Tag: beekeeperproblems

Open Mating Queens
It should be fairly straightforward, shouldn’t it? A colony makes several virgin queens, eventually whittles them down to one, and she flies off on several mating flights. She returns to the welcoming embrace of her workers, and begins the long process of laying hundreds or thousands of eggs every day during the summer, autumn, and spring. This is the strategy that honey bees have come up with, and they have been around a lot longer than humans, so it has proven to be successful.

Elusive Perfection

However, nature being what it is, not every queen’s story is quite so uneventful. As I frequently say, there is a lot of death and failure in nature. As beekeepers, many of us like to think that we should be achieving at least 90% ‘success’ in all that we do. Ideally, 90% or more of our colonies come out of winter strong and ready for explosive growth. Hopefully, by the power of skilful and observant beekeeping, 90% of our colonies won’t swarm, and if we make queens, 90% of grafts will produce viable cells, and 90% of our virgin queens will successfully mate. Well, for me, this is not the case. Every so often it is, but on average, it’s worse than that. On the plus side, my bee farming business pays for itself, including running a van and availing myself of the unique services of a beekeeping mole (my son, Alex). You don’t have to be perfect to be successful.

Mating Failures

I’m going to try to quote the odd study to give the veneer of legitimacy to much of what I say. However, the longer I keep bees, the more I suspect that there is a broad spectrum of honey bee behaviours, and researchers probably struggle to show more than a glimpse into the world of the bee. Just because something can’t be backed up by a study doesn’t mean it’s false, and just because a study says one thing, doesn’t mean it will always apply. That being said, some studies indicate that the open mating of virgin honey bee queens is successful about 70–80% of the time (20–30% loses).^[1][2]

As the ’80/20 Rule’ (Pareto principle) seems to apply to many things, let’s go with that, and say that 80% of open matings work out and 20% fail. That means that 20% end up hopelessly queenless. Without intervention, they become laying workers and eventually dwindle away, their demise possibly being hastened by robbing from other bees or wasps. I think something similar, but flipped, may apply to swarms; around 80% will die and only 20% survive^[3]. So, if five colonies swarm to produce ten colonies (five parent colonies plus five new ones), four of the parent colonies would be expected to survive along with one of the swarms, bringing us back to five colonies. This would imply a honey bee population in a steady state (neither growing nor declining).

Anyway, back to mating success. It all depends, doesn’t it. Under certain ideal conditions, mating success can approach 100%, and in diabolical conditions it can be zero. Averages are all very well, but they don’t help me in my specific location/conditions at a particular time. If I’m staring at the ruined combs of a colony full of laying workers, I don’t care what some study says – I care about how to reduce the chances of it happening again. What are the factors that make the success rate fall? Here are some, in probable order^[4] of influence:

Weather

This is beekeeping, so obviously ‘weather’ is going to rear its heads. I think of the weather as being akin to the Hydra of Greek mythology, but maybe I’m odd. Low temperatures, cloudy skies, and strong winds all play their part in reducing the likelihood of queens (and drones) taking mating flights. Evidence from work in Germany using RFID to track mating flights^[5] shows that, although more mating flights occur above 18°C than below, they still happen as low as 16°C. It seems that in cooler conditions queens have more frequent mating flights of a shorter duration, whereas in warm weather flight duration is longer, but fewer flights are made. Strong winds produce higher risks to the young queen, so she may not fly in such conditions, and may be more likely to fail to return.

Drones

People who spend their days instrumentally inseminating queens, and trying to control mating using isolated places and drone-donor colonies, tend to place great importance on both the number and quality of drones available. They are critical. Some might even say, more critical than the virgin queen herself. An average queen inseminated with lots of top quality drone semen will be a far better queen than a beautiful virgin that mates with too few drones, or drones with below-par sperm counts.

What we want is lots of healthy drones in the vicinity (within a 1 km radius) of our mating apiary. They should be well nourished, sexually mature, and from a different genetic line to the virgin queens. Varroa mite infestation, and associated viruses, reduce the fitness of drones. However, chemical varroacides can damage their sperm. Treatment should therefore be done before drone rearing takes place – maybe oxalic acid when broodless in winter is the answer. According to Coloss^[6] there should be eight drone-donor colonies for 50 virgins (a drone donor colony is a normal colony with 2 drone combs). You need to plan the grafting time to coincide with when drones have emerged and become sexually mature, which is two weeks after emergence.

So, make sure you have enough drones, and look after them!

Time of Year

This season (2025) has been unusual, with everything coming early, and I did my first grafts on 14th April. Normally, there is a window of opportunity that is best for making queens, running from when swarming starts to sometime in July. The reason is a combination of weather, drone availability, nutrition (pollen and nectar), and bright daylight conditions allowing mating flights even after 5pm, with several in a day. It is possible for queens to successfully mate late in the season, even in September, but most commercial queen producers stop in August. Late supersedure queens frequently turn out to be drone layers.^[7]

Apiary Density

This can be too low or too high. In low hive density areas, you may have to provide the majority of the colonies that produce the drones that your virgins mate with. This is great for being able to control breeding, but it is a rare situation in most of the UK. In areas with very high hive densities, there is no shortage of drones, but you have little control over which ones mate with your queens. However, there are other issues with numerous bees in a small area. Perhaps there is inadequate forage to support all of those colonies throughout the season, leading to underfed larvae and weaker drones. Moreover, the risks of diseases spreading are significantly increased, and viruses can damage queens, drones, and workers.

Map from NBU showing number of apiaries by 10km squares

If I could wave a magic wand and have my choice, it would be for a low hive density. As it happens, my bees are typically in places where there are plenty of other hives. According to BeeBase, the ‘apiary density within 10 km’ ranges from 219 to 336 for my apiaries, which seems like a lot. However, the maps feature on the same website shows something more believable i.e. 57 to 149 apiaries and 148 to 269 colonies.

Location/Micro-climate

Some places do better than others as apiaries, and that includes mating apiaries. Perhaps it is to do with the topography, landmarks, degree of shelter or other factors. Some spots seem to enjoy a microclimate that is always a bit warmer and less windy than surrounding places.

There is also the matter of hive (or nuc) location and orientation within the apiary. Anything that can be done to reduce the chances of a returning queen ending up in the wrong hive must be positive. That includes differentiating hives using colour and patterns. Brother Adam’s mating hives were split into four compartments, each having an entrance at 90 degrees to its neighbour.

An old Brother Adam Mating Hive ©Steve Donohoe

Wasps & Birds

Once wasps become a pest, and start bothering honey bee colonies, things get a bit tricky. They tend to find weak colonies, then hammer them relentlessly. Mating nucs are usually weak colonies. I combine my mini-plus boxes into double or trebles to ensure that they are strong enough to keep wasps at bay.

When queens disappear, it is easy to blame it on the countless swallows and martins that continually swoop upon insects throughout the summer. I think it happens, in some areas more than others. At one of my apiaries where I have had significant problems with missing queens, there are a great many swallows, and I think they are swallowing my bees. Apparently, in some locations, dragonflies are also partial to a slow flying virgin queen. The RFID study^[5] tracked 64 queens on mating flights and 11 of them failed to return, for whatever reason.

