Link a blog

The grandchildren have been up to spend a weekend just recently and were fascinated by our bees, especially after watching the brilliant Bee Movie. I was in and out of the room whilst it was playing and found myself going back in to see what was happening!!

I know it is a movie for kids, but at the end of the day, what a brilliant way to get the youngsters interested in bees and their parents to the plight of the honey bee.

Anything that highlights the problems that the bee is facing globally is OK with me.

Well worth watching!!

I had a few spare moments today to search out other beekeepers blogs and was surprised at what I found, the quality of them was  really so good, it has made me stop and think about this one. So I have now come up with lots of new ideas to add to mine, so watch this space!!

If any beekeepers out there would like to have a link to and from my blog to yours, please contact me with your details.

Royal Welsh Show 2011

We had a great day at the Royal Welsh Show, in Builth Wells yesterday, it is a few years since we have been and it has changed so much. The show is just growing and growing in size and stature, apparently it is one of the best shows in Europe.

I had gone down primarily to show my rabbits, but I also had another agenda! I wanted to have a look at the Honey classes and the competition that I will have next year if I get my way!

Honey Exhibits at the Royal Welsh Show 2011

Whilst looking at the fabulous honey, mead, candle and polish exhibits we also watched a demonstration of how to make your own beeswax polish. I will be trying this my self in the near future if I can get hold of any turpentine.

More exhibits - Well done all !

There was also an exhibition hive for the general public to see the insides of a working hive, this is a great way to see what goes on inside with the eggs laid, brood at all stages and the honey and pollen coming in. I am not sure if everyone understands the complexity of the honey bee but even for beekeepers it is great to watch.

Winner of a frame of Honey, doesn't it look good- Well Done

Well done and congratulations to everyone who entered the show and especially to the winners of each class, as I know only to well how hard it is to get a red card at the Royal Welsh.
From my experience it takes months of planning and weeks of preparation just to enter a show and I am talking about livestock

Tonight we opened up a few hives to see how they are getting along, and we were nicely surprised.

Hive #2 last week, was thought to be queen less, now although we haven't seen the queen nor was there any eggs we now believe her to be there but just not mated. The reason for this is the frame of brood that was placed in the hive last week, should have had an emergency queen cell built on it if there was no queen there, and it didn't.

We have made a decision tonight to move the hives from this apiary as there seems to be a problem with the queens mating there for some unknown reason. So they will be moved the the field apiary as soon as we can do it/

Hive # 4 was also checked and I am pleased to say it was the same result as #2.

In the field apiary we checked #12 the latest acquisition, this was the last swarm collected, with a virgin queen and already she has eggs and capped brood in her hive and is doing well.

New Wedding Favours

These wedding favours are very simply decorated but will still look elegant on your wedding tables.

Cream Ribbon and Honey Bee Charm

Peach Ribbon and LOVE Charm

They can be customised to suit your requirements and the ribbons can be changed to match your theme.

 Please visit my Etsy Shop, link on the left of page

Honey Granola

I forgot to add this to my last post, well worth a try!!

I also read a very short book on my Kindle whilst lying in bed on Saturday morning. " Family Honey" this was about a family of beekeepers in USA, going back through the generations. The topic that ran through this book was about the plight of the honey bee, which is very alarming!! we will discuss this at a later stage. There was also a section on Honey recipes where I found a lovely recipe for Granola, a homemade breakfast cereal made from honey and oats, it was delicious and so easy to make.

3 cups porridge oats

1 cup honey

1/4 cup oil

Mix together and bake in a moderate oven, turning every 10 minutes until golden, do not walk away and forget about it or they will burn! Store in an airtight container and serve with fruit and nuts of your choice and cold milk for breakfast, yummy!

Learning on the Go!

As with all hobbies, there is so much to learn and with beekeeping I am learning all the time.This weekend I have been reading  the Beekeepers Bible by Collins.

There is everything in it that a novice beekeeper could possibly need, from the history of the bee to basic skills and honey recipes.

Well worth the cost!

Saturday afternoon, time once again to inspect the hives, we were only going to check numbers 1-5 today as we were a little worried about the activity in numbers 2 and 4 and of course we needed to know what was happening in number 1.

We opened hive #1 first,  I am so glad to say it is now queen right, laying queen, brood found at all stages, this has now been saved and looking good.

Hive # 2 we had our doubts last week when we opened this, if there was a queen or not. This hive is working extremely well, bringing in the honey, but there was no new eggs or brood seen.

