The Walrus and the Honey Bee

Steve Donohoe, Bestselling Beekeeping Author

Tag: Michael Palmer

  • The Best Queen Cells

    The Best Queen Cells

    A year ago, the very idea of starting to raise queens at this time was madness, such was the hideous weather. This year, spring has been kinder, and I have already done my first batch of grafts. Now, I know that the easiest part of raising queens is making cells, and getting virgins well-mated is an important (and not always possible) step, but today I’m going to describe how to make the best possible queen cells.

    In my opinion, the steps involved with making queens, with associated difficulty levels, are as follows:

    1. Selecting breeder queen – as long as you keep notes, this is not very difficult. I choose the queens that made me lots of honey last season, showed no signs of swarming, were well-behaved, and healthy. Normally, they are going into their third season, but if I buy an inseminated breeder queen, she could be much younger. With bought queens, I trust the breeder. The other thing I try to do is use queens from different lines every year; a breeder queen only provides daughters for me for one season. I want to minimise inbreeding and maximise diversity, while still keeping pleasant and productive bees. Difficulty level 3/10.
    2. Making queen cells – there are many ways to do this, and you have to find what works for you. I like grafting, which is not difficult, but it might take a few goes to get into the swing of it. My son picked it up straight away. He uses a bright light and his naked mole eyes; I use some magnifying lenses. We graft into JZBZ cell cups. Once the cells are made, they are easy to handle, whereas if you do the Miller method (no grafting), it’s fiddly to cut the cells from the comb. I’ll talk about this in more detail below, but it’s easy enough. Difficulty level 6/10.
    3. Getting virgin queens mated – this can be a demoralising stage because it’s not going to happen if conditions are poor. They like a pleasant, sunny day, and sometimes those are hard to come by in these parts. We use cell protectors, then place the cells into mating nuclei. The nuclei can be mini-plus or full-sized nucs, or those baby ones (Apideas and Kielers), and must be populated with young bees and have food stores available. Difficulty level 7/10.
    4. Introducing mated queens to a new colony – after all the effort of producing a beautiful mated queen, it is very annoying if, upon introducing her to a new colony, they kill her. This happens surprisingly often. There are many theories and methods surrounding successful queen introduction, but I won’t go into them here. Difficulty level 8/10.

    I might give them different scores in a week’s time, but that’s where I’m at today.

    Anyway, I wanted to write about how to make the best queen cells, which will hopefully go on to make the best queens. I have tried quite a few approaches, and I always come back to the method used by Brother Adam, Mike Palmer, and others. What I want to see are big, juicy queen cells with loads of jelly visible in the translucent JZBZ cup, showing that the developing queen has an excess of nutrients to aid her development. The method I will describe achieves this.

    Time of Year

    Theoretically, you can make queen cells anytime, even when it’s snowing. As long as the right conditions are in place within the cell builder, the bees will build cells. However, the time when all the stars align, when it seems to go best of all, is early in ‘swarm season’. For me, this appears to be from mid-April to the end of May, but it can vary. Last year, swarming got pushed into June/July because the spring weather was so bad. When the bees are making preparations to swarm is a great time to make queens – it’s what they want to do anyway.

    Cory Stevens actually uses colonies that are building swarm cells as cell-builders. He gets rid of the cells made by the bees and adds his grafted larvae. The first round may not be as good as the second because initially, there is competition from other larvae on the combs. Once these are removed, the only way for them to make a queen is to use what the beekeeper has provided.

    You need there to be drones in hives, of course. I have lots of them wandering about in my hives already, and even if they have just arrived, they should be sexually mature and ready for mating three weeks after emerging. I found my first (and only, so far) charged queen cell in a colony on 11th April. No doubt the warm and sunny weather was a factor in bringing them along so quickly. Although we are back to grey skies and 16 °C, I have faith that I will get some good mating days in early May. And if not, I will have to kill unmated queens and try again.

    Bees drawing out drone comb
    Bees drawing out drone comb (2nd April 2025)

    I do make queens into July, and sometimes August, but at such times there is much less brood in hives; brood which I need to create a strong cell-builder with an excess of nurse bees. I also have to feed syrup and pollen patties later in the season, whereas right now, natural pollen and nectar is everywhere.

    Cell Building: Step One – sealed brood

    As part of swarm prevention, we remove a frame or two of sealed brood from colonies that are booming and likely to swarm if not so treated. These brood frames go into nucleus boxes and are brought to my home base, where the queen-making happens. Moving frames between apiaries is risky, so make sure you are aware of the symptoms of disease, or don’t do it. Mike Palmer keeps ‘brood factory’ nucs on the same site as his cell builders.

    We add 8 frames of sealed brood to a brood box (Langstroth). The other two frames will be mostly stores, especially pollen. This brood box will be placed on top of an already strong colony, to make a super-strong colony in a few weeks. Firstly, we go through the colony to make sure that there are no swarm cells and the queen has plenty of laying space. Above that, there is the excluder and two supers. We place a second excluder over the supers, then put the brood box with sealed brood on top.

    We return about a week later to find and remove any queen cells made in the top box. This is important; a rogue virgin queen will mess things up.

    Cell Building: Step Two – make it queenless

    Ten to fourteen days after adding the box of sealed brood, it’s time to split the hive into two parts. One part will have the queen, but not many bees. The other part will be a monster, bursting with bees, but no queen.

    We place a new floor beside the existing hive, pointing in a different direction (typically perpendicular). Onto this goes the bottom brood box – the one with the queen, and later on, it gets a super on top too.

    The queenless hive is set up as follows:

    • floor
    • super
    • brood box (the one that had the sealed brood, now largely emerged)
    • roof

    Later in the season, there would be a cover board on top with a bucket-type syrup feeder over the feed hole, but this doesn’t seem necessary early on, unless the weather turns bad. The super on the floor causes bees to move nectar upwards, which is what happens during a honey flow.

    We shake lots of nurse bees from frames in the queen-right hive into the queenless one, making sure that the queen stays where she is (out of the cell builder!).

    Cell Building: Step Three – grafting

    Next, we grab a frame of eggs and young larvae from our selected breeder queen. These are in nucleus colonies on the same site. The bees are brushed off, and the frame is carried to our grafting room, which is a converted shipping container where we also extract honey.

    The Mole and I graft a row of cups each, which is around 24-30 of them. Mine are on the top row and his go below. We have just purchased a bright LED table lamp to help see larvae of the right size, which are those closest to eggs on the frame – they are less than one day old. We use the Chinese grafting tool or, if the comb is soft, a fine paintbrush.

