The last meeting of the year is on 9th December, 7.30 p.m. at the Shirehall in Shrewsbury. As always this will be something of a social occasion. A quiz is planned, on a beekeeping theme, so come along, make up a team and see if you can beat the others. Prizes for the winners!

Everyone is asked to bring a little something (i.e. food or drink) to help the party along.

4.      Cleaning Frames for Re-use

I often clean and re-use my own super and brood frames but would never consider using old frames from any other source except my own apiary. The particular point about this is that boiling in water is not sufficient to eradicate American Foul Brood spores, which are extremely long lasting, forty years being a typical estimate. Some say that it is not worth the trouble to re-use frames but if they are sound it probably saves time to do so rather than build new ones. I owe the method to David Kemp who until a few years ago was the North-East Regional Bee Inspector. David spent some of his early years working with Brother Adam at Buckfast who recycled frames by cleaning them with hot water and washing soda.

The first step is to have a serious look at the frames to decide if they are really good enough to re-use. With this in mind I often assemble frames using resin glue on the joints and cross-nail the bottom bars with one nail per side. This does require accuracy in placing the nail and if the frame is accurately assembled it will be found to be totally unnecessary to remove one of the bottom bars to fit wax. The method of nailing each bottom bar upwards limits the number of times that the frame can be re-used and is the weakest way of nailing (up the grain) relying totally on the friction of the gimp pin in the side bar to retain it. This is not very important in the case of a brood frame but can lead to the bottom bars becoming detached on super frames if heavily braced. Any of the PVA glues are useless if put in boiling water, the particular product to use is a powdered resin glue called Polymite, previously marketed as Cascamite.

If the weather is hot and sunny a solar extractor can be used and either the frames put in whole or the wax cut out using a serrated knife (the serrations help in cutting support wires). Always cut away from your body! The whole frame or the cut out wax could be put in a cloth bag such as an old pillowcase, which helps separate out any dross or brood-cell lining. Old tights can also be used and if the foundation has been cut out of the frames first you can get more comb in. If the comb was separated from the frames, the frames should also be given a session in the solar extractor in order to remove the maximum possible amount of wax.

An alternative to the solar extractor which is obviously only functional on bright summer days is to use steam to melt the wax where steam from a wallpaper stripper is piped into a brood or super sized box containing the frames. A cover is needed on the top and a catch tray beneath to collect the stream of hot water and melted wax. If old hive parts are available, an old roof can be put on top and an old metal roof cover used underneath inverted, with a hole drilled as a drain. This works quite well but sometimes fallen brood comb can clog the system and prevent steam getting to all parts. The steam method seems always to produce cleaner, more yellow wax. I improved the design by using expanded metal Varroa mesh as a grate and fed the steam in from below using a manifold made from 13mm copper water pipe.There is a commercial product available from Thorne’s called the Easy Steam. The yield of wax from brood frames is disappointing compared to super frames as the cocoons absorb some of the wax.

To complete the process the frames themselves need the remaining wax and propylis removed. A Burco boiler is useful for this but all the ones I have seen are just slightly too shallow to accommodate the whole length of National frames so they have to be dipped one end and then the other. Approximately half of a 1 Kg bag of Washing Soda crystals (N.B. not caustic soda) is added to the boiler full of water and heated until the water is almost boiling, individually cleaning each frame using a stiff brush that has natural bristles, not plastic ones which might melt, a churn brush also known as a dairy brush is useful for this. A good method is to tie frames together in parcels with wire and just leave them to simmer for a short period until clean with a weight such as a brick placed on top to keep them immersed. The water needs to be almost at boiling point so that a minimum of time is spent on each frame otherwise the task becomes very time-consuming. It is worth bearing in mind that a thirty-litre Burco with a three-kilowatt element will take seventy minutes or so to reach boiling point. Periodically the waxy scum will need to be skimmed off, a one-litre polythene jug can be used. Feeling concerned that the bees might not like the soda on the frames when they start to draw them I leave them outside until they have had a good soaking of rain. Hot soda solution is very damaging to the skin and strong industrial gloves that are not damaged and leaking should be worn. Household gloves are perforated easily and give no protection against the high temperature.

A by-product of re-using frames in this way is the wax. In its raw state it can be sold to your beekeeping equipment supplier or traded in for an allowance against new foundation. If care is taken to produce clean wax it can be used to make beeswax candles to provide the beekeeper with another high value product to help mitigate our rather expensive hobby.

5.     Pheromones

This is the second part of a talk by Janet Dowling FRES, to Harrogate & Ripon BKA, given in January 2005: courtesy BEES)

A very major pheromone is the group of chemicals known collectively as ‘queen substance’. This has thirty or more individual constituents that fulfil many roles- the control of the development of worker bee ovaries, the production of new queens, brood rearing of workers and drones and the control of the collection rate of pollen. It also acts as a drone attractant on mating flights. Some of the chemicals are more volatile than others; the drone attractant is one of the more volatile. A major source of the queen substance is the queen’s mandibular glands, but the dorsal part of the abdomen is also a source of some of the constituents. 9-oxo 2 decanoic acid and 9 hydroxy 2 decanoic acids are two well-understood components of queen substance.

These together inhibit the construction of queen cells. However if there is not enough being received by workers either because of over crowding or excessive population, then queen cell construction can commence followed by swarming. In principle these two chemicals should be the basis of a swarm inhibitor, but no practical product has ever been produced. These two acids also attract workers to a queen in a swarm, and result in a stable cluster, which results in a loss of the bee memory of their former location. An unstable cluster does not remove this memory.

Bees cannot count eggs, so they cannot use this method of assessing the queen’s performance. Instead they judge the queen by her production of queen substance and act accordingly. If they start to produce queen cells they usually construct them over a period of several days. How do they know when they have enough? Easy!-the queen pupae also produce queen substance, so the bees are inhibited from producing more as the level of queen substance starts to rise. When the queens are nearly ready to hatch in a colony that has swarmed, it is believed that the driver to thin the cell tip is that this increases the amount of queen substance being produced into the hive. If there is a sudden drop in queen substance caused by the loss of the queen, then the bee response is to produce emergency queen cells. If the drop off is more gradual as the queen ages, then fewer supercedure cells may be produced. Queen substance may explain a number of other common phenomena. Why do swarms work so hard? One possible explanation may be that after the reduction in queen substance endured by the bees leading up to the swarm, they are now receiving a full dose, and this is why they work so well. Similarly this may also explain why small nucleus colonies work so well, with the smaller number of bees each receiving a fuller dose of queen substance.

There are also queen pheromones produced that affect drone production, because queen substance has an inhibitory effect. Early in the season when colonies are small, this prevents building of drone comb and rearing of drones. As the colony becomes more populous, the inhibitory effect is less because the workers get a smaller dose and drones are produced. When queens are failing they do not produce enough inhibitory pheromone. This explains why a queenless colony or one with a failing queen retains its drones- both as brood and adults- at times when other colonies have thrown them out.

Drones themselves also produce pheromones, but virtually nothing is known about them.