The Walrus and the Honey Bee

Steve Donohoe, Bestselling Beekeeping Author

Tag: beekeeping records

Important Beekeeping Tips 2025

For those who start beekeeping, probably as a hobby, or to save the world, some will become obsessed for the rest of their lives, and many will give up within three years. When reality crashes into idealism, there are casualties. That’s actually a good thing; it makes sense to keep looking until you find your ‘happy place’ – the activity that brings you purpose and joy. For me, beekeeping seems to be the obsession du jour (well, 13 years, actually). As an obsessed, potentially somewhat autistic being, I inevitably read and hear all sorts of points of view. The harsh realities of personal experience also forge my own, the latest of which I will now share. Here are my important beekeeping tips 2025 – hopefully they will be useful to somebody.

I’ll Get To That One Day

Firstly, something that many beekeepers know about, but possibly file under “I’ll get to that one day.” It concerns record keeping, specifically the Veterinary Medicine Administration Record, which is to be kept for five years (for each medicine applied to the bees). The importance of filling out this document and keeping it up to date was hammered home to me yesterday at the National Bee Unit (NBU), where I was attending a ‘Bee Health Day.’

As a keeper of food-producing animals, beekeepers in the UK must follow certain laws, which specify what you are allowed to treat your bees with, and what records you must keep. If you don’t do this, you are acting illegally, and can be prosecuted. Generally speaking, especially for smaller beekeeping operations, trading standards will issue you with a warning and/or improvement notice if you are in breach. For bee farmers who rely on sales of honey and bees for their living, matters can get serious. It’s possible to incur an unlimited fine and up to two years in prison for serious and persistent offenders.

You are only allowed, by UK law, to apply certain prescribed varroa treatments to your bees, no matter how ludicrous the rules may seem. For example, even pure, laboratory standard oxalic acid crystals cannot be legally used to treat your bees, by sublimation, for example. The only legal treatments are set out in the newly updated ‘Managing Varroa’ leaflet issued by the NBU (see page 26). Note the absence of home-made oxalic acid dissolved in glycerol treatments, or anything else home-made.

Despite this ‘red-tape’ being a bit of a pain, I’m sure most consumers of UK honey are grateful that laws and standards are in place to help differentiate our high-quality produce from some ‘honey’ that comes into the country from elsewhere. We may not like the laws, but hopefully most people will follow them, and try to change them over time through lobbying and evidence-based argument. You can grab a simple checklist below.

Download the checklist

Varroa Non Treaters

While my Bee Health Day experience is fresh in my mind, I will comment on a snippet of information that I picked up yesterday. Apparently, over 20% of UK beekeepers are now ’non-treaters’ for varroa. On the one hand, they won’t have to fill out a VMD medicine administration record. On the other, many of those people, especially beginners, will be joining the ranks of people who give up within three years. That’s because the vast majority of honey bees in the UK will not be able to cope with varroa mites over the long term. Many will die, and will then be robbed out by other bees, spreading the varroa problem far and wide. I don’t blame beginner beekeepers; they just do what the local more experienced beekeepers, and their beekeeping associations, tell them to do.

I am all for properly funded and controlled breeding programmes to be set up and run to help move the dial towards varroa-resistance. However, your average five-colonies-in-the-garden type of beekeeper has no chance of developing a resistant strain of honey bee on their own. Not only that, but the whole ‘live and let die’ strategy creates unfortunate genetic bottlenecks in which many very desirable traits can be lost, such as being calm on the comb, gentle, and so forth. Kirsty Stainton wrote an excellent article covering this and more in Bee Farmer magazine in April 2025. You can access this via my podcast.

Article about non-treatment of honey bees

Swarming And Lost Honey

A while ago, I wrote about some ‘back of an envelope’ calculations concerning how much honey a beekeeper might lose if they lose a swarm from their bees. As usual, the answer is very much ‘it depends’. However, I ended up landing on a ballpark figure of 16 kg of honey lost, assuming it was a big colony before it swarmed. That’s about one super of honey (Langstroth medium) and would cost me about £235. Rather, I would lose that much in wholesale honey sales to local shops. If losing a swarm loses me the opportunity to earn £235 each time, I’m not a fan of swarming.