Drifting

We know that bees drift, especially when hives are set up in a long line. In such an arrangement, you will often find more bees (and honey) in the hives at each end of the row, and smaller colonies in the middle. We also know that queens can end up returning to the wrong hive, which usually results in their death. Given that any hive can swarm, and will therefore need a new virgin queen to become mated, it makes sense to try to help queens successfully return. Place hives in clusters rather than long rows, and differentiate their appearance in some way.

Research^[8] shows that honey bees have three spectral types of photoreceptors peaking in UV, blue and green parts of the spectrum. So, they can clearly differentiate between UV, blue, and green. We cannot see UV, whereas bees cannot see red (it looks like black to them). The three receptors have their peak sensitivities at the following wavelengths: 344 nm, 436 nm, and 556 nm (please click each wavelength to view the colour). From what I can tell, the research indicates that bees respond more strongly to the shorter wavelengths than longer, i.e. blue more than green.

Photosensitivity of bees to different wavelengths. Chart from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4035557/

In terms of shapes, bees can clearly identify parallel lines, alternating black-white-black-white etc. Furthermore, they seem good at spotting radial symmetry^[9], such as the shape of many flowers, or other radial shapes like stars. We can use this knowledge to mark hive entrances and lids so that the bees can clearly tell them apart.

Inspections

Most mating flights start with orientation flights around midday to 1pm, then the actual mating flights from 1pm to 4pm (or even later). Therefore, if you have a hive or nuc with a queen likely to be taking mating flights, don’t inspect it in the afternoon. The queen faces enough hazards without the beekeeper adding more.

If I place a ripe queen cell into a mating nuc, then I will leave it alone for three to four weeks. Ideally three, but occasionally, I get distracted. If the queen is not mated within three weeks of emergence, I will make sure the virgin is actually there, and give them another week. Subsequently, I assume something has gone wrong.

When I find queen cells in a hive, I try to leave just one, and leave them for four weeks. If I don’t have a mated queen by then, something is wrong. Leaving them longer normally results in laying workers or a drone laying queen. If I intervene with a frame of open brood and a caged queen before laying workers start, there is hope. I recently dropped a mated queen directly into a queenless and broodless colony – straight from a mating nuc into the colony (no cage or anything) – and they accepted her and are now doing fine. Laying workers are the end of the line – they get shaken out.

Notes
1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330125121_Balling_Behavior_of_Workers_Toward_Honey_Bee_Queens_Returning_from_Mating_Flights 30% of queens were ‘lost during mating flights’, although 7% didn’t even fly, so I’d adjust it to 25% losses. Some never returned, some drifted, and some were balled at the entrance.
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11201093/ mating success of honey bees was 78% on the mainland and 60% on island locations (stronger winds).
3. https://theapiarist.org/feral-facts-and-fallacies/ David Evans’ excellent article delves into the facts about feral bees.
4. Okay, I’m sure of the first two on the list, but after that, who knows?
5. Heidinger, I.M.M.; Meixner, M.D.; Berg, S.; Büchler, R. Observation of the Mating Behavior of Honey Bee (Apis mellifera L.) Queens Using Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID): Factors Influencing the Duration and Frequency of Nuptial Flights. Insects 2014, 5, 513-527. https://doi.org/10.3390/insects5030513
6. Büchler, R., Andonov, S., Bernstein, R., Bienefeld, K., Costa, C., Du, M., … Wilde, J. (2024). Standard methods for rearing and selection of Apis mellifera queens 2.0. Journal of Apicultural Research, 64(2), 555–611. https://doi.org/10.1080/00218839.2023.2295180
7. BBKA winter losses survey (sorry, the link has gone now) – not sure how much faith I put in that, but 38% of losses were ‘queen related’
8. Hempel de Ibarra N, Vorobyev M, Menzel R. Mechanisms, functions and ecology of colour vision in the honeybee. J Comp Physiol A Neuroethol Sens Neural Behav Physiol. 2014 Jun;200(6):411-33. doi: 10.1007/s00359-014-0915-1. Epub 2014 May 15. PMID: 24828676; PMCID: PMC4035557. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4035557/
9. Giurfa, M., Eichmann, B. & Menzel, R. Symmetry perception in an insect. Nature 382, 458–461 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1038/382458a0
8th July 2025
Walrus Wobbles (beekeeping blunders)
It really is quite incredible how a supposedly intelligent creature such as myself, with years of experience – I am in my early sixties after all – can continue to have an endless supply of Walrus wobbles. Yet, this is the case. Some of my calamities stem from idiocy or carelessness, but others appear to be more about the Gods, or perhaps, the Moirai (fates). Here are some of them:

Queen Quandaries

Given the effort and time that I put into making honey bee queens, it always hurts when something doesn’t quite work out the way I’d hoped. What’s worse is that it’s nearly always my fault, but not always.

Marking & Clipping When I started handling queens, I was terrified that I would damage them, so I tried all sorts of devices that would enable me to mark them safely. These devices turned out to be a liability, and once I actually used just my fingers, it got significantly quicker and safer. Numerous people suggest picking a queen up by her wings, which is what I do with workers when loading queen cages, but I found another way that I prefer. I hold her down (gently) against the comb using my forefinger and thumb on her thorax, then I pick her up from there. When I was trying to grab her wings, I would often miss, and she’d go scurrying off or even take flight. If it is a hot day, it is wise to spray the queen with a mist of water before picking her up, as they seem to fly more frequently in higher temperatures.

So, what could possibly go wrong? Well, occasionally the queen may ‘feint’. She goes very still. I thought I had killed her when this happened to me the first time. Later, I read about feinting, and regretted throwing my immobile queen into the hedge in disgust. Whoops.

Then there is dropping the queen. This does happen, at least, it does to me. Not often, but it’s horrible when it happens. Every so often you might actually find her on the grass by your feet, but other times she disappears, never to be seen again. They can crawl back into their hive, which is always a relief – you would discover this at the next hive visit – but often you will find emergency queen cells, to prove that you sent her to her doom. One simple solution, apart from “don’t drop her!” is to carry out the marking and clipping over an upturned lid. That way, if you do drop her, she is easy to see. Moreover, when picking up queens, you need to make sure that your fingers or nitrile/latex gloves are clean, rather than plastered with propolis and honey.

Paint for marking queen bees

I used to use marking pens, but there were two things I didn’t like about them. One was that the mark seemed to rub off quite often. But far worse; one time a flood of marking paint rushed out of the pen and covered large areas of the queen’s head, thorax, and wings. I put her back in the hive, but she was gone at the next visit. We now use non-toxic acrylic paint and apply it to the thorax with the handle end of a paintbrush (it works better than the brush end). If we leave the paint to dry for a couple of minutes while the queen wanders around a clip cage, the mark seems quite robust, but occasionally, it is nearly gone the following season.

a kit for marking and clipping queen bees

For clipping queens, we use high-quality nail scissors. I have never had this problem, but you do need to be careful; sometimes she sticks up her back leg, and if you were careless, you might cut that accidentally. We clip the queens first, then mark, then leave her in a clip cage for a while before releasing back to her colony. Which brings me to another Walrus wobble; I have, on occasion, reassembled the hive and forgotten to put the queen back! We now leave the cage on top of brood-box frames so that this can’t happen.