    The frame of grafted larvae goes into the centre of the brood box of the cell-builder, with a frame of pollen alongside. The frame from which we grafted the larvae is returned to the breeder queen’s colony.

    Queen cells on grafting frame
    Queen cells on grafting frame

    Cell Building: Step Four – recombine

    We take a sneak peek at the grafting frame after three days, to make sure that queen cells are being made. If all goes well, we will have at least 80% success, which means around 20-24 big, fat, gorgeous queen cells. Next, we recombine the colony. The brood box to the side, with the queen, returns to its original place on the original floor. Then the excluder, then the supers, the other excluder (belt and braces), and the brood box at the top with the cells in it.

    Cell builder hive
    Cell builder hive after being re-combined

    Cell Building: Step Five – incubator

    On the eighth day after grafting, we remove the grafting frame, brush off the bees, and carefully carry the delicate cells to the incubator. We have a Carricel portable incubator for moving cells, which keeps them warm. Each cell goes into a roller cage, which goes into a layer of foam in the incubator tray, which has holes in it (so that the roller cages can stand up in the holes). The incubator temperature is 34.5 °C, and we put some water in a tray at the bottom to keep up the humidity (60%-80%).

    Cell Building: Back to Step One

    At this point, we can do it all again! Split the hive into a small queen-right one to the side, and a strong cell builder into which the next round of grafts can go. Another 24–30 larvae, to make 20–24 cells. This can be kept going for a bit, but after the second round you really need to add more sealed brood, and the top box is beginning to get some honey stored in it. I normally stop after the second round and just allow this giant colony to make an enormous honey crop. I set up another cell builder later on, once my new queens have got mated and moved to full-sized nucs or hives.

    Cell Building: Step Six – mating nucs

    Two days after going to the incubator, the cells get moved to the mating apiary, and placed in nucs with a cell protector (orange plastic ones made by JZBZ). The nucs are small queenless colonies which have bees, stores, and often brood. We break up our over-wintered mini-plus ‘towers’ into single boxes, each with bees, brood, and stores. We may also put a queen cell into a nuc made up from ‘spare’ brood and bees taken from strong colonies.

    I may sometimes even resort to using Kieler nucs, if I have more cells than I know what to do with. However, I would rather use the cells to re-queen any colonies that have made swarm cells or those with old queens (in their third season). If a colony is going to swarm, I remove the queen in a nuc, destroy all swarm cells, and add a cell from the incubator (it must be protected). Based on Cory Stevens’ experience, I could use that colony as a cell builder if required. We will collect the royal jelly from the destroyed swarm cells and freeze it for later use, maybe. That’s the plan, anyway.

    Newly emerged virgin queen bee
    Newly emerged virgin queen bee

    Oh, and sometimes stuff happens, and I get to the incubator later than planned, and I find emerging virgin queens. I quite like them, but introduction to established mating nucs can be a problem (a protected cell works; virgins can get killed). Virgins are probably best introduced to full-sized nucs or hives which have been rendered hopelessly queenless. The good thing about virgins is that you can examine them to ensure that they are large and healthy. Sometimes good-looking queen cells do not contain viable queens.

    Jay Smith (1871–1958)

    In his book ‘Better Queens’, Jay Smith described how he found a way to make the very best queen cells. After producing thousands of queens by grafting, he eventually came to the view that better cells could be made by cutting a row of eggs from a comb and sticking it to a top bar, which could be used instead of grafted larvae. I tried this once, and made a right pig’s ear of it, so I’m happy with grafting.

    Final Thoughts

    It might be argued that using one of those Jenter or CupKit systems should achieve a similar result, as queens could be made from eggs rather than young larvae. This might further be enhanced by trying to utilise the ‘maternal effect’ which David Evans has written about. To achieve that, you’d need to make artificial queen cups (larger than worker cells), and persuade the queen to lay into them.

    I know that you can make good queens using smaller cell builders than the gigantic one that I have described above. However, I know from my experience, and that of Brother Adam, Mike Palmer, Jay Smith et al., that the best cells come from a colony that is on the edge of swarming. If they are bursting with young bees, with plenty of good nutrition, they make better cells. They just do.

    David Kemp Raising Queens at Buckfast late 1960's
    Raising Queens at Buckfast late 1960’s (David Kemp)

    Of course, if you don’t want 50+ queens, and you don’t have many colonies, this won’t be for you. There are plenty of small-scale approaches, but this is the one that I have found to be the best. I also know people who use smaller cell builders, typically five frames over five in a double nuc, with great commercial success, and they know more about queen production than I do. So there are plenty of options!

    podcast link
  • Queens – Going For It

    Queens – Going For It

    Bees drawing out drone comb
    Bees drawing out drone comb

    I can’t remember if we are currently experiencing “fool’s spring”, the “spring of deception“, or some other amusingly named phase, but my bees are certainly enjoying it. In my area—and indeed across nearly all the UK—March provided more sunshine and considerably less rainfall than usual. This delightful situation is bound to change. The only certainty about British weather is its unpredictability. Nonetheless, as the bees busily build drone comb wherever they can, my thoughts inevitably turn to queen rearing.

    March 2025 has been quite sunny (compared to 1991-2020 average)

    Contrasting Fortunes

    Reflecting on bees in general, there are two notably contrasting stories that spring (haha) to mind. Here in the tropics of Cheshire, the season has progressed rapidly. While losses this winter were slightly higher than normal, with a few small colonies unlikely ever to thrive, most of mine are booming. My nucleus colonies (nucs) have been expanded to double height (six frames over six), and every hive already has at least one super. A nectar flow is clearly underway, notably boosted by the recent arrival of dandelions, and drone brood has become the main priority for most colonies.

    This National nuc will soon be with a new owner

    Contrast my situation with the unfortunate experiences of my friend Mike Palmer, an excellent beekeeper in Vermont. He has suffered losses of 58% so far this winter, and he anticipates even more to come this spring. Mike raises local queens, manages varroa carefully, feeds his bees before winter, and truly knows his craft. His colonies were exceptionally strong during summer and at the time of their autumn varroa treatments. Yet, as he said, “Strong colonies and healthy brood. No mite damage. No DWV (deformed wing virus). They began collapsing in October.” Many in the UK mistakenly assume that American beekeepers neglect their bees, but that is generally untrue. The widespread losses experienced across the US suggest that something, perhaps a virus, is severely affecting bee populations. It has an ‘Isle of Wight disease’ feeling to it. I sincerely hope that a solution is found soon, and that whatever is happening there does not come to the UK.