 Gary checked it over and explained that the behaviour of the bees, led him to believe it was queen less. As they have no eggs, they cannot produce a queen cell, so we had to take evasive action.

We removed a frame of brood from # 5 and placed this in this hive. Now we have to check this in 2-3 days, there will be either queen cells produced on this frame proving there is no queen or if there are no cells it will be queen right and we will just have to wait for her to lay.

Hive # 3 we checked this to see if it needed another super for honey, plenty coming in so it will do in a few days time, Mel better get making some more frames quickly!

Hive # 4 this was another concern, as we thought this was were  # 12  swarm had come from and again we weren't sure if it was queen less or not. We followed the same procedure as above, taking a frame of brood this time from hive #3 . We will need to check again in 2-3 days to see what has happened. Again this activity has not effected the honey flow so we are hoping for some lovely nectar soon.

Hive #5 is queen right with a bought queen from the Buckfast strain and she is laying very well. This hive is getting stronger by the day, but we have had to take a frame of brood out to save hive #2. We are sure they will recover from this loss very quickly. We are not expecting any honey from this hive this year, we just need it to build up strong enough to get through the winter.

The weather today is atrocious not even a bee would go out in this!! bring back the Sun

Can We Save the Hive

Tonight, we decided to remove one frame of brood at all stages from the hive number 6 and give it to hive number 1 in order to try and save it.

Hive number 1 has now got a laying queen (she was found at he weekend when we spotted eggs) and when we opened it up tonight there was a frame of capped brood, but not enough nurse bees to help see it through until these grubs hatch.

It has taken an awful long time for this quessn to go out on her mating flight and start to lay, but fingers crossed we will now save it.

We also fed it a solution of sugar syrup so they dont have to work to hard finding food or robbing their stores in order to survive.

Getting out of hand!

After finishing of my ramblings yesterday, I had just started to do the housework when I was called outside.

Come and look at this, was the shout!!
So the vacuuming had to wait once again whilst I went outside to see what was up.
Where are you?
Over here, I followed the voice and went into the field , look over there!
I looked but could not see anything, what am I looking at?
A swarm of bees,
You have got to be kidding me,I said
No honestly, I saw it it must of just landed in the hedge said hubby
If that is the case we had better get our bee suits on again and take a look

Do you know I might as well get dressed in my bee suit every morning, because I seem to constantly have to keep putting it on, it is getting out of hand!!

So when kitted up, we crossed the field,manoeuvring our way over a fence and under the barbed wire without getting our suits stuck or ripped, not an easy task. Once in the field, we walked up the hedges to find the swarm.We didn't have to go far before spotting it, as there was still several hundred bees flying around the hedge.

We decided to shake this one straight out of the hedge and into an empty Nuc box, not the text book way of doing things, but for ease we thought we would give it a go.

Most of the bees landed in the Nuc box but with several hundred still flying around our heads we decided to go for a cuppa, whilst the rest landed and hopefully followed her majesty inside.

Thirty minutes later, we went back to collect it to find some neighbours in their gardens enthralled at what they were watching, we explained what had happened and why we were looking like spacemen before leaving with the Nuc box back to our field.

That now makes 12!!

The Nuc was sited in a nice sunny position, now all we had to do was drop in the 6 frames without hopefully losing the swarm. Carefully we slipped the top off and then we slowly moved the crown board over to one side, far enough to drop in very carefully one frame then slide it over to drop in another and then another.

Feeling quite smug with ourselves we stood back and admired the new acquisition.

Transfer of Bees from Nuc to Hive

Well today's Job was pretty straight forward, but it is getting a bit of a headache trying to remember which hive is which, so we have had to go around and physically number each hive.
I wanted to name them as I thought it would be lovely "Primrose Hive" has a nice sound to it, dont you think? but for simplicity sake I know its more sensible to just number them so I gave in.

It is extremely important to keep hive records especially when you have more than 2 hives, I am disciplined enough to do that and since being involved with all aspects of beekeeping I set up my own log book. There are unfortunately no records from last year, say no more..

So for record keeping sake only, I have named them as well numbering, hopefully you can then follow a little easier what I am doing in the future.