Queen Rearing

The most fun you can have in a bee suit? Possibly. Most of my hiccups have come at the queen mating or introduction stages, but not all of them.

Two cells were squished as The Mole removed the frame – they didn’t make it. The other 14 out of 16 cells were fine.

I have had most success with a queenless cell starter colony, which I convert to a queen-right finisher a couple of days after adding the grafts. The main problem with cell builders is to avoid a ‘rogue virgin’ queen emerging in the same box as the developing queen cells, as the virgin will kill them all. I had this happen once, so now I am obsessed with making sure that the brood box into which my grafts go has no queen, no open brood, and no cells. I also move cells to the incubator a week after grafting, as they are safe in that controlled environment, in a ‘roller cage’. The incubator is set to 34.5 degrees C and 60-80% humidity. Roller cages can be supported by foam with holes cut in it of the right size (the type for quail eggs work well).

Which reminds me, if you get a good quality incubator, you can have more confidence in it. Once a cheap one cooked a batch of cells, which is far from ideal. However, things can go wrong. You need to keep the water tray wet so that the humidity stays in the right place, and any power cut could ruin your cells. You may not even know that there was a power cut, if your incubator is not at home, and you would only realise something is wrong when none of the cells emerge.

A problem I have sometimes found with raising queens is when the larvae of the right age in the breeder-queen colony are not suitable for grafting. This can happen during a dearth, when the larvae can be a little ‘dry’. A practical solution to this is to pop the frame containing eggs and newly emerged larvae into the cell builder overnight. The next day, the cells will be flooded with jelly and easy to graft. Alternatively, feed syrup and a protein supplement, and return a few days later. Anything that messes up the schedule and timings is quite annoying, though.

I try to transfer queen cells from the incubator to mating nucs the day before the queens are due to emerge. In fact, a newly made up mating nuc with no brood will accept a virgin better than a cell. Once the nuc becomes a mini-colony with brood and stores, the queen cells work better than virgins, I think. Anyway, in the past I have got my calculations wrong and virgins have emerged into their roller cages in the incubator. If you leave them for too long, they will die; you need to give them a little blob of honey straight away, and move them into a colony that day. I have found several emerged and dead, which is very depressing, and completely my fault.

Mating Failures I have seen quite a bit of this, especially in the last couple of years. One might think that a colony of bees, having swarmed, would make a new queen, and she would be mated and laying a few weeks later. Unfortunately, not always. We have found quite a few cases where the virgin disappears, and if we leave it too long, we get laying workers. These get shaken out, as trying to get them to accept a queen is a waste of time and a queen.

There is also that scenario where we find lots of sealed queen cells right on the cusp of emerging. It is great fun releasing the virgins. Our logic is that if we release all virgins and remove all other cells, they will fight it out and eventually one queen will mate and become the new queen of the hive. I reckon it’s worked for us about 50% of the time. The other 50% had no queen of any sort, and either became laying workers, or got rescued with a frame of brood and a new queen. Leaving the sealed cells alone risks losing cast swarms, i.e. swarms with virgins rather than a mated queen.

This season, we started a new apiary with six nucleus colonies, which each got a protected cell from our incubator. Three weeks later, we checked on them; only two had mated queens. The weather was gorgeous, and it made little sense that four out of six were not mated. In fact, we could not see virgin queens in those four either. Once we passed four weeks, we added new mated queens; two of these worked out, but the others became laying workers. So, 33% of the original cells worked out, and only 50% of the introduced mated queens did. What a complete pain! I know people often overestimate predation by swallows, but I think it could have been a factor. Furthermore, the nucs look similar, so returning queens could have entered the wrong one. The two mated queens probably died because those colonies were just becoming laying workers. Or maybe they were poor queens – those particular ones were not from our breeding program, but bought in.

We get a certain portion of failed matings at our mating apiary, which has plenty of colonies, most of them small and existing only to get queens mated. It is unclear to me why it happens, but it does. Maybe 20% or so. We find the emerged cell but no eggs and no queen, and if we leave it too long, laying workers again. Because we use cell protectors, I think the problem is failure to return from mating flights, due to the aforementioned winged predators or stumbling into the wrong hive.

Management Mess-Ups

Gosh, this is turning into a book. Some cretinous cock-ups that we have made are:
- Letting the queen get trapped above the queen excluder, probably because she was on the excluder when it was removed, but maybe due to a faulty excluder.
- Dropping a frame, most likely after being stung or stabbed by a random sharp bit of nail or wire on the frame. Murphy’s Law requires that the queen will be on the dropped frame.
- Dropping a super full of honey frames. This almost always breaks the super, and if it’s polystyrene, it probably won’t be easy to repair.
- Accidentally removing the queen on a frame of brood, removed to provide laying space in the brood box. The queen pops up somewhere unexpected, such as a new nuc, and the original colony builds emergency queen cells.
- Setting up a hive stand without a firm base. At some point, as the hive gets heavier, it will probably sink into the ground, and maybe the hive will tip over.
- Removing the spring honey crop and not leaving enough stores for when the weather turns bad for a few weeks. Leads to starvation. But before they actually starve, the queen slows laying and workers eat eggs and kick out larvae. This is not going to help build a strong colony for the summer flow. Need to take emergency action and feed syrup using frame feeders. Better still, leave enough stores in the first place.
- Introducing a queen under a push-in cage and completely forgetting about her. We found her dead under the cage, but the bees had made their own by then anyway.
- Leaving space above frames because they are being fed fondant in early spring. If you leave it too long, they will build ‘wild comb’ into the space, making an architecturally attractive ‘mess’ that must be scraped away. When doing this, make sure the queen is not on it, by using plenty of smoke and shaking the lid over the hive.
- Not using mouse guards or thin underfloor entrances in autumn/winter. Mice love to spend some time inside a hive, defecating everywhere and eating comb. We mostly use underfloor entrances, which keep mice out. We like the Paynes style of poly nuc because we can slide the entrance reducer around so that the queen excluder part covers the entrance over winter.
- Storing wet supers in a storage space that is not bee proof, without wrapping. This will often result in a mass invasion of robber bees and wasps. Much better to stack supers with an upturned roof as the base, wrapped in pallet wrap, with a roof on top – the bees can’t get in, and hopefully won’t be drawn to the area by the smell.
- Leaving hive tools, smokers, notebooks, marking kits etc. at the apiary. We have about 20 hive tools, which helps, and several smokers (although we only use smokers when the bees seem twitchy). We have various ‘marking and clipping’ kits made up and kept in the van. I should keep my notebook in a plastic wallet so that it won’t get ruined by the rain if I leave it somewhere. I also transfer my handwritten notes in my notebook onto a spreadsheet at the end of the day, which seems like a lot of work, but I like data, so it’s OK.
beekeeping notebook

Honey Room

I recently covered the various Walrus wobbles that have happened to me in the honey house. The worst one was having to clear up about 60lbs of honey that had overflowed onto the floor. Lovely job.