    Graphic of USA honey bee losses over time
    Graphic of USA honey bee losses over time

    Retiring Small Colonies

    Right, back to the point. I’m sure there was one. Oh, yes – queens! Queen rearing is both enormously rewarding and, occasionally, soul-destroying. I am so happy with the results of last year’s efforts; our nucs are bursting, and the green-dot queens we made last season are looking fabulous right now. Well, not every single colony; there are always a few crappy ones. Those that are still on 3–4 frames will soon be replaced because they will never amount to anything. It is nearly always a waste of a bee hive to keep small, slow to build, colonies going. They normally have something not quite right with the queen.

    When retiring a colony, we inspect thoroughly for signs of disease, verify the queen’s presence, and check the brood pattern. Previously, we might have simply re-queened these struggling colonies, but this season they will be completely replaced with fresh nuclei. It is tempting to use sealed brood from these retiring colonies to establish a cell builder (placing combs of sealed brood above a strong colony), but I worry about hidden diseases like nosema, which are only identifiable under a microscope. We rarely see dysentery, but occasionally those slow ones in the spring are slow because of nosema, which does not necessarily lead to bee poop indoors.

    Leisurely Drones

    I use excess brood harvested from super-strong colonies as part of swarm prevention to make cell builders. No point taking risks when making queens. However, once I have made some queen cells I will combine them with frames from the smaller (but hopefully healthy) colonies to make up nucs. These will then grow on into production colonies for the summer flow. If there is one. Many people say that a good spring leads to a poor summer, and so far, it looks like spring could be good.

    Drone close up photo
    Drone Makro Freak/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

    Many of my colonies already contain sealed drone brood, and some drones have emerged, leisurely wandering about their hives like gentlemen in their smoking jackets, contemplating going on a flight someday soon. That means, in two to four weeks time, sexually mature drones will be on the hunt for virgin queens. Assuming, that is, the wind and rain stay away.

    I put foundation-less frames into good colonies at my mating apiary, and at any apiary really, in the hope that they can do some good. My beautiful drones will enhance the quality of local bees by mating with virgin queens. If we are going to have sexually mature drones in 28 days I could start grafting in two weeks. The weather often wrecks such plans, sadly. There may be plenty of virgin queens and mature drones, but they ain’t going to be having much sex if it’s freezing cold, wet, and windy.

    Cell Builder Already?!

    With all this in mind, I decided to start my first cell-builder colony of 2025 today. I added a brood box containing mostly sealed brood above an already strong colony. Obviously, once that lot emerges, there will be a crazy number of young bees in the hive. I shall keep an eye out for any queen cells, and get rid of them. In fact, I have some little glass tubes that I will use to collect royal jelly from queen cells. I’ll freeze it until grafting time, then use it to prime cell cups if I happen to be using a paintbrush as a grafting tool. The paintbrush (sable 000) is the tool of choice when grafting larvae from newly made, and therefore soft, wax comb. If the cups are primed with a solution of royal jelly/distilled water (50/50) it is easy to transfer the larva from bristle to puddle. So said Peter Little.

    If everything proceeds as planned, the first batch of queen cells should be incubating within three weeks, subsequently placed into mini-plus mating boxes. My over-wintered queens currently housed in mini-plus towers have rapidly expanded to four boxes and will soon need a fifth. My goal is to transfer these mature queens into nucleus colonies created from brood harvested from smaller hives. Then the five box stack is broken down into five single boxes, each with their own floor and lid. The frames are arranged so that each box has bees, brood, and food. Then they get a queen cell. Three weeks later, weather permitting, we have newly mated queens.

    Rays of Sunshine

    I fully expect the weather to mess things up, but I might get lucky. You’ve got to be in it to win it. Something like that. Predicting when we will get perfect mating weather is not something within my powers. If the first batch of cells does happen to result in well-mated queens, that will be pretty early in the season – around mid-May. Otherwise, if it doesn’t work out, we will keep plugging away, and at some point the Gods will smile upon our humble efforts. There is one ray of sunshine already – I have scrapped my Kieler mating nucs. Such a relief to be rid of them.

    Bramhall in the sun
    Bramhall in the sun (Image: Kirsty Thompson) – Cheshire Life

    The next few months will be busy but fun. Oh, and we will be moving house too, just to increase the stress levels. Hopefully, we should be in our new house in Bramhall by June. May your bees be healthy and productive, and your season be a good one.

  • Winter Beekeeping Challenges: Managing Colony Losses

    Winter Beekeeping Challenges: Managing Colony Losses

    Audio (podcast version) is here

    When you look at what would be expected to happen in a stable population of ‘wild’ honey bees, such as those in the Arnot forest, it is initially quite shocking how much death there is in nature. She is a harsh taskmaster, and it is not always the fittest that survive; luck plays a part too. As a beekeeper, I expect to keep my winter losses quite low – maybe 10% or less – but the Gods are not always smiling on me. This year, I have significant winter losses already, hence Winter Beekeeping Challenges: Managing Colony Losses.

    Death In The Wild

    Studies indicate that so called ‘wild’ bees swarm frequently, which is not surprising, as it is how bees reproduce. A species that is reluctant to reproduce is not going to do very well. I think that it would not be unreasonable to suggest that 70% of wild honey bee colonies swarm each year, and that only about 25% of those swarms survive. The parent colonies are left with queen cells, which means that not all of them will survive either. Most probably do, but there will be mishaps that leave the colony without a mated queen. There’s a lot of death going on. But, of course, there is a lot of new life too. There is a high churn, which no doubt helps with adaptations to environmental changes.

    graphic showing swarming and losses in a stable population of wild bees
    In a stable population of wild bees there is a lot of death and new life

    I try to raise queens that are very different to wild bees. Hopefully, they will be much less likely to try to swarm, and if they do try, I will deal with the situation before it happens. I can also keep an eye on parent colonies and re-queen if necessary. All being well, there is less death, and the new life comes from selected queens that display the traits that help me to produce lots of honey.

    Winter Preparations

    Another tick in the beekeeper box, a feather in my cap, or string to my bow, is that my bees go into winter with low varroa mite numbers and with plenty of stored food. This is the way1. Well, it should be. However, something is afoot this winter. I have just finished trickling VarroMed (an oxalic/formic acid treatment) onto my bees in hives (I don’t do it on my nucs) and have been assessing the strength of all colonies. Many of the nucs are looking lovely, but on my production hives I have already lost 16%. It’s not starvation, and I don’t think it’s varroa. I think something went wrong with some of my queens.

