But this lovely hot spell has seen the bees inundated with a fabulous flow of nectar; the hives are all full of stores and the honey supers have been filling rapidly. This is particularly so in the Burcot hive, which is a ridiculously strong colony since the swarm which left it went back to re-join the others. Not only do the bees here benefit from the village gardens, they are only about 200 metres from the River Thames and all the lovely trees and wild flowers along its banks. There is also farmland surrounding the village with fields of oilseed rape also just a couple of hundred metres away which is still in flower.

Yesterday I took off the first super full of big fat frames of Burcot honey!

Lovely fat frames

The honey is a lovely pale colour with a delicate taste. I am assuming it contains a high proportion of oilseed rape nectar which is prone to crystallising quickly and solidly so we put it in buckets to allow the natural crystallisation to take place before we process it to make it more palatable – I think this involves gentle heating and “creaming” which is pretty much mashing/mixing until you get a soft-set type of honey.

Uncapping the honey enabling it to spin out

Liquid gold!

I did jar up a couple of samples – including one for a boy at the school where I work who is suffering horribly with hayfever. He lives in Burcot and I’ve read that consuming unheated, coarsely filtered honey containing pollen grains daily can desensitise hayfever suffers to the effects of the pollen (see this article from The Telegraph). I think you should ideally begin using it before the hayfever season starts to build up resistance. I’m not sure there’s any firm evidence for this, but it certainly won’t hurt (plus my honey is DELICIOUS!)

Sadly, over at the Association beginners’ apiary last week we found that the wasps had overwhelmed one of the colonies. Alan’s hive was completely overrun by wasps – empty of stores and only a tiny shivering handful of bees were left protecting the queen. He put these into a nuc. to give them a chance of recovery but they didn’t look great, very sad.

Now that all the honey has been taken off, it’s time to treat my bees for another pest – Varroa. The Varroa mite is a parasite that attaches itself to the body of the bee, weakening it and spreading viruses such as “deformed wing virus”. Arriving in England only in 1992 it is now endemic and all colonies need treating regularly. I decided to use Api-Life Var to treat my bees – it’s a natural organic treatment that Thymol, Eucalyptus Oil, Menthol and Camphor)

Bees at the entrance

While having a quick look at the colony this week I was excited to see a bee “waggle dancing” – showing the the other bees where to find forage. I quickly grabbed the camera and took a bit of video – you can see her in the middle, waggling and doing a figure of eight kind of movement!

Waggle Dance Video

I ordered a sweet little extractor from Fragile Planet bee supplies. It’s a two frame tangential extractor which you can work using an electric screwdriver to save on turning the handle but I couldn’t get mine to attach so ended up doing it the hard way after all!

Uncapping the honey

Here’s a photo of me uncapping the honey with an uncapping fork – this seemed a much neater way of doing it than with a knife, much less damaging to the drawn wax. Unfortunately, we were a bit over-keen with the spinning and the first two frames we put in fell apart were completely ruined. It did clearly say on the instructions to spin gently at first to avoid the weight of the honey breaking the wax but we didn’t read that until it was too late!

Foundation/comb fallen to bits in the extractor

I managed to extract about ten pounds of honey and put it into smaller jars as I gave it all away so quickly last time! I don’t think it tastes quite as good as my first crop – it’s still a really nice delicate flavoured light coloured honey but doesn’t have such a distinctive floral taste as my first batch.

lovely larvae

After a month of no brood in Hive 1 I was thrilled to see it chock a block this week with gorgeous, juicy looking larvae and eggs! What a relief. I also spotted the new queen who’s doing a great job and carried on laying as I watched her.

All good too over at Mum’s, after a tricky week dealing with wasps almost overwhelming the nuc. We had a nasty incident with rat glue (a wasp catching tip from a beekeeping forum). However, NEVER use rat glue – it’s horrible stuff and the only thing we caught was a poor little wren.

We inspected the nuc nine days after the virgin queen was released from the queen cage and all seems to be going really well. We spotted her strutting around quite happily and looks like she’s mated OK as there were a few eggs too.