Conclusion

Whether it is the Moirai, the Gods, or my incompetence, these set-backs occur in beekeeping as in life. I like to think that maybe I have learned from them. I still enjoy keeping bees, even though I’m probably not especially good at it!

podcast link
17th June 2025
Beekeeping Twilight Zone

Sometimes unexpected things happen in beekeeping. What seems weird to me, or peculiar, or interesting, may not chime with you, but here are a few cases that caused a raised eyebrow or two. Welcome to my beekeeping twilight zone.

Her Majesty Returns

Recently, the Mole and I were inspecting a colony that had clearly swarmed. Because we clip a wing of our queens, it was still a strong colony. The queen was gone, so she will have fallen to the ground as the swarm departed. Then the swarm, realising that they had no queen, returned home. We use mostly solid floors, so we don’t get that nonsense with bees hanging underneath. We knew that the queen was gone because (a) we had a good look and could not see her and (b) there were no eggs on any combs, but there were several sealed queen cells.

Queen bee by ©ISLA Donohoe de Oliveira

Next, we carried out our usual routine of destroying all queen cells except for one, then closed up the hive. On the next inspection, we found the queen had returned and was happily laying eggs, and there were no viable queen cells at all. The one that we had left had been torn down. Her majesty had her green dot and clipped wing; she must have managed to crawl back. I suppose that must mean that she fell to the ground quite near to the hive entrance. This is probably something that many beekeepers have seen, but it’s the first time I have. I’m not even sure I welcome her return, as she will need to be changed at the end of the season anyway – perhaps a nice new one would have been better for us.

Hopelessly Queenless

This brings me to the next thing, also queen-related. When we leave one queen cell after a swarm, or even before one having removed the queen in a nuc, things don’t always go to plan. Occasionally, they make more cells and a cast swarm leaves (a swarm with a virgin queen). Other times we come back three or four weeks later to find no queen, no brood, and a hopelessly queenless colony populated by some old workers and drones. Not every virgin queen gets successfully mated and returns safely to her home. I reckon about 20% go missing depending on many factors, including weather, time of year, number of colonies at the apiary, and so forth. Paul Horton has found that using landing boards or hive panels made of correx, decorated with different patterns and colours, reduces the number of lost queens.

Some beekeepers like to leave two queen cells rather than one to provide some kind of insurance. In my experience, leaving more than one cell almost always means that they swarm. But leaving one cell means that 20% of the time they will end up hopelessly queenless. It’s a pain.

Differentiating Hives from: ©Healthy Bees, Heavy Hives

We have also had the situation whereby there are many ripe queen cells about to ‘pop’ so we open them up and release the virgin queens into the colony. It’s actually quite fun seeing the new virgin queens escape their cells and scuttle across a comb and into the hive. Releasing all the virgins at once, and removing all queen cells, should theoretically result in one surviving queen who will mate and continue the line. However, we have done this a few times and every so often no virgin survives, and we are left with a queenless, broodless colony.

When this happens, we normally shake the bees out and remove the hive. Occasionally, we will add a frame or two of brood from a neighbouring colony and give them a queen (or a queen cell). It depends on available resources and how strong the queenless colony is.

Drone Power

During the rapid spring build up, especially if the weather is good, the bees become very keen on producing drones. They will build drone combs anywhere they can, especially in any places where bee-space is wrong. I don’t like combs to be too mixed up; I like most of the combs to be for worker brood, and one to be all drones. This season we tried making up frames with no wax foundation in them – just a couple of bamboo skewers stretching across the frame and some lollipop sticks along the underside of the top bars. When placed in strong colonies at the correct time, we found that the bees gratefully turn the whole thing into a lovely frame of pure drone comb. I was inspired to do this by David Evans (The Apiarist), with the only difference being that his bamboo sticks run vertically whereas mine are horizontal.

A foundationless frame filled out with drone comb

I would not want to encourage the production of loads of drones from unpleasant colonies, but we don’t tolerate unpleasant colonies anyway. Well, we try not to. The advantage of allowing the bees to dedicate an entire frame to drones is that, with luck, they don’t ‘mess up’ other combs by mixing up worker and drone brood, which I don’t particularly like. Drone comb is where the varroa mites will hang out, but we treated our colonies in March, so we are happy to let the drones be born and mate with local queens. We don’t like removing drone brood as part of varroa control; drones are important for producing great queens – but obviously not drones riddled with mites.

Fast Mating

I remember Randy Oliver telling me that there should be no ‘rule of thumb’ in beekeeping, and that everything has to be taken on its merits. Well, be that as it may, my rule of thumb in queen rearing is that, once a virgin has emerged, she needs to be mated within two to three weeks. Before two weeks is good; after three weeks is not great – maybe the queens will not be so good after that. In terrible weather conditions, we have seen queens get mated at about four weeks, but they can often fail over the winter. Anyway, if I’m making queens for my beekeeping business, I want the best of everything. I want my queens mated within two weeks of emergence, ideally.

This season has started incredibly well in my area. There has been a lot of sunshine, and nectar has been flooding into the hives. Arable farmers are complaining about a lack of rain, but in my patch the bees are having a party. This gorgeous weather prompted me to start grafting earlier than in previous seasons. We did our first grafts on 14th April and the next batch on 22nd April. Normally, that would be a recipe for unmated queens, but this year they are happily laying away, having been mated very quickly.

We found some queens were mated five days after emergence. That seems pretty quick to me. Most will be moving to nucleus boxes, then into hives later in the season, or kept small and sold as nucs next spring.

Usurpation

This sounds unlikely, but I know somebody who witnessed it happen, right in front of her eyes. A swarm arrived and took over a colony in a hive in her garden. At first, she thought that her colony was swarming, but it became evident that, in fact, a new swarm had arrived. The next day, she checked on the colony, and it had a new queen. I can’t remember precisely the circumstances, but I think it was a marked queen with a different colour. She explained what she had seen to me, and I was, shall we say, a little circumspect.

However, after I looked into it, I realised that this phenomenon does indeed occur, but it is rarely observed. The swarm arrives, takes over an existing colony, kills the original queen, and settles in. This could look like supercedure if the newly arrived queen had no mark on her.

Absconding

I have only personally experienced this occasionally with mini mating nucs, due to me not setting them up correctly from the start. However, it was associated with the so-called ‘colony collapse disorder’ in the USA. As far as I know, something similar might have been going on over there very recently, with very high losses widely reported. With absconding, what seems to happen is that the beekeeper finds a dead hive with very few bees (dead or alive). In some cases, this might be that they all got very stressed and decided to bugger off for pastures new, abandoning their home en masse. In many other cases, what happens is that there is a continuous drip-drip effect in which bees gradually die off in the field, weakening the colony, which sets off a cascade resulting in the same thing.