    Poor Queens Early On

    I have twice as many strong nucleus colonies as those which died, so my hive numbers will still be continuing on an upward trend next season, even from springtime. Nevertheless, I am a bit depressed about losing colonies already. The way I make sense of it, at this stage, is that the first few batches of queens that we made in 2024 were not made under ideal conditions. The larvae that we grafted early on were a bit too dry (they should be swimming in jelly) which led to a lower take than normal. Then we had appalling weather which would have delayed mating flights. These two things probably conspired to produce some queens that were a bit rubbish.

    Summer Queens

    Later on, in the summer, conditions were good for making queens, and the bulk of those that we made went into nucs for next season. This may be why I have plenty of strong nucs, but some of the production colonies that I re-queened have died. About half of my “deaths” are not actually dead yet, but they are so small and pathetic that they will be dead by the spring. On the other hand, many of our surviving colonies are looking fantastic; it’s rarely all doom and gloom.

    If we didn’t make queens and take plenty of nucleus colonies through the winter, then the odd bad year for losses, such as due to really harsh conditions, would set us back. That’s not happening to this walrus. Not only is queen rearing incredibly interesting and fun, it helps to keep beekeeping sustainable2.

    Death In The USA

    On the subject of losses, and death, I had to raise an eyebrow at the latest survey results coming out of the USA for honey bee losses. The Apiary Inspectors of America recently published preliminary results from the 2023–2024 US beekeeping survey: colony loss and management. A staggering 55% of managed honey bee colonies were reported as lost during the survey year (from April 1, 2023, to April 1, 2024). The running average over 13 years is 40%, which is already a seriously bad number, but 55% is ridiculous. If varroa was the primary culprit, it suggests a degree of resistance to amitraz3 (overuse or improper use) and possibly leaving supers on too long. Sometimes beekeepers go for a bigger honey crop but that means leaving varroa treatments until it’s too late, causing high winter losses.

    Graphic of USA honey bee losses over time
    Graphic of USA honey bee losses over time. Something is very wrong.

    I asked Mike Palmer about this; as in, what the hell are US beekeepers doing to have such terrible losses? He shared some USDA analysis of his colonies, which showed nothing amiss. His losses were 20-25%, and he reckons most were varroa related. That’s way ahead of the US average, but still a cause for concern, and it has been getting worse in recent years. He said, “We’re losing too many good colonies for no explainable reasons.” The USDA analysis of his hives showed low varroa and low levels of deformed wing virus (DWV).

    Mass Movement Of Bees

    Mike reckons the problem in his area is partly to do with the mass movement of bees in the USA. There’s the almond pollination4, of course, in which most of the honey bees in the country can mix with each other and exchange any nasties. He also gets an “invasion” of bees from southern states in the summer, which bring with them countless mites and hive beetles. He can tell when the invasion has started because suddenly mites and beetles appear as if from nowhere.

    Environmental Issues

    The other concern is a gradual build up of pesticides in the environment, which has begun to cross a tipping point, such that queens are now being superseded more often and not being mated properly. Such things also damage the immune response in honey bees, making them more vulnerable to everything. Mike had some pollen tested from his hives and had 10ppb Clothianidin5 found in some samples tested by Cornell University. Dandelion pollen had 4.5ppb even though dandelions are not treated, so it’s in the soil. It’s unfortunate that things have to get really bad before there are changes to policy.

    Mike says, “We’ve got an anti-neonic bill passed in Vermont. It won’t take effect until 2029. The product remains in the soil for up to 15 years. I’m 75, and I doubt I will ever see any benefit from the new law.” So, with that in mind, things don’t seem too bad in my apiaries, and I can’t wait for spring.

    Notes

    1. The phrase “This is the way” from The Mandalorian serves as a mantra or creed among the Mandalorians, particularly those belonging to the Children of the Watch. It underscores their dedication to a strict code of conduct, their cultural traditions, and their unique way of life.
    2. Sustainable beekeeping is a term that is widely used to mean all manner of things. I am using it in the way described by Michael Palmer in his lecture at the National Honey Show in 2013.
    3. Amitraz strips (e.g. Apivar) are effective if used properly and rotated with other treatments such as organic acids or thymol. At least, they are for me. Being lazy and leaving strips in the hive over winter is a great way to allow resistance to develop.
    4. The almond pollination event in California is the largest managed pollination effort in the world. It occurs annually during late winter and early spring (February to March) in California’s Central Valley, where approximately 80% of the world’s almonds are grown.
    5. While 5 ppb clothianidin may not cause immediate mortality, it has serious sublethal effects on behaviour, immunity, and reproduction, all of which contribute to long-term colony health decline. Managing and reducing exposure to neonicotinoids is critical to ensuring the survival and resilience of honeybee populations.
  • Making Queens!

    Making Queens!

    In my area, we are entering the busiest time of the beekeeping season. Colonies are expanding rapidly, and some have swarmed or are about to. Spring/early summer is often like that; a massive amount of nectar and pollen coming in, queens laying like there’s no tomorrow, and beekeepers trying to stay ahead by putting more boxes on hives. The weather helps, of course. It’s been pretty good for me so far.

    Swarmage

    Not only do I have to check every hive every week for signs of imminent swarmage (good word, eh?) but this is also the time to start raising queens. The bees are doing it anyway, which is a strong hint that conditions are ideal. My first batch of cells is in the cell builder right now. These are daughters of the breeder queen that I purchased last August. Hopefully, they will turn out to be good queens. I have done my part as well as I can, so the rest is up to the Gods.

    The method I used to make my big fat juicy queen cells (photo to follow next time, maybe) is very much along the lines of how Michael Palmer, Peter Little and many others do it, apart from Step One. They, in turn, are following Brother Adam’s queen rearing methods. I have tried the Cloake board method, but I much prefer the way I’m doing it now. In any case, why wouldn’t I follow in the path of the people I know who produce the best of queens?

    Here’s what I did, but remember, I’m only making about 60 queens this year. If I was making hundreds, I might have to make some changes.

    Step 1: Demaree a strong hive

    To make my cell builder, I chose a colony that had 7 – 8 frames of brood (Langstroth), had already filled one super and was working the second. There were no queen cells. I re-arranged this colony by doing a “Demaree“. The queen stayed in the bottom box on a frame of brood, but all other brood frames went in the top. I also put frames with pollen and honey upstairs, which meant that I had to put nine frames of drawn comb in the bottom (I could have used some foundation). The configuration became: floor > brood box with queen and empty comb > queen excluder > two supers > queen excluder > brood box with no queen and the brood > cover board > roof.