As luck would have it, I am trialing some hive scales made by Wolf-Waagen, and I was able to measure exactly the difference between similar colonies in similar areas. One swarmed, and the other did not. The hive that didn’t swarm made me 24 kg of summer honey, which I recently extracted. It had already given me 38 kg of spring honey, so those girls did well for me.

The other colony swarmed at 3pm on 27th June. It had collected 9 kg of summer honey before the swarm. As the non-swarmed colony continued to gain weight, the swarmed one remained flat for a few weeks, then it began to fall slightly. At the time that I realised that the new virgin queen had failed to mate, and gone missing, the difference was about 16 kg, but things went rapidly downhill in the queenless colony after that. In this case, the reality of lost honey seems to have matched up with my rough calculations.

Don’t Put Hives In A Row

Don’t put your hives in a row, and I’ll go further – don’t let them all look the same. The ‘hives in a row’ thing is something that I have gradually come to appreciate is a poor way of organising an apiary. There are several reasons:

1) drifting

2) lower mating success of virgin queens

3) increased risk of disease spread

1 and 3 are sort of the same, but I like information in threes 🙂

In a row, but at least not identical. From: ©Healthy Bees, Heavy Hives

Drifting

The problem with a long row of hives is that you end up with loads of bees at the ends, and fewer in the middle. The end hives are piled high with supers, and full of honey, but those towards the middle tend to be more diminutive in stature. Both workers and drones drift between colonies, especially when they are in a row with the entrances all facing the same way.

A bee returning with a load of pollen or a honey stomach full of nectar is likely to be welcomed into any hive, as the occupants will welcome the additional resources. It appears that honey bees navigate to one end of the row, and move along from there. So, a bee that flew out of a hive in the centre of the row will return to one end, and may not make it back to the central hive, becoming an honoured guest of one of the first three hives at each end.

Lower Mating Success

It is for a similar reason that queens returning from mating flights fail to make it back to the correct hive if it is in the middle of a long row of hives, particularly if they all face the same way and look similar. She will find her way back to the end of the row, but may enter one of those hives rather than work her way down the row to her original hive. The outcome is likely to be that she is killed, but she may take over; in either case, her original colony is now probably hopelessly queenless, and doomed.

A better hive configuration is for them to be in groups of up to four, with entrances at 90 degrees to each other, and each entrance can be differentiated from the others using colour or patterns.

Disease Spread

Finally, there’s another thing I heard about from the National Bee Inspector yesterday. We were discussing chronic bee paralysis virus, and how it can spread through an apiary with devastating results. He explained that since he had changed his hive placement from rows to groups of four (at 90 degrees to each other) he has not seen the disease spread widely through an apiary, but contained to one or two colonies. He also quickly clears up and buries the dead and dying bees on the ground beneath the hive entrance, as these are a big factor in spreading it. Anecdotal though this is, I don’t really need another reason not to place hives in rows, but it’s a good one.

Extract Honey When It’s Warm

My blog post about honey processing stated that supers at 30 degrees C would yield more honey at extraction than those at 18 degrees C. I suggested 20% more honey. Well, we did buy a large warming cabinet and have been using it to keep supers at 30 to 35 degrees C rather than allowing them to cool overnight prior to extraction. So far, the amount of honey we are getting is 16% more per super than when we previously extracted honey that had cooled to room temperature. The honey warming cabinet will pay for itself in one season. It may seem to be a considerable outlay, but for us, it’s really worth every penny. If you are good at building things, you could probably make something similar, or even an entire warm-room, for less money.

Raw Honey

Oh, and for those worried about it not being ‘raw honey’ the temperature inside the brood nest of a bee hive is about 34 degrees C. On that subject, when Odysea Ltd won their case against trading standards, and the judge allowed them to label their honey ‘raw’, it transpired that they heat honey to 40 degrees C during processing, and run it through a 300 micron filter. That’s pretty much what I do, but I prefer not to call mine ‘raw’. When a customer clearly desperately wants to hear the word ‘raw’ I will explain that there is no legal definition of raw, but that mine probably is, by whatever definition they might come up with, and that it is certainly unpasteurised.