The ‘en-masse buggering off’ syndrome appears to be more common with certain genetics, such as Apis mellifera scutellata (African honey bees). It appears to be stress related; something, or things, stress the bees to such a point that they decide to move house, leaving their babies behind. The degree of stress experienced by bees is multifactorial; disease, nutrition, environment – at some point one more stressor becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

A model of colony collapse ©Randy Oliver (scientific beekeeping.com)

The form of colony collapse that many experience has been brilliantly illustrated by Randy Oliver. Viruses, made more virulent by high levels of varroa mites, are often part of the picture, with Israeli acute paralysis virus (IAPV) being the one regularly involved with colony collapse. Nosema is another stressor that seems to rear its head as bees get stressed, for whatever reason. Some recent research has shown the presence of a virus that infects wax moths, but I don’t know if that is something that happens after the bees die off and the moths move in.

Queen Stings

I used to think that it was impossible to be stung by a queen bee. Until a year ago, I don’t think I had ever met a single person, including many bee farmers with hundreds or thousands of colonies, that had been stung by one. Apparently, rare as it is, it can happen. But I think, in the extremely rare cases some people say it happened, that a worker may have stung the beekeeper while they were handling the queen, and they attributed it to the queen. It’s a difficult one to prove. I have handled plenty of queens, and the only weird things that happened to me are (a) feinting and (b) flying off. When handling queens in mating nucs on a sunny afternoon, it is wise to spray water onto the queen to stop her from taking flight.

Fighting Queens

Many people believe that queens fight, but actually, it is virgin queens that fight. Mated queens are docile. I was with Mike Palmer one summer when his team was re-queening colonies, and he put three mated queens in a cage to see what they would do. They did not fight, and the three of them were wandering about the next day, completely uninterested in one another. Virgin queens are the brawlers; they often have to dispatch rivals in true Highlander style (there can only be one).

It’s odd that if you release a virgin queen from a ripe queen cell in a colony, the workers will sometimes chase the virgin around, trying to sting her. I think this indicates that it’s the workers who together form the ‘hive mind’ of a colony, and they don’t like it when the beekeeper messes with their plans. Workers can also ball a mated queen who has just been marked, once she is returned to the hive (I have seen this). This is why many beekeepers don’t mark young queens, but wait until they are fully established in a colony. I tend to mark them before winter, but some people leave it until spring.

What Do You Think?

Readers may well have different experiences to me, or alternative explanations for strange goings-on in a bee hive. Please don’t hesitate to share your thought in the comments section!

12th May 2025
Swarming Time and Solving the Space Problem

This is a time when some large discrepancies show up between colonies. One of my apiaries was absolutely booming and nearly every hive bursting with bees. In other places, the picture is more varied. However, I did find my first charged queen cell today, so the season is well and truly underway for me. Swarming time and solving the space problem – let’s do this!

Mini-plus hives

It’s not as bad as it sounds. Yes, I found a queen cell with a young larva in it, but it was in an over-wintered mini plus hive. I really like mini-plus hives for mating queens, and I take spare queens into the winter in such hives, but stacked up three boxes deep, to give them 18 frames (6 in each box). They nearly always come through winter in great shape, which presents a bit of a dilemma.

By now, even after adding another box to make a tower of four, my queens have packed each box with brood, and they are ready to explode. In an ideal world, I could remove the queen to a full sized nuc or hive, then break the tower of boxes into singles, arrange the frames appropriately, and give each a queen cell. There are a few drones about, not many, but lots of sealed drone brood in hives, so mating should not be out of the question.

Unfortunately, it’s too early for me to start grafting, and I’m not going to have queen cells made by selected queens for 6 weeks or so. I suppose if my other hives were making swarm cells I could harvest them to pop into mini plus hives, but I don’t like using swarm cells for such things, and I haven’t got any anyway.

Doing the splits

Today I split one of my mini-plus towers into a 2 box hive on the site of the original hive, and a 3 box hive nearby. The smaller hive contains my charged queen cell and the other one has the queen plus a box of drawn empty comb. It won’t be long before they need more space again…probably a week.

Another stack of 4 mini-plus boxes was so full that I decided to remove the queen in a cage and split them into two hives of 2 boxes. They can’t swarm without a queen, and it buys me a bit of time while they make replacements. It so happened that one of my nucs was bad-tempered (has always been) so I re-queened them with the one in a cage in my pocket. I used a push in cage because it is a safe way to introduce a queen. She is laying well and was only out of her hive for 30 minutes, so I hope she will be accepted.

Going backwards

One of my hives had only got a couple of frames of bees. They were over on one side of the Langstroth brood box, with much more space than they needed. What a contrast to many of the others! I couldn’t see anything wrong with them, so I moved them from a hive to a poly nuc. It’s going backwards, but hopefully, they will get going at some point. I might give them a frame of sealed brood soon.

A hive was demoted to this nucleus box

Another ‘going backwards’ moment recently was when I noticed that a strong colony was not so strong any more. I think I made a mistake by adding a super too soon, but they did seem ready for one. Rather than growing into the space, they seem to have developed some chalk brood and gone backwards. So, off came the super, and I’ll have to see how they go. I expect them to die, but perhaps the forthcoming decent weather will be the tonic they need.

The weather forecast is rubbish

I have noticed that weather forecasts are a bit rubbish. Given the vast resources pumped into super computers and predictive models used by meteorologists, I’d hope that they were better. It really must be extremely difficult to get it right. I frequently go to bed feeling positive about the warm, dry day that tomorrow will be, only to wake up and see clouds and rain. Then I check my weather app and, sure enough, the forecast has changed to reflect this reality.

Furthermore, how many times do weather folk on TV start off by telling us what the weather was like today, or what it’s like right now. This, I submit, is not a forecast. The odds of getting it right are skewed strongly in their favour when they are describing the current weather rather than what it’s going to be like in a few days time.

Note to self: you live in Manchester, you fool – of course it’s going to rain!

Dealing with the boomers

My apiary of booming colonies was a new site last year. All the hives are brand new Honey Paw Langstroths, and they all started off on brand new everything. They also have, by and large, some of my best queens. Last year’s breeder queen was a beast, and her daughters seem to be laying machines too. As I needed to expand to a couple of new sites, I made up nucs using resources from these strong hives. They are still strong, but have work to do, so hopefully that delayed swarming by a few weeks.

The mole (my son Alex) with nucs at a new apiary

My space problems

Notwithstanding what’s going on in my hives, my problem currently is that I know that I need more supers, but I haven’t even got enough storage space for the boxes I have now. I have ordered the refurbished portacabin which will become the honey processing place, so that will create some space. I have also made enquiries of a friendly farmer about using some of his outbuildings. Or, if he lets me build a shed on his property, I could use that.

This brings me to another space related issue – my van. It is already too small, and I only got it last year. It just means I have to be careful when I load it, think ahead lots and make more trips. If I got a bigger van, it would cause mayhem at my house because the Walrus driveway is not enormous. Plus, reversing out onto a main road, having to cross a cycle lane, is not a barrel of laughs with my diminutive VW Caddy. What would it be like with a Transit?