    Image showing a Demaree
    Step 1: Demaree

    After four days, I checked the upper brood chamber and removed any queen cells that had started. I repeated this another four days later. There was now no way for any queen cells to be in the top box.

    Step 2: Hopelessly Queenless

    After ten days I had some fun. I split my tall structure into two hives, one with the queen and one without. I moved the bottom section to the side and faced the entrance the opposite way. There was now a hopelessly queenless colony in its original place. Then I shook bees into the queenless hive from the other one, using a shaker box (brood box with queen excluder nailed to the bottom) to ensure it remained queenless. I did not shake the frame with the queen on it, but the shaker box is to eliminate the possibility of another unmarked queen getting in (it happens).

    Separate the hive into two parts
    Step 2: Separate the hive into two parts

    Step 3: Leave alone for two days

    This “step” happened because I was busy; I had planned to come back the next day. The point is that after a day or two that hopelessly queenless hive is desperate for young larvae or a queen. On reflection, maybe I should have put an excluder between the bottom honey super and the queenless brood box above. It’s always possible that a passing virgin queen might enter the hive and mess everything up…unlikely but possible.

    Step 4: Grafting

    My original idea was to try the Jay Smith method of using a strip of eggs cut from new comb that had been laid up by the breeder queen. I was all prepared with my Stanley knife and gas stove to melt wax, but I abandoned this approach because I was making a mess and didn’t feel comfortable. Grafting is more straightforward than cutting out strips of comb and glueing it to frames with melted wax; at least for me.

    So I grafted twenty larvae into nicot cups and put them on the cell bars. It took me longer than I wanted and I probably messed up another twenty larvae due to poor technique. I only put a larva into a cup when I lift it out of the comb first time, and that was not always happening. The reed on my grafting tool was too stiff (I have since ordered new ones), and my headlight was not bright enough. Subsequently, I ordered new kit, and it looks like it will be great for the job.

    By the way, for those who graft in their truck, I recently became aware of a nifty device which should make it easier (and the steering wheel less sticky).

    Step 5: Starting queen cells

    I put the frame of grafts into the centre of my queenless cell builder and fed them. The feeder contained sugar syrup with some Ultra Bee mixed in. I have no idea if this helps or not, but I thought I’d try it. They guzzled it down pretty quickly. There was already pollen in the hive, and foragers were piling it in, so I think all is well from a nutrition perspective.

    Adding Grafted Larvae
    Step 5: Adding Grafted Larvae

    Step 6: Re-combine back to a single hive

    After two days, I checked on my developing cells. They looked great. Only one or two of my grafts had been rejected. Next, I put the hive back together again, as shown. It is now a single tall hive with a queen in the bottom, cells finishing upstairs, and two excluders making sure the queen cannot get up there. I topped up the syrup feeder as it was all gone.

    Re-assemble back to one hive
    Re-assemble back to one hive

    Step 7: Remove queen cells

    Eight or nine days after grafting, I remove the cells, gently brushing off as many bees as I can. They can now go into the incubator or straight into mating nucs. In the latter case, I wrap aluminium foil around the cell, leaving just the tip exposed. If cells go into the incubator, the queens need feeding soon after emergence, and the quicker they are with workers, the better.

    Step 8: Back to a standard hive

    I now re-configure the hive once more so that it becomes a typical double brood set up. When I want to make queens again, I’ll probably use another strong colony and repeat the process.

    Normal hive with cells removed
    Normal hive with cells removed

    Mating Nucs

    It’s all well and good having nineteen queen cells, or virgins, but that means you need nineteen mating nucs for them. At the start of the year, that means shaking out a lot of nurse bees from hives. I have Keilers, Mini-plus hives and 3-frame poly nucs, plus some homemade wooden nucs with dividers in. The Keilers and Mini-plus need nurse bees and syrup to get going. The nucs with full-sized frames need me to steal from other colonies.

    This is why Mike Palmer has so many nucleus colonies; they provide the brood frames and nurse bees that he needs for his cell builders and mating nucs.

  • Nucleus Power!

    Nucleus Power!

    A nucleus hive, customarily called a “nuc” is just a little hive. I have heard it pronounced “nuke” and “nook” and I imagine non-beekeepers wonder what weapons of mass destruction have to do with bees. Many nucs are about half the size of a standard brood box, but there are all sorts.

    Mating Nucs

    Some of them are tiny and have half or quarter-sized frames, like a dolls house version of the real thing. They are mating nucs. A virgin queen or a queen cell goes into this tiny box with its baby colony of workers, and two weeks later she’s mated and laying eggs, at which point she is transferred to a bigger hive or caged and sold. That whole “mating nuc” thing is a specialist area that I will put aside for now; I want to focus on nucs which have the same frame size as full-sized beehives.

    Achieving Goals

    As each season rushes by and as I gain experience, either lived or imbibed from books and conversations, I am increasingly aware of just how powerful nucs are. I can’t imagine beekeeping without them. However, nucs are just another tool to be used or misused by the beekeeper. Conditions vary so much from area to area that beekeeping itself must vary too so that our bees thrive. Each beekeeper must ask himself/herself what they want from their bees; what is their desired outcome? If we tailor our actions and timings towards our goals, then we will hopefully prosper.

    Here are some possible beekeeping goals:

    – make lots of honey
    – expand my operation and have more hives
    – sell bees
    – raise queens
    – reduce swarming from my hives
    – catch swarms
    – recover from losing colonies that died over the winter
    – move bees to a new apiary

    Nucs can help with all of the above. The important thing is getting the actions and timings right, and these depend on your goals and local conditions.

    Lots of Nucs (Mike Palmer)
    Lots of Nucs (Mike Palmer)

    Timing is everything

    When to make nucs?
    It depends! In California, when hives come back from almond pollination in March/April, they are very strong and ready to swarm. This is the perfect time to make “splits” (nucs) and packages of bees for sale. At the same time here in the UK many people are only just inspecting their hives for the first time since winter! Beekeepers must know their local conditions and take actions based on the state of their colonies rather than the date on a calendar.

    Preventing Swarms

    Speaking of booming colonies and swarming, nucs are a great help in two ways. Firstly, if you remove a frame or two of brood from a hive, it is “set back” by two weeks or so, and this may persuade the bees to postpone swarming. The removed frames can either boost another colony, be part of a cell builder or start a nucleus colony (add some other combs, bees and a queen or queen cell). Secondly, if you make up a nuc from the strong hive and take away their queen, they cannot swarm, which is the so-called “nucleus method” of swarm control.

