Winter bees and Summer bees

There's a neat evolutionary trick or two that enables colonies of honey bees to overwinter, and it isn't just the bees ability to cluster for days (weeks) on end when it's cold. Clustering, don't forget, is essentially an emergency measure to protect the queen and to keep her warm and safe.

Bees cluster when they collect around the queen whilst they're searching for a new place to live after swarming from the parent colony, and they will cluster when the inside of their nest is too cold for them to be able to safely walk around on their own without freezing to death. It's a pretty dangerous thing to do though, because a clustered winter colony will always settle over brood – the future of the colony - and can starve to death a mere inch or so away from food, which is why choosing the right nesting site after swarming is pretty important,

BBKA Basic - Swarm Control for Beginners

The BBKA has made changes to the Basic syllabus and the way the assessment is to be carried out and marked. These changes apply from 2016.

The main change is that there is now a whole section on swarming and swarm control because it had been noted that those taking the assessment weren't really confident enough with their answers.

The BBKA asks that those taking the assessment are able to answer "Oral questioning on Swarming, Swarm Control and effects". A pass mark is 50%.

The syllabus is still quite clear  :-

3.0 SWARMING, SWARM CONTROL AND EFFECTS – ORAL QUESTIONS
The Candidate will be:

3.1 able to give an elementary description of swarming in a honeybee colony;

3.2 able to give *an elementary account of one method of swarm control; 

3.3 able to describe how to take a honeybee swarm and how to hive it; 

3.4 able to describe the signs of a queenless colony and how to test if a colony is queenless; 

3.5 able to describe the signs of laying workers and of a drone laying queen; 

3.6 able to describe a simple method of queen introduction; 

3.7 able to describe one method of uniting colonies and precautions to be taken;

* "An elementary method of swarm control" is not one which requires the beekeeper to search for the queen and then remember to manipulate doors in a special board or move boxes after a fixed number of days. There is no need to make things so difficult to remember, and so easy to get wrong.

An elementary method of swarm control is the one described by FERA as "Swarm Control When You Can't Find the Queen" or the one in the BBKA leaflet "Swarm Control for Beginners"

Swarm control doesn't have to be hard, it can be very easy.

~'.'~

Messing with hard and fast beginners rules

When we learn something new we're often told there is only ever one way to do a certain thing, and we're often expected to perfect that method before trying a different way of achieving the same result.

Beekeeping is like this, to some extent, in that many instructors tell new beekeepers that there is one way, and only one way, of keeping bees - their way - and they can get really annoyed if their trainees don't do as they're told.

There are a lot of examples, let's have a look at a few :-

A new beekeeper must buy a standard National Hive.
Some say this is because that's what most people will be using, so it's easy to get spares and borrow a frame of

Queen cells, swarming, and beginner beekeeper training

It's late September, which is a strange time of year to think about queen cells and swarming, but, having recently helped a new-to-the-BKA-this-year beekeeper deal with the repercussions of bad poor misunderstood advice, now seems as good a time as any.

It's important for all beekeepers to know, and to fully understand, why it is not a good idea to remove queen cells as the sole method of swarm control, no matter how experienced the beekeeper who says it is! The end result is likely to be a colony with no queen and no means of making one. The colony will be doomed to a slow decline - which a newish beekeeper, struggling alone, may not notice until it's too late and they 'suddenly' see their hives contain frames empty of both brood and stores, with the few remaining bees on the point of starving to death.

How can this arise, especially when this particular beekeeper has done all the training, attended all the apiary sessions, and been to all available BKA events since they joined?

Marcus Terentius Varro - De re rustica.

According to CMC Green, Varro "began the project, he says, at the request of his young wife who wanted to know how to manage her new estate". The 'treatise' isn't written as a text book, it's written as a series of stories and conversations.

When I first read this translation I was quite surprised to see how little beekeeping has changed in over 2,000 years (since about 30 B.C.), and how much of the advice is still relevant to 21st century beekeeping. Okay, so we now know that colonies are not led, or ruled, by a 'King' and we know that bees don't spontaneously appear within corpses of bullocks, but the antibiotic properties of honey have only been rediscovered, and used in medicine, in the last few years and the properties of thyme have been invaluable in dealing with varroa. Maybe there's something else that we 21st century beekeepers can use, if we look hard enough.

If nothing else, I think it's interesting.

This translation is taken directly from this site. The site owner William P Thayer states that this translation is "in the public domain", and may therefore be copied. Published in the Loeb Classical Library, 1934.

All the numbering and links have been removed because blogspot doesn't do sub and superscripts, and leaving them in made the text more than awkward to read. The number of paragraphs have also been increased, to try to improve readability.

Enjoy!

shb update

Good news, I hope.

Dated 15 June 2015 and via Gavin Ramsay  on sbai

I have to say that the apparent success of the eradication attempt in southern Italy is surprising ... and good. It might still be lurking somewhere there - or elsewhere in Europe - but this sea of green dots for 2015 is very promising.

From Italian health authority and research organization for animal health and food safety

Current epidemiological situation

Figure 1: Calabria protection area (20 km radius)
Figure 2: Sicily protection area (20 km radius)
Figure 3: Calabria and Sicily monitoring area (100 km radius)

~'.'~

Blackthorn Winter

The Blackthorn is flowering and with it has come the fairly typical-for-this-time-of-year icy cold east wind.

After an auspicious beginning - well, it didn't rain as much as last year or the year before - 2015 has turned out to be starting with a long, cold, spring, and it's caught a number of beekeepers out.

It's worth remembering that beekeepers in rural areas don't get the advantage of the urban heat effect, and nor do their bees. Last week there was snow in parts of Scotland, Yorkshire and Cumbria and, despite media pictures of folks sunning themselves on beaches (albeit wearing thick coats and scarves) it's been so cold in the balmy south that the central heating has turned itself on. There was another frost warning last night.