And, while I’m in a moaning mood, what possessed our council to build a cycle lane running alongside our road anyway? The cyclists whiz along it, seemingly unaware that at any moment a vehicle could reverse out into their path. The time approaches when this walrus will have to leave the city, but ‘the beekeeper’s wife’ may not be easily persuaded.

17th April 2023
The Biggest Challenge In Beekeeping?

If I Had A Magic Wand…

I have put together a brief survey of my readers – please spare a minute of your busy day to share your experience. Thanks!

There was a poll here, but it’s closed now. Here are the results:

Biggest Challenge – Poll Results

28th September 2022
They Fly?!

Raising queens has helped my beekeeping enormously. I have been able to compare hives headed by home bred queens with ‘self-made’ queens. The latter tends to occur when bees swarm or when I make a ‘walk away split’. I leave them with one queen cell from which to create a new mother. It’s a comparison between average and selected queens. The average queens are often fine, but they tend to be slightly more swarmy and a bit grumpier than daughters of my best stock. I graft from queens that haven’t swarmed, make lots of honey and don’t sting very often. I can choose to control the queen half of the equation; the drones are up to nature.

Bad Walrus

Last year I adopted a lazy policy towards nucleus colonies that I sold. I would move five frames and the queen from a strong ‘double-nuc’ to a correx box and, after that, to a new owner. I left the remaining bees to re-queen themselves, and within six weeks, I could do it again. Some of the nucs that I sold have done exceptionally well, and the owners are delighted. However, a few swarmed in May, and a couple have been bad-tempered. I’m not going to do that again. I know swarming could have been due to a lack of space, particularly as beginners only have foundation frames, but I’m not too fond of the feeling it gave me. From now on, the nucs that I sell get a queen from my ‘queen unit’ if I can call it that.

Making queen cells

Each stage of making queens started off being tricky until it wasn’t. Having tried a few things, I have now arrived at my preferred way of making a cell builder colony. It’s a Demaree with the grafts going into the top box once I’ve made sure any emergency queen cells are gone. Periodically I rotate brood frames from downstairs to the top. I have done three rounds of grafts this season, and it works well. I only have 15 or 16 grafts on the frame, which suits me. Presumably, if I wanted to scale things up to 40 odd grafts, I would have to make a giant queenless cell builder with loads of nurse bees, like many commercial queen producers.

With my cell builder hive

I leave the grafted cells in the cell builder until they have been capped. About nine days after grafting day, they go into mating nucs or the incubator. Now, I’m sure there are catastrophes to come, but this stage of the proceedings has become relatively straightforward. Practise makes perfect and all that.

Mating nucs

Speaking of mating nucs, I have Kielers, mini-plus and full framed nucs with a divider (three frames on each side). I also have some homemade three framers. A bit of a mixed bag, you might say. I used to find the Kielers very tricky, but this season, after reading ‘Managing Mininucs’ by Ron Brown, I have seen the light. The only problem is that the smaller the mating nuc, the quicker they fill it up with brood, meaning they could bugger off if you aren’t on the ball. I love the mini-plus hives, although I’m not experienced enough to say they are my favourites. But they are. Second place goes to the poly nuc with a divider down the middle. So far.

Now that I am proficient at producing queen cells from my best queens (grafting is easy now) and getting them mated is simple when the sun comes out, my next hurdle has loomed before me. Catching queens shouldn’t be that hard, should it? They are in a small box with only a few frames…how hard can it be? Finding the lighter coloured queens is easy, but the dark ones are trickier. Having found her, I have to mark her thorax, maybe clip a wing, and put her in a cage with some attendant workers. I appear to be rubbish at this.

Gloves sticky with propolis

The main problem I have is that the thin rubber gloves I wear become sticky with propolis and nectar. I don’t want to pick the queen up with those, but if I take my gloves off to pick her up, my fingers soon become a sticky mess too, so that if I’m catching several queens, it’s a problem. The answer appears to be to unglove myself to pick up the queen and then re-don the gloves once she’s in the cage. Bit of a palaver.

Why not just pick her up?

The answer is NOT, in my limited experience, to pick up the queen with some device. I tried that twice today, and after a bit of fumbling, the queens took flight! After all the effort to get to this point, I can tell you it’s not a pretty sight. Apparently, if you stand still and leave the lid off for a few minutes, the queen usually returns. Let’s hope so. Surely this is the last piece of the puzzle to solve? After that, I’ll be a queen raising master – no? I asked Mike Palmer, and he said that sometimes queens fly off, especially in hot weather. He said it’s best to catch queens on cooler days or cool mornings. Another piece of knowledge that I could have done with sooner, but good to know anyway.

Devices to avoid handling queens

The way I get attendant bees with the queen is not something that I’ve read about, but it’s bound to be used by somebody else. I put the queen in a cage on her own. Then I scrape up some workers into another cage and seal that up. Next, I put one cage alongside the other and slide the plastic screens back a little on both, holding them together so that the bees can wander between the two cages but can’t escape. Once the queen has most workers with her, and she’s away from where the plastic slider is open, I close it up. It works very well, and I don’t have to pick up workers. However, after reading a piece by ‘The Apiarist‘, I ordered a load of JZ-BZ cages to try. That will be back to picking up workers, I suppose.

Making candy

I’ve been using standard fondant in queen cages, but next, I will try to make candy using powdered sugar and corn syrup. If I get it right, it should stay soft for longer. Most of the time, my queens are only in the cage for an hour or two. I’m just moving them into a hive or a nuc in a nearby apiary.

Plastic queen cage

My next bee job is to do a little interim honey extraction to produce wedding favours for my eldest daughter’s forthcoming nuptials. One of my hives has a full Langstroth brood box of capped honey, plus three supers. That’s a heavy box! The youngest child has helped by designing the labels for the cute little jars that will adorn the tables. It’s beginning to look like a decent honey year; not the best, not the worst. Then there will be a mass re-queening, using up all of my beautiful new babies. I’ll make up some nucs to take into winter and replace any old or dodgy queens. Any leftover queens can probably get through winter in double mini-plus hives; another reason I like them.

Finally, I traded in my Land Rover Disco Sport and picked up a Volvo XC60. It’s one of those hybrid, plug in the wall things. The interior is so gorgeous that I cannot possibly use it as my bee wagon. Therefore, my little VW T-Cross has become the Walrus Bee Wagon. Time will tell if that was a wise decision.

19th July 2021
Harsh Realities

There is that saying, “if it were easy, everyone would do it,” and I think it applies to some aspects of beekeeping. Frankly, in the early years of one’s beekeeping life, just keeping them alive and well is a significant achievement. Come to think about it, that still applies to me now after nine years (yes, I’m still a beekeeping baby).

I Killed Her

I killed my breeder queen the other day. Of all the queens in all the world, this was the last one I wanted to die. I started off being naturally talented at killing queens, but over the years, the knack wore off, and now they mostly live for a year or two. It’s too painful to recount the details right now. Let’s move on…I have other good queens.