    A nuc is a tool that allows the beekeeper to manipulate the strength of their hives. You can weaken big colonies to prevent swarming, but if you are waiting on a nectar flow, you may not wish to overdo it. If honey is the goal, you need your colonies to be big and strong in time to catch the nectar flows. This is what makes timing so important, and knowledge of local conditions and flows. As your nuc grows stronger, you then face the potential issue of the nuc itself swarming. One option is to add more space (another nuc box on top), and another option is to split that nuc further, to make more nucs!

    Brood Factories

    It all depends on what you want. In general, if honey crops are the goal, hives must be powerful at the start of each nectar flow. The trick is to keep them full of bees without letting them swarm. If you want more bees, then the best time to make nucs is when there is a lot of brood in the hive, and the nectar flow is on. To raise queens with a cell builder, you will need a box bursting with nurse bees and no queen. Nucs can be used to supply frames of sealed brood for cell builders; it serves the double purpose of providing nurse bees as well as preventing the nuc from swarming. Mike Palmer calls his nucs “brood factories”.

    The way to make comb honey is to put a super of thin foundation on top of a hive that is desperate for more space when a flow is on. The bees will very quickly draw out the foundation and store honey in that top super. One way to help create the right conditions is to add bees/brood from nucs.

    Portable Bees

    As a reasonably small beekeeper*, I don’t have a pick-up truck for moving hives around. When I find a new apiary, I get started with nucleus hives. I use polystyrene (EPS) nucs which are easy to transport in my Land Rover, and easy to carry to new stands. I’d struggle to move full-sized hives in the same way. I have followed other successful UK beekeepers by choosing EPS for nucs because they do so well over the winter. In my opinion, in my area, smaller colonies do best with insulated hives, whereas for larger colonies the jury is still out.

    Long Live the Queen

    Here’s another fantastic thing about nucs: a breeder queen will live a very long time in them. Many people who raise queens by grafting from a treasured breeder queen keep her majesty in a nuc. The age of a queen is determined not by time but by how many eggs she has laid. In the relatively limited space of a nuc, her egg-laying is curtailed so she can live longer. I wrote previously about a breeder queen that lived seven years!

    Swarm Traps

    Swarm traps are nucleus hives which beekeepers strategically position in the countryside in the hope of catching a swarm of bees. It so happens that five frame nucs are the right size for this. Most people have a mix of old black comb and foundation in the swarm traps, which are placed a few hundred yards from the apiary.

    Queens in Spring

    In the UK the weather can sometimes be very wet and gloomy at queen rearing time. It can be challenging to get hold of queens in the spring, which leads to a vast number of them being imported from areas with a more stable climate. The issue of imports is very emotive,
    with arguments on either side, but as a general rule, I think that beekeepers should at least try to raise some of their own. Nucs are ideal places for queens to be kept over the winter. If you take some queens through winter in nucs, then you have them ready to go the following spring. They can be used to replace winter losses or to grow into production colonies or sold to other beekeepers. Is that what they call a win/win?

    *I’m referring to hive numbers rather than bodyweight!

  • Dreaming of 2020

    Dreaming of 2020

    I often like to have some theme for my blog posts, but today I’m just writing whatever pops into my head. There are lots of things to say about bees, but after a while, it can get a bit stale. Bees are fascinating insects, and most beekeepers tend to be obsessed with them, but to the rest of the world, they are not particularly high on the list of things to discuss.

    Oxalic Acid

    Right now, many beekeepers are deciding whether or not to treat their hives with oxalic acid, which kills varroa mites. I say, “do it!” because there is a good chance that the parasites won’t have many bee pupae to hide them. When there are a lot of baby bees being made, they hide under capped brood, and oxalic acid won’t be so effective. Theoretically, the amount of brood should be low or at zero around about now. The only way to be sure is to open up the hives and rip out frames to inspect them, but I can’t believe that the bees would appreciate that in the wintertime.

    Echo Chambers

    Just think how much I’d have to write about if my blog was on politics or economics? In these days of social media and rapid news dissemination, anything “new” is pounced on instantly and retweeted or reported in a frenzy of activity. Such is the demand for any news at all that we can quickly lose perspective, and assign importance to things that are quite trivial, simply because they are repeated so often in the echo chambers of our information sources. It’s easy to see trouble wherever you look, which is why beekeeping is so therapeutic for me. I don’t think about climate change, trade wars, real wars, wealth gaps or anything else when I’m with my bees.

    Winter Work

    I have gone on a bit of a spending spree on bee equipment recently. It’s all part of getting ready for next season. I used to think “season” applied to football, but now it’s bees. I’m an Arsenal fan so watching football has become painfull over the last few years. I’ve made up a load of cedar hives, which look and smell lovely, as part of the expansion of my beekeeping operation. It’s an “operation” now; it used to be a hobby!

    New Kit waiting for Spring
    New Kit waiting for Spring

    I have also made up some polystyrene mini-plus nucs which will be used as mating hives for queens, and for taking queens through next winter. Having seen them in action at Richard Noel’s place, I’m sure that these are the right type of mating hive for me. I had a useful email exchange with Steve Browning of Arden Forest Honey in Warwickshire which further convinced me of this. Those tiny mating nucs are really hard to manage, for a fumble flippered walrus anyway.

    Formal Instructions

    Mrs Walrus has given up dropping hints and has now issued formal instructions that particular walls need painting before Christmas. These are the walls in my house, not bee houses. That’s what I’ll be doing this week. It will be a very rare foray into the delights of Do-It-Yourself. I made the mistake of speaking to my brother on speaker-phone when Mrs W was in earshot. He is one of those people who is always doing handy things, and I am not. I am good at focusing on one thing and ignoring the rest of the world. Anyway, after hearing of all the jobs that my brother got done in a day (more than I do in a year), I was politely asked to get my paintbrush out. That’s not as rude as it sounds…

    Interviews With Beekeepers

    My youngest daughter, Squg, is an artist. She has now completed the cover for my forthcoming book, Interviews with Beekeepers. I’m sure that by now you will have realised that this book of mine is, in fact, a myth. It has been “coming soon” for so long that it reminds me of government tech projects…they never actually materialise. The actual release date, the final definite time, is 2nd April 2020. You just have to have faith. Like religion. Anyway, the book cover looks fantastic. The contents are incredibly readable, too if you like bees and beekeepers’ stories.

