to spot the first signs that the bees are preparing to swarm. Remember, it only takes 8 days from the queen laying in a queen-cell to the time it is sealed, and on that day, or the first fine sunny day thereafter, the old queen will usually leave the hive with between a third and a half of the workers. They will cluster for a while (anything from a few hours to one or two days) quite close to the hive whilst scout bees search for a suitable new home, and if not captured by the beekeeper, will leave for an unknown destination. If, however, the queen’s wings have been clipped, then when the swarm emerges, either the queen will drop onto the grass and be lost, in which case the swarm will return and await the first virgin to emerge before they can swarm, or the bees will find the queen and cluster around her very close to the hive. You can see why you need to be vigilant.

                If however you find occupied queen cells, you need to make an artificial swarm (see April’s notes) unless you can visit your apiary daily and so pick up any swarms that emerge.

                Fields of oilseed rape will have been in flower for 3 weeks or more, and supers should have been added well in advance of them being needed. From the middle of this month, you will hopefully have full supers to extract – so long as the combs are at least 2/3 sealed then it should be ok to clear the bees and remove the super/s.  Clearing bees can be achieved using porter escapes or one of the more rapid methods based on the Canadian clearer boards.

                Whilst you are inspecting your hives, do carry out a disease check of the brood, especially looking at one or two frames containing larvae after shaking off most of the bees, to check for European foul brood, for at this time of the year it is much easier to spot.

                Lastly, don’t forget to keep monitoring the Varroa levels in your hives, and if the counts indicate that the mite population in your hives is reaching a critical level, then you need to do something to lower the population. Making a shook swarm in a fresh broodbox and then treating the displaced bees and brood in the original broodbox with Apiguard will control the mite population.  Using mesh floors on all your colonies may keep mite numbers at a reduced level, but you must clean the collecting tray at least weekly if problems with wax moth are to be avoided or perhaps leave the collecting tray out altogether.

Brood rearing will now be going on apace, with the queen re-laying cells as they become vacant as well as extending the total area of brood as the cluster grows in size. The bees’ need for water will now increase – some of this will be licked up from cold surfaces in the hive but by far the majority needs to be brought in from outside. If there is no nearby source, or their chosen watering-hole might cause conflict with your neighbours, then place a tray of moist peat in a warm, sheltered spot in the garden/apiary, but do remember to keep it moist as once bees have found an alternative water supply, it is very difficult to change their minds.

It is a good idea to get the bees onto a clean floor at this time of the year – just quietly lift the whole hive to one side, set a clean floor in its place, then separate the broodbox from the old floor and replace on the clean one. Take the old floor away, scrape it clean, then scrub it with warm, soapy water. Leave it to dry, and then go over it with a blow torch (don’t flame epoxy-coated mesh though!). This treatment should help to control diseases in the hive. You can also transfer the bees to a fresh broodbox at the same time, scraping the old one clean and going over it with a blow torch as before, with the same benefit.

On a mild day you should make a point of looking at the activity at the hive entrance – a colony whose foragers are returning with large loads of pollen has probably come through the winter fine, even if the number of foragers varies from one hive to another, but a hive with few foragers and almost no pollen coming in needs to be checked, but keep any necessary inspections as brief as possible (I would not carry out full inspections on obviously healthy hives until later this month, and then only if the weather is warm.)

Smoke the bees a little if they need it, then gently remove an unoccupied outside frame. Look down between the frames to ascertain where the cluster is, and gently part the frames in the middle; now remove a central frame and check to see if there is brood present, especially eggs. If you cannot see either, then the colony has probably lost its queen, and should be united with a queenright colony that seems to be short of flying bees. Do this by placing a sheet of newspaper on the queenright hive, held in place by a queen excluder, and placing the queenless lot on top (the excluder is there to hold the paper in place and to act as a sieve just in case there is a queen present in the top lot – I have known the occasional hive to have a queen who functioned quite normally except that she stopped laying altogether!) If the removed frame contains drone brood instead of the expected worker, but it is in a fairly compact mass, then the queen has probably run out of sperm, and although laying normally, cannot produce fertile eggs. The drone cells are easily recognised by their raised cappings. If the bees are fairly quiet, then go through them until you find the queen, kill her and then unite them to another colony as before.

If, however, you find scattered drone brood, and can see occasional cells containing more than one egg, then the queen has died some time ago and some of the workers’ ovaries have developed sufficiently to enable them to lay eggs. The best solution in this instance is to take the hive some distance away and then shake all the bees onto the ground, leaving them to work out their own salvation.

With any attempts at uniting bees, you must be reasonably sure that the colonies are healthy, otherwise you run the risk of spreading disease through your apiary; also, try not to add bees from a stock that swarms annually to one that swarms infrequently as they may cause the latter to swarm when they might have gone through the season without doing so. If a hive goes queenless at the very end of the month, and is quite strong, you may well want to try and save it by introducing a queen. Unfortunately, home-bred queens are a bit thin on the ground at this time of the year, but try asking members of your association if they know of any.

Whilst you are in the apiary, I would heft each hive; any that feel light can now be fed a gallon of syrup in a contact feeder – it is important that you use this type of feeder in the spring as with other types the bees need to leave the cluster to gain access to the syrup, and during a cold spell they won’t and may die inches from the food. You can, of course, still feed candy if that is easier.