Well bred, but dead

Facts of Life

Despite the reams of words written about swarm prevention and control, it’s a fact of life that bees swarm. The area of apiculture that many shy away from is raising queens, and I’m beginning to see why some choose not to climb the steep learning curve. The bit that everyone writes about is building queen cells which is not especially difficult. Let’s face it; bees do most of the work when it comes to cell building. They often make them when we’d prefer they didn’t, but at least they are giving us a clue that conditions are ideal for such an activity.

Limited Resources

The way I see it, there are two hurdles to leap when getting queen cells built. Firstly, a cell builder needs lots of nurse bees; it gobbles up resources. You need to start by putting 8 to 10 frames of sealed/emerging brood into a box to make one starter hive. Those frames of brood, if taken from production colonies, would be used to grow populations leading to a better honey crop. If you only have three or four hives, do you want to strip them all of their sealed brood to make up one cell builder?

Eight frames of brood is a couple of boxes of bees once they emerge. That probably equates to two supers (60 lbs) of honey, which is about £300 to £400 of lost revenue. Cell builders are monster hives that make a lot of honey, but I don’t want to hold back my other colonies too much.

The second hurdle is grafting, which is just a skill that is improved by practice. Some proper equipment helps too, plus a steady hand and reasonable eyesight.

The Solution is nearly always Nucs

I don’t think that grafting is that big a deal, but grabbing loads of brood frames from production colonies is. The solution, as shown to me by Michael Palmer, is to keep nucleus colonies as brood factories. As a nucleus hive becomes busy and more crowded, the act of removing brood is a good thing because it provides space and delays swarming. You are not keeping nucs for honey. They donate resources to cell builders and to boost other hives. You are going to take them through winter to ensure that you have queens available in the spring.

Note to self: You are not going to turn them all into production hives so that you don’t have enough nucs the following season!

Investment, not Cost

How many nucs do you need? It’s probably going to be okay to take a frame of brood from each in May/June/July every few weeks (Nov/Dec/Jan in the southern hemisphere). We need at least eight frames of brood to make our starter hive, so we need at least eight nucleus colonies, or maybe four “doubles” (five frames over five frames). Some may die over the winter, so we probably need to take ten or twelve nucs into winter. That’s a lot of nucs for somebody with three hives. I can see why they might prefer to buy queens from a reliable local source instead.

The cost of ten nucleus hives with frames is £750 before you even put a bee in them. You can buy twenty queens for that much money, and not have any of the hassles. Add in syrup feeding to get frames drawn and varroa control; this queen rearing is getting costly.

A Mating Apiary

Yet More Investment

I am finding that the hardest part of making queens is getting them mated. That’s the piece that attracts far less author attention. I do not have much success with those small mating hives. I know it’s all about learning, and “practise makes perfect,” but the truth is that it’s a problem for me.

If I stick a couple of frames of bees and stores into a three or five frame nuc and give them a queen cell, it mostly works well. These are full-sized frames, which means we are back to taking resources from elsewhere. If I have to get 16 queen cells into mating boxes, I need 16 three-frame nucs, including the frames and the bees. That’s a significant investment.

A Walrus Struggles

The solution to keeping the costs of mating down is supposed to be the use of those “tiny little mating nucs that everyone else but me seems to be able to use without problems.” Perhaps, as a walrus, I need to accept that big is beautiful? I will persevere with mini-plus hives because they are a reasonable size and queens can over-winter in them, but I’m done with Kielers. The walrus and the Kieler are not friends.

As a digression, another thing that I struggle with is getting plastic frames correctly drawn. Once they are, I love them – too much comb going perpendicular to the frame for my liking. Mine are black plastic. I can easily see eggs in the cells, and the frames can be spun without blow-outs. One day I’ll get the hang of this.

Happy as a Walrus in Snow

The best thing about making my queens is that I love it. The economics probably don’t work yet, but for me, it’s about pushing myself to learn and improve. The initial investment makes me wince when I think about it, but once you have the gear, the brood factory nucs and the mating nucs, it’s just about keeping it going. Larger mating nucs work for me because once the queen is mated, she can happily stay there for weeks if I don’t have anywhere to put her. The alternative is banking queens, which I suppose will be something else for me to learn in the years ahead.

20th May 2020
The Three Curses

There is always something new to learn about bees. The same probably applies to almost anything. Material for my blog posts should be endless and easy to come by. Ubiquitous, you might say. I have a vast library of books, interviews with beekeepers, my own experience, research papers, and so on. Now and then I slip in an article that has nothing much to do with bees whatsoever! Why, therefore, do I find myself staring at a blank screen wondering what on earth I’m going to write 1,000 words about? Proper authors have to write entire books. How do they do that?

Dear Diary

One option is to slip into “diary mode”. The problem with doing so is that most other beekeepers are doing the same things as me at the same times, and non-beekeepers aren’t even reading.

Dear Diary, today I tested the temperament of my bees by dangling my testicle over the frames. I only have one, because of the temperament test I did last week on my pet piranha!

If you must know, I’ve been taking honey off my hives and extracting it. I’ve also been treating all of my colonies with Apivar strips to kill varroa mites. I’m going back to thymol next year because it’s cheaper than Apivar and it’s a good idea to rotate treatments. I also feel a bit of a fraud because I just treated all colonies without doing mite counts. I know I should do mite counts so that I can spot “mite bombs” and also colonies that manage varroa well, but I never got around to it. Pathetic.

Soft Set Honey

Varroa, Wasps and Wax Moth

Anyway, now that I have meandered my way through that rambling introduction, I must progress to the meat of this piece. In my opinion, there are three big fat horrible scourges of beekeeping in the UK. These three curses are varroa mites, wax moths and wasps. There are many other potential problems to be vexed about, but for me, the unholy trilogy is the mainstay. If foulbrood comes along, then all bets are off; I’m on the lookout for that but haven’t suffered from it to date.

I have written a lot about varroa mites so I won’t labour the point here. Suffice to say, they are evil life-sucking beasties that need to be dealt with or your bees will die. Not only that, as they die, they will spread their parasites to other colonies. Bees drift to other hives more than many people realise. Additionally, as a colony becomes weak, other bees rob out the honey, taking mites back home. Of the three curses, varroa is the mightiest.

Big and Strong is best

Many problems in beekeeping are solved by keeping colonies strong. That means lots of bees and brood; a balanced population of eggs, larvae, pupae, nurse bees, guard bees and foragers. Beekeepers provide space, in the form of additional boxes, as the population increases in spring. They also remove boxes (hopefully filled with honey) as the population decreases heading towards winter. The idea is to keep the bees feeling snug in their home. We don’t want them to be overcrowded, but we don’t want acres of unused space in the hive either.

In my area wasps are usually a real pest in late summer and autumn. Once they discover an apiary, they tell their mates about it and before long hoards of them are probing the defences of each hive, looking for the weak one. Often a weak hive will try to defend itself, but it will be overcome. They end up dead. I hate that. Nature is like that though; survival of the fittest.