That’s all, folks – I hope you found some of that interesting. I am returning to honey extraction tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. We are treating big colonies with Formic Pro and nucleus colonies with Thymovar. After the big cleanup of the honey processing room, our attention will turn to making some late season nucs and re-queening some colonies. Before you know it, I’ll be shouting “bah, humbug” at carol singers. Looking forward to Spring already!

19th August 2025
What Went Wrong in my 2024 Beekeeping Season

The audio version (listen rather than read) is on the podcast page

Overall, the 2024 beekeeping season ended up being fairly average for me in terms of honey production. The weather conditions were quite challenging in the spring and early summer, but, as is often the case, things turned around by the end. Nevertheless, as always, some things went wrong. My beekeeping record-keeping has evolved (or perhaps regressed?) over the years, but I’ve always been able to review my season and get a good sense of what went right or wrong. So, without further ado, here’s what went wrong in my 2024 beekeeping season.

Starvation

The dreadful spring weather seemed destined to cause a complete absence of a spring honey crop. Just as I was about to run out of stored honey—which would have meant I couldn’t supply my customers—a brief window of warmer, drier weather arrived, lasting about ten days. We eagerly harvested this crop, leaving a partially filled/uncapped super for most colonies. Then the weather turned grim again, and most of my bees quickly became hungry.

Within just a couple of weeks, I lost several colonies to starvation. This was entirely my fault, though it’s the first time it’s happened in many years. I took immediate action once I realised the situation. I ordered a load of frame feeders (thanks to Gwenyn Gruffydd), explaining the urgency, and they arrived quickly. We immediately put them to use. While some colonies were doing fine in certain locations, hives in other places were very light, queens stopped laying, brood was being cannibalised, and they were on the brink of collapse.

We fed the colonies using the frame feeders, which hold about two litres of syrup, over the course of about two weeks, returning every few days to refill them. The syrup was Invertbee, diluted to approximately a 1:1 ratio (sugar:water), with a little thymol added (dissolved in alcohol). The bees quickly recovered, the weather improved, and many colonies were likely saved. Considering I had taken most of their honey, it was the least I could do. Not my finest hour.

Dry comb and hungry bees

Mating Boxes

Once again, Mole and I worked through our queen rearing process using an assortment of mating boxes—roughly a 50/50 split between Kielers and Mini-Plus. This was the last straw for the Kielers. We won’t be using them again. While they do work, they’re a hassle compared to the Mini-Plus hives, which we much prefer.

The weather wasn’t kind to us, so our first grafting day wasn’t until 8th June, and the last was on 15th August. This season, I decided to mix things up a bit and used different breeder queens instead of our usual Buckfast type. We mainly grafted from an older (Yellow dot) dark Jolanta queen and an instrumentally inseminated queen from Northumberland Honey, which was almost pure Apis mellifera mellifera (Black Bee). I thought it was time for a change. The Jolanta queen had been a good honey producer, but her colonies didn’t perform particularly well early in the season; they only really thrived later, delivering a big summer crop. Her workers were a bit feisty, but I decided it was worth the risk.

Regardless of how our newly made queens perform next season, one thing we do know is that the Mini-Plus hives worked brilliantly for us once again. We overwinter several of them as triple or quadruple brood boxes, with the top box full of honey. In the spring, we can split them into single boxes, each with bees, brood, and stores—an ideal environment for our first queen cells of the season.

The Kielers, on the other hand, require a lot of winter maintenance. We have to scrape them out and sterilise them, and we essentially start from scratch in early summer. This involves shaking bees, storing them in a cool room for 3-4 days, and all that jazz.

Kieler nucs demand a lot of attention because they’re so small. They can quickly run out of food in bad weather, and they can just as easily become overcrowded and swarm when the weather is good. I understand why they’re effective in larger-scale queen production setups, but from now on, we’re 100% committed to the Mini-Plus system. Although they aren’t compatible with our other equipment, we can live with that. I’ve ordered more Mini-Plus hives from Germany.

Queen Problems

In 2024, I changed my cell-building setup, using a strong double-nucleus colony instead of my usual giant colonies—similar to what Mike Palmer does. Next year, I’ll return to my usual method, as I’m more familiar with it, though we did reasonably well with the double-nucleus system.