    Roll on 2020

    Niagra Falls
    Niagra Falls

    Apart from plotting my bee-related activities for next season, I have had some time to think about what’s coming in 2020. It should be an epic year. The eldest child gets married off in July, which means that I have to prepare a hilarious yet touchingly sensitive speech and lose a few pounds so that I’m not embarrassed when buying a suit. After that Mrs W and I will be spending some time with Mike & Lesley Palmer in Vermont USA, which will be amazing. They are a fun couple, and Mike is rumoured to know a thing or two about keeping bees. We’ll then take a road trip across to Niagra Falls and later on to Toronto, Canada to catch up with some relatives. Hopefully, earlier in the year we’ll also get our usual week in Tighnabruaich, which is our special relaxing place.

    So, all in all, a lot to be excited about in 2020. I can’t wait for these short, cold, wet days to pass and for the new growth of spring to arrive.

  • Winter Survival

    Winter Survival

    How this Walrus does it

    I harvested my last honey in August and treated for mites as soon as the honey supers were off. This works for me. Many beekeepers leave the harvest until later, maximising their honey crop, but I’m happy with what I do. At that time my bees are still bringing in nectar from Himalayan balsam, but my priority is always to ensure that varroa mites are knocked down before the queen starts to lay her “winter bees”. I treat them again in late November, with oxalic acid this time, to take advantage of lack of brood in the hives in winter.

    The flow from the balsam into September was good news because the bees stored it above and around the brood nest, to be eaten later on in winter and spring. Generally, my production colonies do not need to be fed enormous quantities of sugar syrup in the autumn, but sometimes the odd one does. 

    Horses for Courses

    Some beekeepers rely on a late honey crop, for example, heather, so they have a different way of doing things to me. In fact, for the two UK based bee farmers in my book (Murray McGregor and Peter Little), heather honey is a big deal. They don’t bring hives down from the hills until after the heather crop is in, which means that they are feeding bees into October and sometimes November. Each beekeeper has to develop his or her own system, one which works for their location, climate and beekeeping priorities.

    Peter Little, hive in winter
    Peter Little, hive in winter

    People who are new to beekeeping are naturally distressed when they find that some of their colonies died over winter, and they often conclude that the death of their bees had something to do with the winter weather. Clearly, weather plays a massive part in the fate of our bees, but it isn’t necessarily the winter weather that’s the problem. I asked Michael Palmer (Vermont) about this last week:

    Mike Palmer says…

    Walrus: Hi Mike. When you had that polar vortex thing in the States, with very rapid temperature drops to deep cold, did you notice higher bee mortality? 

    Mike: No, I didn’t notice higher mortality.

    Walrus: Do your winter losses show any correlation to bad winters? I suspect not, but good to check! I think maybe poor summers lead to weak colonies over winter; a strong well fed colony would survive almost any winter…thoughts?

    Mike: Yes, exactly. Summer/autumn weather greatly affects winter survivability. Last year (2018) was a good example. We had a good flow until the first week of July. Then we had a hot, dry August and September. Drought! Then October was cold and wet, followed by two “one-foot” snowstorms in November. It was very cold in December and January.

      Clusters of older bees were going into winter because the lack of flow in August and September stopped the queens laying. Then spring came late. The first pollen came on 20 April. The nucs couldn’t take it – most were too weak to sell. The production colonies recovered this year to make a good crop. This year is much better: 450 nucs going into winter well-stocked with young bees and honey.

    I have heard similar stories time and again from bee farmers. They know about keeping their bees healthy and well-fed and free of mites, but they can’t do much about the weather. It’s not so much the winter weather as the weather before and after. If the summer is miserable, then colonies will go into winter weaker than they should. If the following spring is cold and wet then already weakened bees can succumb.

    Murray McGregor’s worst year

    Here’s what Murray McGregor in Scotland said about his worst year:

    “We had a disastrous year; 1985 was a terrible summer. A terrible summer actually hits you with a double whammy, because there was very little blossom honey, then it rained all through the heather. It rained almost every day from the end of June to the end of October. There was flooding, no heather honey and the bees stopped raising young bees, which was what made it so very serious. We had very little honey, and what happened with so few young bees is that we had a huge spate of winter losses. The hives that survived winter and were alive in early 1986 were undersized and took much of the year to recover. So, 1986 was just as bad a honey year as 1985 but was caused by a combination of it being another poor summer and the lack of bees early on. It took two to three years to recover from 1985.”

    We cannot do anything about the weather, but what can we do to ensure that our winter losses are low? Here are a few things that might swing the odds in your favour:

    What do bees need?

    A strong colony of healthy bees, including many young bees laid in the autumn (so-called winter bees). Prof David Evans recently posted about a study which showed a strong correlation between colony weight and winter survival. Weak hives are more likely to suffer from isolation starvation. That’s when the cluster of bees cools down to the point where they are unable to move to nearby honey stores. Healthy colonies have low mite counts and show no signs of disease.

    Adequate stores of honey and/or sugar syrup. Bees are experts at regulating the microclimate inside their hive and in their winter cluster. They need fuel to generate heat, and that fuel is honey (or syrup). They also need water, particularly the bees in the centre of the cluster, but that’s quite a complicated process which I will write about another time. Most of the stored honey will be consumed in late winter and spring, as the amount of brood increases, because brood requires tightly controlled temperature (34 – 35 Deg C) and humidity. Bees also break their cluster during warmer spells in winter which can be a problem.

    Randy Oliver says, “in my experience, the least efficient wintering occurs at around 55-60˚F (13-16˚C), when it’s not quite warm enough to forage, yet not quite cold enough to form a tight cluster, but warm enough to establish a brood nest. Much energy is wasted as the colony breaks cluster each day in preparation for possible (and often fruitless) foraging.” He’s in California; my bees will forage at 13 Deg C, but that’s not ideal in the middle of winter when flowers are not about. 

    A young, well-mated queen. Sometimes queens that were mated late in the season, or when the weather was poor, will become drone layers because of a lack of sperm in their spermatheca. Older queens who have been furiously laying for two or more summers may also develop the same condition as their stored sperm runs low. 

    A weather-proof cosy home to live in. They should not have too much empty space; just enough for the bees and the honey. Polystyrene hives are better insulated than wood, but there are pros and cons to both. In my wood hives, I make sure that I have inserted insulating material into the roof, which reduces some heat loss and hopefully prevents condensation forming above the cluster of bees. 

