Newsletter May 2008

Shropshire Beekeepers' Association

Newsletter : May 2008

April 23rd., St. George’s Day, was the first time this season that it was warm enough to open up the hives properly for a quick inspection. I already knew that three weak colonies had gone to the wall during the winter. One I suspect had a new queen that had not been able to mate successfully in August because of the poor weather then. A second was very small and should really have been united with a bigger colony, while the third was just a fairly feeble colony that had not done much at all last season. Fortunately the other three colonies had coped well and are now beginning to build up. One, indeed, already had drones and will need watching for early signs of swarming.

I have printed a fairly full account of Celia Davis’s recent talk to us on the subject of Nuclei because it contained much that members will find interesting. It ties in quite well with a brief account of queen rearing using a nucleus that those of us who still have to dip our toe into this particular pond could try.

New Association Secretary
Congratulations to Fiona Diggory who was elected Association secretary at the recent EGM. She will serve, in the first instance, until the AGM in October when new elections will be held for all officers for the following year.

New Seasonal Bee Inspector Appointed
Dave Sutton writes: I am very pleased to inform you that The National Bee Unit has appointed Joanna Schup from Whixall as a Seasonal Bee Inspector. Jo will be well known to many of you from her sterling work for the local beekeeping community on behalf of the North Shropshire Beekeepers Association. She has now successfully completed her initial training at Central Science Laboratory in York and her preliminary fieldwork training, and she joined the Western Region Team of Bee Inspectors on 7th April.

Jo will be looking after an area comprising the greater part of the county of Shropshire coupled with adjoining parts of North and South Staffordshire and part of North Worcestershire. I know that you will give her all the help and co-operation that she needs in her work in the same way that you have given these to my colleagues and me. We in our turn will endeavour to continue to deliver to you all a comprehensive disease inspection and management service aligned with a wide range of educational events and information.
I very much welcome her into the Western Region Team of Bee Inspectors and I am looking forward to working with her and I wish her every success in the position. If you have any concerns at all about the health or condition of your colonies, Jo can be contacted on Tel. 01948 710941 or email j.schup@csl.gov.uk.

A large audience gathered at our March meeting to hear Celia Davis speak on the subject of using nuclei as a regular part of apiary management practice. She set out to persuade us that we should all do this because they offer so many interesting possibilities to the creative beekeeper.

The ideal 5 frame nuc can easily be created from a healthy colony by transferring 3 frames of mainly sealed brood, plus two frames of stores and pollen, together with the adhering bees, into a nuc box. A queen cell is added and the entrance blocked with green grass to prevent the bees from returning to their ‘home’ colony. (By the time the grass has withered enough for the bees to get out they are much less likely to do this, especially if the nuc can be sited away from the parent colony.) A nucleus needs feeding but this should not be started for three days otherwise robbing could become a serious problem. Once the queen has hatched and been mated the colony can grow very quickly so be ready to transfer it into a normal sized hive, initially with a dummy board, which can gradually be moved as more frames are added to allow for the expanding brood nest.

The ‘perfect’ nucleus would:

The account below, taken from the February edition of ‘Beemaster’, the Notts BKA Newsletter (courtesy BEES) describes a way of using a nucleus to undertake a simple queen rearing programme.

With this well tried and simple method you can expect to raise 7 or 8 queens.

Select a colony from which you wish to raise your queens and wait until early or late May. All that is required is a five frame nucleus hive and a frame with unwired foundation.

First day. Take the queen and bees on a brood comb and put it into the nucleus hive about three or four feet away from the parent colony. Put another brood comb and others containing food and pollen into the nucleus hive box. Add a fifth comb of unwired foundation trimmed back on it’s lower edge to form a zig zag shape and place it next to one of the brood frames. Shake in bees from two more frames. Put on a feeder containing syrup.

Sixth day. Go through the parent stock and remove any queen cells built by the bees. Ensure all cells are cut out. Remove the foundation frame from the nucleus hive. This should be partly drawn out and contain eggs and young larvae. Trim back the lower edge in a scalloped fashion to where they occur. Place this comb in the middle of the parent colony.

Eleventh day. Make another check on the parent colony to ensure there are no wild cells. Look at the inserted foundation and count the cells produced, leaving the number you require.

Seventeenth day. The queen cells on the prepared foundation will be near emergence. You can now make up more nucleus hives and give them a queen cell or dequeen other hives and insert the ripe queen cells in the brood comb. The nucleus hive can now be united with its parent colony or give the parent colony a queen cell. Remember to follow the timing exactly.

[Last month I referred to the stress that migratory beekeeping might cause to the bees. I had in mind the practices in the US rather than the UK. Re-reading the BBKA news for last October I noticed an article by Norman Carreck on this subject, an extract of which is reprinted below. Ed.]

In the United States the scale of bee movement is quite staggering compared to European practice. One of the largest operations is Adee Honey Farms based in South Dakota. Richard Adee describes his colonies as ‘a bunch of tourists’. His family runs 50,000 colonies for honey production in the summer months in North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska and California. In autumn after the honey harvest, colonies are graded for pollination. They are then loaded on to approximately 80 articulated trailers with 480 colonies on each, for almond pollination in California in February/ March. A queen rearing and nucleus operation in Mississippi is then stocked with 12,000 of these colonies from California. After the almond pollination, the remaining colonies may go to Washington State for apple pollination or southern California for avocado pollination. After pollination or nucleus production, the colonies then move on to North and South Dakota, Montana or Minnesota for honey production. In a given year, the Adees may move 200 to 250 loads of bees a minimum of 1500 miles.

And this is entirely typical. In spring, half of all of the honey bees in the USA will normally be in California for almond pollination. The remainder will be in the southern states between Arizona and Florida. Bees in Florida may then be moved to pollinate blueberries and cranberries in the New England states, or apples in Pennsylvania or New York. Other beekeepers who did not move bees for pollination, may still move colonies to take advantage of spring buildup in the southern states. With low world honey prices, movements on this vast scale have become a necessity in order for bee farmers to survive. Is there a down side to these movements? Speaking at Apimondia in 1999 Richard Adee said: ‘with the largest bee yard in the world in the spring in the Californian almond groves — 800,000 colonies in the central valley stretching for 350 miles, the potential is great for epidemic disease problems’. Were these prophetic words perhaps?

Millions of swarming honey bees are on the loose after a truck carrying crates of the insects flipped over on a California highway. The California Highway Patrol says somewhere 8 and 12million bees escaped Sunday from the crates in which they were stored and swarmed over an area of Highway 99 and stung officers, firefighters and tow truck drivers trying to clear the accident. CHP Officer Michael Bradley said a tractor-trailer flipped over while entering the highway on its way to Yakima, Washington. The flatbed was carrying bee crates each filled with up to 30,000 bees, which had been used in the San Joaquin Valley to pollinate crops. According to Bradley, several beekeepers driving by the accident stopped to assist in the bee wrangling. Which is a stroke of luck.
Sky News Monday March 17, 2008

Many of you will remember Natalie Hodgson’s bee ‘village’ at her lavender farm near Bridgnorth. For the entertainment of visitors she created a series of distinctive ‘houses’ to enclose her hives. Something similar has now been reported elsewhere, as the following article reveals:

A spiritual beekeeper in Serbia has built hives in the shape of monasteries and churches for his insects 'because bees have a soul too'. Slobodan Jeftic is creating his 'holy honey' in the northern town of Stari Kostolac. The 58-year-old said: 'By doing this, I am bringing together the two great loves of my life – beekeeping and my religion.'