Our first issue of the year was that the larvae we grafted early on weren’t floating in the large puddles of jelly that I like to see at the bottom of their cells. They weren’t being fed as well as I’d have liked, which made grafting more difficult, and the success rate (‘take’) was lower than usual (50% compared to 80%+). I think this may have led to problems with queen acceptance and early supersedure. Lesson learned: it’s essential to only graft well-fed larvae with lots of jelly.

Once the weather improved, things went smoothly from a queen-rearing perspective. However, we then faced another issue—poor queen mating in our production colonies. These were colonies that had attempted to swarm and were left with a single queen cell (we clip queens, so we didn’t lose bees, just the old queen). Normally, the virgin queen emerges, mates, and starts laying within a month of removing the other queen cells. This season, however, we found that mating wasn’t happening, which resulted in drone-laying queens. The majority of my colony losses were due to drone-laying queens, laying workers, or missing queens, which all stemmed from mating issues.

Yes, we did lose a couple of swarms, but mostly we caught things in time.

The final queen problem we encountered this season was the failure of queen introductions, even in some nucleus boxes. It was worse than usual, though generally we’ve had a good success rate in the past. I’m not sure whether this was due to the darker queens not being accepted by the lighter-coloured workers or something else. As usual, when I took the time to use a push-in cage, it worked fine. The problems always arise when we use those plastic travel cages, even after changing the cage and removing the attendant bees. It wasn’t a huge issue, but this year was the worst I can remember.

A Good Season Anyway

In conclusion, despite the problems outlined above, we still had a pretty good season overall. We sold nucs, raised queens, and produced a decent honey crop (over 80 lbs per colony). We had an excellent crop of lime honey (Linden or Basswood) from one site, which has now completely sold out. Clearly, people love it!

Oh, and this was the first season with the new van. It’s been a game-changer—so much more space, and it’s 4WD.

VW transporter van with walrus apiaries livery

Now, it’s time to make some candles…

10th October 2024
Proactive Beekeeping
Some beekeepers are always thinking ahead. They have a plan. They keep records, so they know what’s going on with their bees, and they take time to think about what they will be doing next, and then what next after that. I suppose personality type might come into it; not all folks are wired the same way, but thinking ahead a step or two is a helpful beekeeping trait. There is little point doing all of that thinking, planning, plotting, or whatever you want to call it, unless you also take action. Thoughtful planning combined with actually doing something to achieve said plan probably results in successful outcomes.

Thoughtful planning + Action = Proactive beekeeping

Many beekeepers tend to be reactive rather than proactive. They wait until something looks wrong, then try to fix it. The proactive beekeeper foresees potential problems and takes action to prevent their occurrence. It’s not that difficult, but it’s not always easy either. We all make mistakes, and that’s OK. Hopefully, our mistakes teach us something, and we can use the lessons to proactively avoid them in the future.

Experience Can Help

Experience can be a great teacher, if we learn the correct things from it. To me, experience is about how many colonies you see each week, year after year. It’s not about how many years you have been keeping bees. My son (the mole) has been through 50–100 colonies, April to September, for two years now. I bet he’s seen more bees in two years than a lot of ‘experienced’ beekeepers see in 20 years. Hopefully, under the careful guidance (or crazed ramblings) of this old walrus, he has learned a thing or two. Compared to a ‘proper’ bee farmer, this is a tiny number of colonies, of course.

Sometimes people learn the wrong things from their experience. Those beekeepers who don’t treat for varroa mites at the right time in the right way, or maybe don’t treat at all, often attribute the death of their colonies to all sorts of things, but rarely the varroa/deformed wing virus combo. It’s a blind spot. I probably have a few of those myself (blind spots). It is quite difficult to look in the mirror and admit that the person staring back isn’t as great as he sometimes likes to think. This is one reason why I try to avoid mirrors!

Dandelions To The Rescue

I have hopefully finished feeding the colonies that needed it, which was actually quite a few of them. I got through all of my fondant and ended up giving syrup to some. We now have plenty of dandelions in flower, which is the time when I think my bees have ‘made it’ through winter, as (weather permitting) they will get plenty of pollen and nectar from dandelions. The weather forecast seems OK for early April, so that could be when we start inspections.