Victory over Vespas

Common Wasp (Vespula vulgaris), queen

The answer to wasps is to put out high-efficiency wasp traps around the apiary. When a wasp gets into the trap, it’s doomed; it cannot return to its nest and spread the word about a beautiful beehive down the road. Next, we need to keep strong colonies, as previously stated. Nucleus hives tend to be smaller and weaker than production hives, so they need special attention. When I make up a nuc, I want a mated queen, or at least a virgin, in there rather than a queen cell. The quicker the queen is laying eggs, and the colony is building up its numbers, the better. I also find that using hive floors with underfloor entrances gives the bees a better chance to defend their turf, as does reducing entrance sizes on nucs. Finally, once a hive is being completely hammered by wasps and is unable to protect itself, it needs to be immediately moved elsewhere.

Wax Moths want your comb

My final curse, the wax moth, is always about. The larvae make a complete mess of wax comb stored in the shed. I have only found them to be a problem on brood combs, but others have experienced the ruination of stored honey frames that have never seen brood. I spoke to Peter Little about this. He stores frames over the winter in large plastic barrels. He burns sulphur in each barrel then seals them up; the sulphur wipes out any pests including wax moths, and the comb is ready to roll next year. My solution is to spray stored frames with a solution of Bacillus thuringiensis and store them in plastic crates so that mice can’t get at them (another curse).

Comb Ruined by Wax Moth Larvae

Drawn comb is a valuable resource for beekeepers. When you go to a crate of stored comb in the spring and find a disgusting mess because wax moths got at it, it is both unpleasant and expensive. Drawing out wax foundation into usable comb takes a lot of effort by the bees. They will only draw foundation during a honey flow or while being fed sugar syrup. If you need to provide space for a hive quickly, you need drawn comb. It just needs a quick polish by workers to be ready for the queen to lay her eggs in it. It’s ready to be used for storing nectar. A box of foundation is not really “space” until the bees have drawn out the comb. I have read that bees need to consume 8lbs of honey to make 1lb of wax. Wax moths can undo all of that hard work very quickly, so they have to be stopped.

Oh my, I have gone over 1,000 words. Time to hang up the parchment and quill for another week. I hope all beekeepers get a good honey harvest and that they avoid the three curses!

29th August 2019
Mistakes!

In beekeeping, as in life, everybody makes mistakes. Even bees occasionally make them. The hard part is owning up to them.

Douglas Adams said, “a common mistake that people make when trying to design something foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.” I hate the fact that I stray into the realm of fools but cannot deny that it is so. I learn from reading, listening and watching, but nothing makes me a fool better than the experience. I hope that over time, the mistakes I make are lessons which turn me slowly, inexorably, into a good beekeeper.

Obsession

Keeping bees is way more tricky than I thought when I started. I suppose that is why it becomes an obsession. Show me somebody who has tended to a few hives for a couple of years, and I will show you a bee obsessed crazy person.

At first friends and colleagues would ask me about bees, and I would delight in telling them all that I had learned. Now I know by their glazed expressions that they think, “surely this guy can talk about something that isn’t a bee?” It’s a bit like expectant parents; they never shut up about the grim business of pushing a small person out of a reluctant opening. Obsessed people who find each other can talk for endless hours about their interest, whether it is bees or babies or whatever. To ordinary folk, it quickly becomes tiresome.

You can take a horse to water but…

I love reading some of the old bee books which were written by the grandmasters of their time. R.O.B Manley is my favourite, but there are others. Something that gives hope to those of us feeling like fools is that they had their share of calamities too.

In his book, Honey Farming, Manley states:

“What is learned by personal experience is generally learned well, but that is often rather an expensive way of gathering knowledge.” I can’t disagree with that!

He continues:

“Better…profit by the experience of successful contemporaries…who have left written records of their work. Beware of writers who have never had to rely on their bees for any part of their livelihood. These are often…good and well-meaning people, and their writings are frequently both interesting and glib, but they don’t…know what the business of honey production entails. Their point of view is that of the hobbyist.”

I took Manley’s advice. I met and interviewed some of the world’s most experienced bee farmers and turned it into my book, Interviews with Beekeepers. I learned a lot. I still make mistakes, and so do they, which is gratifying.

Manley and Miller

Manley wrote about how in the harsh winter of 1939-40 he left bees on high ground and suffered heavy losses. He said, “in one place…where I was stupid enough to leave the apiary unsheltered at the height of 700 feet above sea level, I lost about one-third dead, and more than another third were reduced to mere handfuls of bees.” He never did that again; he moved them to better wintering sites on lower ground.

The great CC Miller generously owned up to his mistakes in “Fifty Years Among the Bees.” He describes how he got carried away with expanding hive numbers from sixteen to fifty in one season. Many were too weak and were fed too late going into winter. He says, “by April 1st, I had only three colonies living, two of which I united, making a total of two left from the forty-five or fifty. After eleven years at beekeeping, and after having bought…quite a number of colonies, here I was with only two…to show for all my efforts! “

Michael Palmer

Here’s an extract from my interview with Michael Palmer:

Steve: Ok, so to give hope to those of us who aren’t as experienced as you, have you got any tales of woe where you did something stupid, or something that went wrong to prove you’re not perfect!?

Michael: I am far from it [laughs]. Yeah, I’ve gone back to an apiary after it rained overnight and found a colony where I forgot to put the crown board and lid back on.

Steve: So that happens

Michael: Yeah, that happens, really stupid stuff happens. Or I forget what day I’m on, so I forget to put a comb in the breeder hive, so when I go to graft, I haven’t got any grafting material. I don’t know, I’ve made every mistake. That’s why having a mentor, or a relative who got me into it, would have been helpful. I usually make every mistake at least once.

Peter Little

This one is from Peter Little:

Peter: I want to look at the queen and look at her brood, I want to know her temperament in all weather, how productive the bees are, how swarmy or not swarmy, and it’s my intuition. It’s one big guess then, but my intuition tells me that if I cross that queen with those drones, I think I’m going to get a damn good bee. So, I do it. Nine times out of ten, it works well; sometimes it doesn’t. Nothing’s guaranteed.

Steve: What happens when it doesn’t work out well?

Peter: Well, you get bees that are absolutely awful.

Steve: Right

Peter: They might be too inbred, they might be unproductive, they might be stingy, but you soon delete it then; you don’t repeat it.

Steve: No

Peter: Even Brother Adam made lots of mistakes over the years. It wasn’t just all perfect.

Steve: I’m sure, yeah

Peter: There were lots and lots of lines he had to delete because they weren’t any good.

Queen Killer

As for myself, I could probably fill a page with just the mistakes I made in the last month. The one that haunts me the most is when I couldn’t get to my incubator in time to catch virgin queens as they emerged. By the time I got to them, they were all dead. All that careful grafting and cell building to create beautiful queens, and I killed them. The other day I dropped a queen that I was marking and couldn’t find her. She was in the grass somewhere. Luckily I checked in the hive later, and she had managed to get back in. Phew. What a fool.

18th July 2019