She's a babe! (Queen in the middle of pic)

We transferred the frames from the nuc into a proper hive and also moved it a couple of feet forward to enable better access. It only occurred to me afterwards that it would have been better to have done this in two steps (into new hive, then move it a few days later). Quite a few bees were hovering over the old site seeming confused but Mum said they were happily flying in and out a couple of hours later.

My swarm (Hive 2) seems to be dwindling out of existence. As the queen seems to have disappeared maybe she swarmed again soon after I got them taking half the bees? I reckon I’ll take them over to Mum’s and combine them with the nuc. Hopefully I’ll get this done in the next few days as I need to crack on with varroa treatment next week.

orange pollen - dandelion?

The dark orange could be asparagus or dandelion, the pale yellow honeysuckle and there’s lots of white – especially noticeable was a big white mohican stripe down the back of many of the bees which I found out comes from Himalayan Balsam. Here’s a short video showing the white stripes:

This is a controversial flower – an invasive and aggressive non-native species which crowds out the native plants, then dies down in winter leaving soil susceptible to erosion. It prefers damp conditions and is quite common now on riverbanks. I know there are regular “Balsam Bashing” sessions in Abingdon along the River Ock (which is probably less than 500m from my apiary “as the bee flies.”) However, the bees seem to love it and apparently it makes excellent honey too.

The bees are also all over my lavender at the moment and all the gardens in town are no doubt supplying them with many other garden plants to forage.

Working the Lavender

However, having looked at a map to see how far the river was from my apiary, I was surprised to see how close some agricultural land is.  I noticed a bean field near Shippon recently, which is only about a kilometre away.  Bees mostly forage within 1km of their hive but apparently can travel up to 5km.  I live in the centre of Abingdon so always thought of my hives as “urban bees” but they could be flying out as far as Boars Hill, Radley, Culham or Marcham for particularly tasty forage – no doubt next Spring’s oil seed rape will tempt them out of town.

eggs on the test frame?!

Not only did Michael step in to save the day with my hive, I also had a phone call on Tuesday from the Association Chairman, Lilian who offered me a virgin queen – she’d found five that morning. As I already had the test frame in I wasn’t sure what to do but Lilian suggested taking out two frames of bees and setting them up in a nuc box with the new virgin queen. I took the nuc over to my mums to prevent them drifting back into my hive. The bees were roaring, obviously already missing having a queen. I put the queen into the nuc protected in a cage stuffed with fondant which takes a couple of days to chew through, by which time the bees will be accustomed to her smell and more likely to accept her. I checked after two days and the cage was empty and the bees seemed much calmer. I closed them up and will leave them for a week before checking again – hopefully they haven’t bumped her off.

Mo guarding the equipment

Back at home my poor pathetic little swarm (Hive 2) is still struggling. I gave them 4 pints of syrup last weekend and found that it was empty midweek. Stupidly, against all advice I decided to be really careful and refill it in the afternoon (should ideally be done after they’ve stopped flying to prevent exciting robber bees/wasps). A bit later I noticed a lot of activity around the hive – great gangs of bees bunching up around the front and many others bobbing around and diving in. After watching for a few minutes it was pretty obvious that a lot of bees were coming out of Hive 2 and darting back the very short distance to Hive 1 with their booty! The lazy devils were robbing Hive 2 blind. No wonder they’ve been filling up another super – no doubt with sugar syrup rather than proper honey! After a quick bit of research on the internet the quickest/easiest suggestion I found was to cover the robbed hive with a wet sheet which confuses the robbers, making them give up after a couple of days. Lets hope so; as if this wasn’t bad enough I also noticed ants running up the side (put some ash down around the stand to deter this) AND found a wax moth in the hive during inspection.

a wet sheet to deter robber bees

This week I also finished mosaicing my second stepping stone for the apiary – a swallow this time. It’s supposed to look like a tattoo swallow (to match the first one I did – a sugar skull). Anyway, I’m pretty pleased with it and I’m now working on a bee drinking dish with lots of raised pebbles etc for the bees to stand on in the water.

swallow stepping stone

I put a clearer board on the hive yesterday to clear the honey super but found there were loads of bees still sitting on the honey – next time I’ll give it 48 hours. As usual they were very good tempered and I just brushed them off before taking the frames into my (very clean!) kitchen to do the extracting.