To-Do List

The tasks I have lined up are:
- changing or cleaning/scorching floors
- repairing/replacing some hive stands
- moving any supers on floors above the brood boxes
- checking for queen & healthy brood (when it’s warmer)
- marking and clipping any queens that haven’t been done
- maybe a bit of equalisation at an apiary level
- swapping out some black combs for better combs or foundation (in a flow)
- dealing with any colonies that have no queen or a drone layer
- re-queening colonies with old ‘yellow-dot’ queens (YDQ) with some ‘red-dot’ queens (RDQ) that came through winter in mini-plus hives
- cleaning up boxes and excluders, and scorching with a blow torch (or bleaching, if poly boxes)
- continuing the endless task of putting wax foundation into wired super frames
- setting up a new apiary on a nice organic farm (owner insists on timber hives and no synthetic treatments, which is fine by me)
Mini-plus hives used for over-wintering queens

Queen Stuff

That will keep me busy for the next few weeks, and subsequently, it will be time to add supers and try to keep ahead of swarming. I only have six spare over-wintered queens, in mini-plus boxes, and eight colonies with YDQs that require replacing. Oh well, I shall do six. I actually have nine YDQs out of 71 colonies (13%); all the others are RDQs. Of the eight YDQs, one will be moved to a nucleus hive and used as a breeder-queen because she’s done well for me (Jolanta queen, J9 line). My other breeder-queen is an instrumentally inseminated one from Luke & Suzie at Northumberland Honey, which seems to have come through winter in fine fettle.

One of the YDQs has never really had the opportunity to fill up a full-sized hive (she’s in a double nuc) so I shall move her to larger premises and see if she can make some honey. She is a queen from Andrew Little (son of Peter). That is, of course, assuming that she was not superseded last autumn. That applies to all of my YDQs – maybe they are YDQs no more; I won’t discover this until inspections start.

So there you are; I do have some plans. They are not so cunning that you could stick a tale on them and call them weasels, but it’s better than nowt.

Scene from Blackadder
21st March 2024
Reviewing Beekeeping Notes is Addictive in a Good Way

This morning, Mrs Walrus MBE made a quip about where I might be “on the spectrum,” indicating that it is probably some way along. Although this was partially in jest, it was possibly a tactic to divert attention from her undiagnosed, but obvious to all, attention deficit issues. Ha! Touché. Nowadays, it’s cool to have a disorder, so we must be a very cool couple. I’ll admit that I’m obsessed with beekeeping. However, I reckon that reviewing beekeeping notes is addictive in a good way, one that helps me to learn.

I am in no way minimising the suffering that mental health disorders cause; we are healthy people with certain personality traits that tend to attract labels. If either of us are on any spectra (I never thought I’d use that word today) it’s not near the zone where lives get ruined, thankfully. My mental health has improved considerably after 17 years of abstinence from alcohol and 11 years of keeping bees. Perhaps swapping a damaging obsession for a healthy one is the best that someone like me can do, and I’m at peace with that.

My Notes Are Far From Perfect

Anyway, to the subject of this article. Over the years, my beekeeping notes have become increasingly unwieldy, but I still write them up after each apiary visit. I manage to make notes on a hive by hive basis, so each hive can tell me a story when I review the notes later on – sometimes years later. As the hive numbers have grown, so the amount of detail recorded has declined. Mostly I record when something happens, such as adding or removing boxes, frames, treatments, food or whatever.

One complicating issue is the different hive types that I keep. It’s a bit crazy. My main production colonies are in Langstroth hives, and so I also keep Langstroth nucs. However, as people only want to buy National nucs, I keep them too, just to over-winter and sell. I have National nucs but not hives, so I have to split rather than promote them as they expand. I also raise queens, and have two types of mating boxes; the mini-plus hives and Kieler mating nucs. The former are great for over-wintering spare queens. Most of these hive types are colour coded on my apiary maps (yes, I do that).