During the second half of the month, you will probably find occasional colonies that have expanded to the point of needing a super; any colony that occupies 2/3 or more of the broodbox should be given a super above an excluder – if you are worried that the extra space will be too much for them to cope with, then put the super above a sheet of newspaper, which they will chew through when they require more space. This method is especially useful if you might not be able to visit the hives for a few weeks; several supers can be put on at one time, each separated by a sheet of newspaper.

If you think that your bees may have a higher level of varroa infestation than you would like, then now is a good time to treat –I would use Apiguard (thymol based) or Api Life Var as the mites in this area are now showing signs of resistance to pyrethroids. Always read the instructions first, though.

Writing these notes in mid-January, it is difficult to imagine what the weather has in store for us for the rest of January and February. During mild spells bees will be taking cleansing flights, voiding the accumulated waste in their guts whilst on the wing. Bees are able to retain large amounts of waste for up to 6 weeks, so will not normally defaecate within the hive.

During this month, the snowdrops, hazel catkins and small yellow aconites will make their appearance and give the bees their first source of pollen. Towards the end of the month, if it has been quite mild, pussy willows and crocuses will also come into flower. Seasons can vary wildly at this time of the year, and a long, cold spell during January/ February may well hold both the bees and flowers back for several weeks. Then, when the mild weather does arrive, all the early part of the season gets concertina’d together, with all the plants flowering at the same time, and very often with a much shorter flowering period. At the end of this month, if we get one or two warmer days, the first bumblebee queens may make an appearance, but they will quickly go back into hibernation if the weather turns cold again.

If you have given your bees top ventilation for the winter, the end of February/beginning of March is a good time to remove it. Condensation within the hive is not such a problem now as the bees’ need for water for brood rearing and diluting stores is now much greater than the need to get rid of it. Any netting placed over the hives to protect them from woodpecker damage can also be removed if the weather is mild. If you have wintered your bees over a ventilated floor, a sheet of insulating material can, with advantage, be placed above the crownboard to help the bees retain heat for the slowly-expanding broodnest. Towards the end of the month, I would remove mouse-guards and replace them with entrance blocks, as mouse-guards will remove pollen loads very efficiently at a time of year when each one is so precious.

From now on the bees will be consuming stores very rapidly, so do keep hefting your hives (tilting the hive from 2 opposing sides to see that it feels heavy) to be sure the bees have enough – feed candy (baker’s fondant) if you are unsure or they feel light, placing it directly above the cluster.

With the appearance of pyrethroid-resistant varroa, we all need to seriously consider alternative methods of reducing the mite population within the hives during the active season. Of course, during the spring and summer, time is at a premium, with the garden growing apace and the bees needing a lot of attention in the form of swarm control, extracting, etc. You need to have in place one or two easily applied methods that occupy not much more time than you would normally spend on the hives. Remember, all you are trying to achieve is a mite population that is below the threshold at which colony damage occurs; you are not trying to eradicate all the mites in the hive.

1. One of the easiest ways of slowing the build-up of a large population of mites is to keep all your colonies on open-mesh floors; colonies lose up to a quarter of their mites this way, especially if the hives are in a sunny location. Weak colonies will need the collecting trays installed below the mesh, but medium to strong colonies will manage quite well without.

2. Cutting out drone brood after around mid-June is another extremely good way of reducing the mite population, and this is the method I would recommend to all beekeepers (I would refrain from doing this earlier as a good population of drones is needed to ensure proper mating of virgin queens. Mite populations in drone brood early in the season are usually lower than later in the season, so removing drone brood in May, for instance, will deplete your drone population more than your mite population).

3. Use lactic acid (around 60ml of 15% solution per hive) to spray onto the bees, avoiding open brood. This treatment should not be used during a flow, but if you have to, you should leave any extracted honey a minimum of 8 weeks before bottling. By this time, any lactic acid present in the honey will have degraded.

4. Hive Clean (available from BeeVital) – around 15ml is dribbled between the combs directly into the seams of bees, again not during a flow if you can avoid it.

December used to be the month when frosts hung on in shady places al day, and we got those dreary, foggy mornings when the sun hadn’t the strength to break through. These days it is more likely to be mild and fairly dry. The bees should now be tightly clustered on some frames surrounded by food, and wil stay put until weather warm enough alows them to venture forth on a cleansing flight. Bees wil only defaecate within the hive if they are sick, or if the stores on which they are feeding contain much waste matter, e.g. heather honey. The hind part of a bee’s gut in winter can hold waste products for several weeks, so you can see that cold spels of weather are no problem so long as we get milder breaks every so often. Generaly speaking, recent winters have been unseasonably mild (although last year seemed to mark a change back to the sort of winter we used to experience) so bees wil have found no problems with flying outside. Too much good weather at this time of the year can have its drawbacks, however, causing the consumption of stores to rise, and so maybe leaving too little for the spring . al the more reason to make sure they are plentifuly supplied with stores in the autumn.

This month is a good time to treat any colonies with oxalic acid if you think the number of varroa mites might be too high. As there should be little or no brood in hives, the mites wil al be on the bees. Folow the instructions on the pack and only dribble the required amount of oxalic acid between the seams of bees. You want to disturb the cluster as little as possible. The external temperature needs to be above 3 made up from Thorne.s a few weeks before I intend to treat, but you can just as easily make up your own by dissolving the appropriate weight of crystals in sugar syrup, using a syringe to dispense the required amount along each seam of bees. C and the solution at room temperature. I buy mine ready