Number 1 ( Dahlia) hive is the problem Nuc which is queen less
Number 2 ( Dandelion) hive is the one which we saw the queen emerge from this week
Number 3 (Lavender) hive is the one with the honey flow and going well
Number 4 (Primrose) is my hive also with a new emerged queen this week
Number 5 (Daisy) is from an artificial swarm out of number 2 hive

All above hives are in one apiary on the mountain

Number 6  (Poppy) hive is the swarm caught in Deganwy today transferred from a Nuc box into a full hive and on 5 full frames with room to expand
Number 7 (Geranium) hive is a swarm caught in Llanbedr this hive was transferred from a full hive into a Nuc box only on 3 frames and we needed the hive for hive # 6
Number 8 (Buttercup) hive is from an artificial swarm from hive #4 and was also transferred from a Nuc into a full hive to give them more room as this was struggling for space
Number 9 (Honeysuckle) hive is from a swarm caught in Mochdre
Number 10 (Cowslip) hive is from a swarm caught in Llanrwst
Number 11 (Cosmos) hive is from a swarm caught in Llanbedr again, this week

All the above hives are in the apiary in the field

Now I can get on with some housework which has been a little neglected because of the bees!!

Inspection

Talk about learning as you go along! there is nothing quite like hands on experience, now dont get me wrong I am all for reading about the subject of bees but nothing quite makes sense until you actually experience it.

My bedtime reading at the moment is bees, bees and more bees and if it isnt a book, it is the Beecraft magazine which has lots of useful information for all beekeepers including the novice like me.

Normally we inspect the hives at the weekend but when I got home last night Mel was eager to have a look at the ones that were queenless, to see what was happening in them. So before dinner we donned our suits and went to the apiary on the mountain. I am happy to report that all hives were doing well except for one, the Nuc!



12 frame National Bee hive



5 frame Nuc Box



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Nuc, if you remember is the hive that we swapped from a full hive last weekend into a Nuc box as we thought it had so few bees and no queen, I can confirm this is definitely the case, I will update on this later.

The two other hives that were queen less on the last inspection have now got new virgin queens, in fact one emerged right in front of us.  It was fascinating to watch her pull her self out of the cell, a lovely black queen. In fact I couldnt quite beleive what I was seeing as Mel had taken out this particular queen cell to check if it was dead inside, and there she was in his hand!! they dont tell you to do that in a text book.

In the other hive we didn't actually spot the new queen but we are pretty sure she is there albeit a vigin (hence no eggs) as the remaining queen cells were all dead. I hadnt quite understood that the new queen or shall I say the first queen to emerge runs around the hive looking for queen cells in order to kill them. She wants to rule! so she kills each of them by inserting her sting into the cell before they hatch.

Another little snippet I learnt last night was the queen has multiple stings, unlike a worker bee who only has one and then dies when it has been used, she can sting lots of times and obviously lives to carry on.

The main hives from last year are now well and truly in a honey flow and bringing in the nectar. The 2 strongest hives  have almost filled a super it just needs to be capped so we we have put a new supers on each of them ready for them to fill them as well.

Fingers crossed for a bumper 2 months

Hive Number 11 another swarm

Yes that's right Hive number 11 another swarm caught tonight in Conwy,

This time it was in a swarm box so very easy to collect and to handle. The box had been placed in a dark corner of a garden by a friend of ours Cyril. He phoned us up today to say that there was a lot of activity around it, so after dinner we set out to collect it, taking with us a gift of a jar of Melys Honey as a

 thank you.

Back home we were lucky to be able to hive it straight into a brand new hive that Mel had spent all last night putting together, just in case! Lucky for the bees he had, guess what he will be doing

 tomorrow night!!

All the bees were tucked up nicely in their new home before dark.

Queen Disaster

We checked over the hives today, after re queening 4 hives last week, we thought we would have had a positive response but like the book says it is very difficult to re queen native Bee's they don't like accepting just any queen.

3 out of 4 hives had got rid!! and at £30 each its not very funny. One colony accepted and has already started laying her eggs so that one will be fine.

Now the other 3, well 2 of them had drawn emergency queen cells so we have left them with them and will allow them to hatch, but what we will do is relocate the hive to Llanrwst to give them a better chance of mating and they will be close to the honey flow that is just starting to happen there.

The blackberry and balsam is just coming into flower and both hives have a strong colony of workers so should bring in the honey.

The 3rd hive is a disaster, they had no brood so are slowly dying out, a lot less bees in there compared to last week. We have taken them out of the hive and moved it into the field which is going to be our new apiary, (more sun, less shade, protected from the wind) we replaced the hive with a Nuc box and will try and save whats left with a queen and some brood out of one of the other hives.

The good news is that we have had 2 more swarms so we are now up to 10 hives (including the disaster) also the strong hives are definitely starting to find the nectar and pollen so we should get a bit of honey this year but as they say don't count your chickens...