Winter Losses

Despite some evidence to the contrary, I’m going to call winter over. My winter losses were 6 hives from 31 that went into the Autumn of 2022. Three died before Christmas (discovered at oxalic acid treatment time) and three afterwards (found in early April 2023). That’s 19% losses, way higher than I’d like, but not the end of the world. One died of starvation, two were drone laying queens, and the others I’m not completely sure about. Probably a combo of mites/virus/queen issues. A mouse seems to have been involved too.

In the past, I have tended to re-queen towards the end of the season, in July or August. This means that if something goes wrong, there isn’t much time to put it right. It’s not been uncommon for introduced queens to be accepted, but a month later they are superseded. The classic line from beekeepers is that “the bees know best,” and that they must be doing whatever it is they are doing for an excellent reason. I have doubts about that, but I certainly need to reflect on queen introductions – timing and how I do it.

Queen Replacement

From a honey production perspective, it’s wise to re-queen once she has finished her second season. This season, any of my white-dot queens need to be changed, or moved to a nuc and possibly used for breeding if she’s great. Is it better to do that now, or should I have done it last August? Mostly, I did it last August. That’s why most of mine are yellow-dots.

If we were going with a ’spring replacement’ strategy, we would have to either use imported early queens or queens that went through winter in nucs. Early queens, even those from warmer places like Italy and Greece, are not always the best. Sure, drones are about early on, and the weather can be decent, but that’s not as good as mid-season when drones are plentiful and everyone is sun bathing.

Therefore, if I were to switch to Spring replacements, it would be with nucs. I have purchased early queens, occasionally, and some can be perfectly good, but I am inclined to prefer my stock if I have it. Brother Adam was clear that spring was the best time to re-queen the bulk of his hives. Combining a nuc with a colony that has been made queenless is pretty reliable. But is it better to just start again with that nuc, promoting it into a clean hive, rather than merging it with different bees/brood and older comb? Or maybe do as Adam did – swap the queens in the hive and the nuc. An over-wintered queen made last season that is laying well will almost always be accepted.

Swarms

A good use of my notes is to look at swarming and how well I dealt with it. I find that it’s the colonies that do really well early on that swarm, so pulling out a couple of brood frames should help. Last season, 27% of my hives swarmed. Last year I just gave them space, but this time I have been removing brood frames from the biggest colonies to give to others. I’m also hoping that, having had successful eye surgery, my sight is so much better that I will miss fewer queen cells. I can easily spot eggs now, whereas it was tricky before. Thanks to Julian Stevens for his incredible skills.

Explaining the unexpected

Occasionally, some really unexpected things happen, and my notes help me to figure out what caused it. For me, idiot that I am, I sometimes find that I accidentally move queens. Last season, at one point, an old marked queen turned up in a mating nuc. I had shaken it in without realising. This sort of thing has also happened in the past, when I gave a ‘test frame’ to a queenless colony, only to find a marked queen wandering about. I had moved the queen with the test frame.

I’m hoping that having 2 working eyes will be an advantage this season, and maybe I’ll do fewer silly things. Already this season I have looked in the hive of a drone laying queen to find that my introduced queen of last season was still stuck under a push in cage, dead, obviously. I had forgotten to release her, poor thing. My notes should have helped, but I often forget to take them with me!

Breeder Queens

The real reason that I keep detailed notes on more or less every colony is that I’m always on the lookout for a nice queen to breed from. Apart from the amount of honey produced, and lack of swarming, it’s good to see a placid temperament consistently throughout the season. Plus, of course, I record the mite count in June, and don’t breed from anything showing with high mite loads.

A special breeder queen, mated on Dartmoor

Having spent all of last year asking Andrew Little (Peter’s son) for a breeder queen, I am now the proud owner of a special insect. She is one of the few living bees in the world that was actually mated at the Sherberton mating station (Dartmoor) previously used by Brother Adam. That does not mean she will be great, but for a sentimental old walrus it is a special thing. More importantly, she has gone through all the rigorous checks such as daughter testing that Peter Little used to do. I shall do my best to create perfect daughters from her, as Andrew is keen to hear how she performs.

Weather

As I record the weather in my notes, I can reassure myself that the current cold spell is nothing out of the ordinary. Last year, for example, it was overcast and 12 deg C on 18th April, and then overcast and 10 deg C on the 27th. April can have its chilly spells, but I often forget and think that something unusual is happening when it’s not. Things worked out pretty well last year, so why not this?