I borrowed the Vale and Downland Beekeepers’ Association extractor which was probably a bit big for my needs (just six frames). The cat seemed to like it for some reason though!

Mo sleeping under the extractor!

After slicing the cappings off the honey, we put the dripping frames into the extractor:

Frames in the extractor

Then we got spinning! Fortunately I had a some help – my Mum, son Noah and nephew Louis taking it in turns to turn the handle – it was actually surprisingly hard work.

Mum tells Louis to give it some welly

Finally, we opened the valve and out poured my beautiful, golden honey.

Honey pouring out of the extractor

I should perhaps point out that I didn’t expect to have enough honey to sell in my first year; it will all be for personal consumption (plus a bit for friends and neighbours). I do realise I may be breaking a few health and hygiene rules here (eg. jugs on the floor/cats/no hats etc.) but if and when I have enough honey to sell in future I will obviously adhere strictly to all hygiene regulations!!

Well, I got quite a few jars (17 of various sizes) and, even though these won’t be for sale I made a label to finish the job. Again, as these aren’t for sale I haven’t checked that they comply with all the rules and regulations, but think I’ve included most of the info required.

The finished prodct!

The swarm

They have begun to draw out just three frames, with no sign of any brood yet but I was very pleased to see a nice big queen. I now wonder if perhaps they did swarm from my hive and some have now drifted back. I gave them more syrup and hopefully she’ll start to lay and build up the colony in time for winter – if not I reckon I’ll have to unite them with my original colony.

In my original hive all is not well either! For the second week I didn’t see the queen and hardly any brood either – no eggs, no open larvae; just a sprinkling of sealed brood. This suggests there’s no queen which, as I knocked out all the queen cells I found last week, is a bit of a disaster. There were a couple of tiny play cups but both were eggless. It is possible that there’s a newly mated queen in there which I failed to find (which if my suspicions that the swarm was from this colony could be the case). If that’s so she probably isn’t laying yet. The colony was particularly quiet and docile today – I understand that a queenless colony is usually bad tempered, so that’s a good sign. At least there is a queen in with the swarm which gives me some options; I can unite them with the original colony or, assuming she starts laying soon, “borrow” a frame of brood to produce a new queen.

I was also worried to notice one or two bees with ragged wings:

Ragged wings

I’ve never noticed this before and have heard that Varroa mites can cause “Deformed Wing Virus”. I googled this however, and it looks quite different – the wings really do look deformed and withered rather than just ragged. It seems that some old bees get ragged tips to the end of their wings – just wear and tear I guess. Hopefully that’s all it is!

Well the good news is that the honey in the super is looking great; mostly capped and ready for harvesting so I’ve booked the Association’s extractor for Thursday!! Very excited for this – bought a big bucket, bought a big sieve, ordered a few nice jars and asked my mum to come over and help. What could possibly go wrong? Hopefully won’t be too sticky to take photos so I’ll let you know!

I was very disappointed not to find the queen anywhere, despite looking really, really hard so doing the artificial swarm wasn’t on the cards. There are so many bees now its much more difficult to spot her but I did see plenty of brood – sealed, all sizes of larvae and some eggs. I also saw three queen cells with larvae and royal jelly which I destroyed. The super had plenty of honey too – but none of it sealed yet and very runny so not yet ready to take off. I put on another super – the extra space should keep them a bit happier if they are getting crowded.

A bee enjoying my poppies

I was a bit worried to see that there was a cluster of bees at the entrance of the hive so googled it to find out what could be going on. Apparently this “bearding” is probably down to the hot weather (extremely hot and humid). The bees are trying to keep cool and enable better airflow around the hive. I took out the floor of the hive to give them a bit more ventilation (the mesh floor is still in place). Hopefully this will make them more comfortable and encourage water evaporation from the honey to help ripen it quicker.

Bearding Bees