24th April 2023
Loving it!

The bees don’t care about COVID-19; in fact, they seem to be having a great time. I don’t know if it’s the reduced air pollution, the beautiful weather or something else, but my bees are booming. I’m a little concerned about the lack of rain which is a strange thing to say for a resident of Manchester UK because we usually get plenty. I have seen signs that the lime trees (Lindens) may flower soon, and bramble too, which suggests that if we do get some rain, a decent nectar flow will be upon us. If it stays dry, it could be a lousy honey year, but I’m pretty confident in the ability of my local area to attract precipitation.

Ratio of mated queens to grafts

Last week I was writing about my struggles with small mating hives, but on reflection, I can see that I made plenty of mistakes. The harsh numbers from my first round of queen rearing are as follows:

Number of grafted larvae: 20
Resulting emerged, living virgins: 11 (55%)
The final number of successfully mated queens: 6 (30%)
Absconded: 5

Clearly, this is nothing to boast about, but I am remaining optimistic. At least I have six mated daughters of my fancy expensive German breeder queen – the one that I accidentally killed. That queen’s colony is making another queen, who will be daughter number seven. I also made up a nuc with some frames from “Frau Breda”, and they too are creating what will be daughter number eight. I was hoping to do better than eight, but it’s a lot better than none.

Mating Nucs

I had 100% success with getting virgins mated in my two or three frame nucs (full-sized frames). The smaller mating hives were my nemesis, but I’m aware of what I did wrong. I believe that I should have used some queen pheromone when setting up the mini nucs, and the nurse bees should have been sprayed with weak sugar syrup. I also think I should have kept them confined for longer than one day before adding the virgins. Somehow I managed to get a mated queen from one of my Kielers, despite my incompetence, which proves that it can be done.

Something odd happened today when I was trying to catch the queen in the Kieler mating nuc. As I went to pick her up, she took flight, much to my surprise, and flew around in circles waiting for me to go. I put the lid back on and stepped back. A few minutes later, her majesty returned through the entrance, and this time I went in and grabbed her successfully. She got a blue dot and a new, much larger home.

Loire valley comes to Manchester

This year I sold my first nuc, an over-wintered one, on 26 April. I left a frame of open brood and added some sealed brood from another nuc, and on 26 May they had a new laying queen. It’s not always like this. Everything is early. It feels as if we are getting the sort of weather that I would expect from somewhere further south, like Nantes on the River Loire in France. Our holiday weather is coming to us, which is quite handy in these times of restricted travel and social distancing.

Having killed my Peter Stofen breeder queen, I decided to select the queen of my biggest colony for my next batch of grafts. They have been good bees. They came out of winter well, built up fast and have nearly filled three honey supers so far (Langstroth mediums). I noticed from my notes that this queen is the daughter of a queen from Peter Little. The drones in my area seem reasonable (and I try to help with that) because F2 or F4 hybrids do not sprout horns and breath fire. They seem to be as well behaved as their predecessors.

YDQ beginning to tire

I decided to remove my old yellow dot queen from her hive and put her in a nuc. She has been a fine servant, and clearly possesses non-swarmy genes, but she is beginning to flag at long last. Her replacement is one of the newly mated daughters of the Stoffen breeder queen. I should be able to graft a few more of her larvae before she goes to bee heaven, but we’ll see. She owes me nothing.

I keep notes on individual hives because I don’t have too many to make such a task unduly onerous. Usually, I dictate my notes into my iPhone then write them up on my spreadsheet later on. I can tell from these notes that from 17 production colonies I have lost four swarms so far this year. It could have been supercedure, but I’m going with “swarmed.” None of my 13 nucs swarmed, but I caught one that was about to. I have also successfully prevented swarming several times by removing the queen in a nuc or doing a vertical split. It’s all part of the fun.

My Happy Place

My bees are loving it, and I am too. Despite the mishaps, I especially love raising queens. I remember being told, by Randy Oliver, I think, that each beekeeper needs to find their “happy place.” For some, it will be producing honey, for others pollination services, or making beeswax cosmetics or whatever. I can make more money selling nucs than honey, and I love making queens. The intersection of doing what I love with making a small income is at the nucs because they each need a queen; a nice queen selected from my best bees. Who knows, maybe one day my ratio of successfully mated queens to grafts will be over 50%? It’s good to dream…

28th May 2020
If Peter Drucker kept Bees
Peter Drucker

The legendary management consultant, Peter Drucker, may well have kept bees; I don’t know. He certainly made a vast contribution to twentieth-century management theory, and I’m sure his influence will stretch far into the current century too. He is well known for, amongst other things, these sayings:

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

and

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

Making Records

I reckon these pearls of wisdom apply to beekeepers whether they are running it as a business or a pleasant pastime. Firstly, keeping good quality records is very helpful as well as enjoyable to those of us with a slightly nerdy tendency. At this time of the year, I read through my inspection records and take time to reflect on how things went last season. I also make my plans for the year ahead. Things rarely go to plan, but I find it helpful to have one.

The way I record what goes on in my hives and apiaries is as follows:
- after inspecting a colony, I record my observations by voice memo into my phone
- before I leave the apiary, I take a video recording, panning around all hives
- Later, at home, I use the video and audio recorded on my phone to help me update my inspection record, which is a multi-tabbed spreadsheet. I have one tab per hive.
Too Much Information?

I keep track of many things so that I can improve. Drucker would approve. For example, I know where each queen in each hive came from and can, therefore, select possible breeder queens. I can follow the growth of the colony, whether or when queen cells were made, temperament, the honey harvested and sugar syrup fed, disease treatments applied, mite counts, and so on. I also have an apiary map which I keep updated as new colonies start and others die or move elsewhere.

An Apiary Map

As at today, I have 27 colonies of bees in three apiaries (one has just got started). Twelve of these colonies are full hives on either single or double brood boxes, which leaves fifteen that are nucleus colonies. Of the nucleus colonies, six are on BS National frames and the rest on my prefered Langstroth frames. I have started keeping a few National nucs so that I can sell them to other beekeepers. There isn’t much demand for Langstroth nucs in England, sadly.

Hive Record

Only a tool, but a good one

Being a genius record keeper won’t make you a great beekeeper. In the long run, I suspect that it will help you to improve if you use those records to good effect. I already know which hives I’m expecting to re-queen next season when I have queens available. There are a couple with older queens, one which is too grumpy for my liking, and a couple which have never made much surplus honey. Assuming they survive the winter, I have also identified my breeder queens; those who will be the mothers to the queens I raise next summer.

When I visited Olivarez Honey Bees in California, I discussed record-keeping with Ali Churiel, who keeps track of their 16,000 colonies based in California and Montana. If she can track that many, I should be able to cope with mine.

Bees are Great Managers

Regarding Drucker’s “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things,” the bees are managers par excellance. In this context, I see the beekeeper as the “leader.” The bees will manage their colony in the best way they can given the circumstances in which they find themselves. Every time the beekeeper opens up a hive and pulls out frames, something changes.

The bees will manage themselves very well, mostly. The job of the beekeeper, as leader of this merry enterprise, is to persuade them to do the “right thing” (from the beekeepers perspective). It’s important not to try to fight the bees; to force them to go against their nature. That would be folly. The beekeeper’s job is to time his or her manipulations to utilise the bees’ instincts for gain. When conditions are right, the bees may swarm, but this instinct can be used to raise queens instead. Or before the bees become short of space, we can add more boxes for them to grow into, and as they expand, we provide yet more boxes and profit from the surplus honey that they store.

Wise Words from those who know

Randy Oliver told me: “To be successful, you need strong, healthy colonies, so anything weak has to go. That needs to be your number one focus, and the second thing is timing; you’ve got to be in the right place at the right time.”

Murray McGregor says, “The thing that will tell you how bees like to be kept is the bees themselves. We think that we need rest, we need holidays, it’s good to have quiet times, but bees don’t like that. Bees love to be working. They work because they want to. They breed when they want to, they swarm when they want to and you have to work with the bees’ system and not against it. As soon as you are fighting your bees, you are not getting the best out of them.”
29th December 2019