    Stream Time!

    Anyway, having blasted through my allotted 1,000 words, I’ll call it a day. Time to watch some House (Amazon Prime), or Punisher (Netflix) or Dickinson (Apple TV+).

  • Hive Ventilation

    Hive Ventilation

    There are many things in beekeeping which cause furious debate. One part of this, which this demonstrated below, is that different beekeepers deal with different environmental conditions. Here are some extracts from Interviews with Beekeepers on the subject of hive ventilation:

    Murray McGregor (Perthshire, Scotland)

    Steve: Another thing that crops up a lot, mainly between the UK and the USA, is the insulation versus ventilation debate if there is one.

    Murray: I think it’s a debate largely between those who want to be fixed in that way. There is no real doubt that in the Winter insulation is important and ventilation, especially top ventilation, is anathema to the bees. The bees tell you what they want. If you put a board on top of your hive with a vent to allow for top ventilation, the bees gum it up. They don’t want it. We’ve never seen any advantage whatsoever to top ventilation, but a lot of advantage to having insulation. 

    Steve: I think from what I’ve heard from discussions over the pond, the idea is that over winter they will get damp without the top ventilation. Do you use solid or open mesh floors by the way?

    Murray: We’ve got both.

    Steve: I wonder if that makes a difference?

    Murray: I don’t think it makes a huge difference, but I would suggest that mesh floors are slightly superior to solid floors from what I can see. But, to compare what happens in the UK, with a relatively gentle maritime climate, to what happens say in the Midwest USA or the Canadian prairie provinces, with severe cold, icing up of the front of the hives at the bottom and many problems that we don’t encounter – to say in the UK that we know what’s best for somebody in North America would be nonsense. They are working in their environment, and they’ve got the best idea of what works for them. 

      However, like everywhere else, there is a tendency in beekeeping to get bogged down in tradition. So, if traditionally that’s the way it’s always been done, then that’s the way it must always be done. In fact, beekeeping is, or should be, like any other progressive craft; open to modern methods so that changes in technology and materials should be exploited to our advantage. 

    Richard Noel (Brittany, France)

    Richard inspecting a hive
    Richard inspecting a hive

    Richard: I won’t talk a lot about this because for me we don’t have Winters really, we don’t have deep snow on the ground. Mike Palmer, for instance, has three-tiered hives to get the height, and they share their heat because it’s one box next to another, and he has a ventilation hole on top so the bees can breathe. All hives in Canada that are outside have a higher vent hole so that they can fly if they need to. Over here we generally don’t have much snow, not enough to suffocate the bees. I use the Dadant fully ventilated bases that I keep open most of the year. If I get a cold spell and I get time, I’ll close the bases off in early February, to maybe help the early brooding by having less draft. 

      I think ventilation in a colony is a good thing, but I certainly wouldn’t have top ventilations here. The old idea of putting matchsticks on the corners of the crown board, which lots of people on the forums say belongs back with the dinosaurs, was to create an airflow. What you really want to do is make a pocket of air that stays warm, and the minute you make a hole in the top, you get a chimney effect if the base is open too. In our hives in Europe where it’s fairly temperate, we have some snow but not much, you are better off having base ventilation. I believe that a solid base isn’t as beneficial as a ventilated base, but that’s just what I’ve found in my hives. I have used solid bases and find they get dirtier in the winter, but there is a huge debate on it.

    Steve: The thing is people who are making their living from this must have found what works for them…

    Richard: Yes, it’s area dependant. A lot of professionals I know all have the plastic Dadant bases with ventilation in. It’s kind of a standard thing in France. I think it’s great because you can sterilise them easily and you don’t have to paint them. When something rots in a hive, it’s usually the base that goes first, and you get rid of that with one fell swoop by buying plastic. Which is also cheaper. If you want to close them off you can; I need to do that when treating with oxalic acid. 

    Michael Palmer (Vermont, USA)

    Michael: I don’t really know what to think about that because our conditions are so different. We have this continental jet stream which comes down the Hudson Bay and freezes us big time in the winter, so we have that, and you don’t. You have maybe a damper climate, so I don’t know what to think. Personally, in my experience I don’t think you need to insulate the body of the hive. Our bees are going through long winters, sometimes four months with no cleansing flight, temperatures in the 20 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, and the only insulation I have is on the crown board so that respiration moisture won’t condense and drip down on them. 

    Other than that, bees don’t heat the inside of their hive, they heat their cluster. If you put thermocouples, heat sensors, in the hive, you can see that once you get a few inches away from the cluster, it’s almost ambient temperatures. So I wonder how much hive insulation is really going to help. We’ve always felt that if you insulate the hive, and you finally get a nice day, it takes longer for the cluster to heat up and be warm enough for them to be able to take a cleansing flight. That’s how it’s always been presented to us. Some beekeepers in the US have double-walled hives with sawdust inside, and the things sweat and don’t do well.

    Steve: OK

    Michael: I mean look at some of those old-time beekeepers who have had so much success – they have the rattiest old rottenest beehives, full of holes – you’d think that the damn bees would just perish, but they don’t, so I wonder. If you looked in the old literature, like say “the Hive and the Honeybee” or American Bee Journal…somewhere there is a piece by Farrar – he was a professor in somewhere like Wisconsin – and he wanted to show that insulation isn’t necessary. So he took bee boxes and cut out the side panels, so the bees were totally exposed, except they had a roof, and he put a mesh around the body so that predators would not get in and eat the bees. These things went through the winter with temperatures many degrees below zero – they were just heating the cluster.

    Steve: Wow

    Michael: So do bees need insulation? I don’t think so. What they need is a way to vent away the moisture that they are giving off all the time. In this climate, if you don’t have an upper entrance to get rid of extra winter moisture, the inside of the hive is just soaking wet and mouldy. They need a top and a bottom entrance to get a flow of air. If you want moist air to leave out of the top, you need it to be replaced with dry air, from the bottom. I don’t favour entrance blocks in the winter. I leave them wide open, with a hardware mesh with about a half-inch gauge, so the bees can go through but not the mice.

    Steve: OK

    Michael: My hives stay absolutely dry.

    Steve: You have solid floors, though?

    Michael: Solid floors. There’s so much moisture coming out of that top entrance, sometimes on a cold morning, you can see a horizontal icicle sticking out of that entrance, so much moisture is leaving, and it freezes as it comes out. That moisture could be trapped inside the hive.

    Steve: Yeah.

    Michael: But, you have an Atlantic climate, and we have a Continental climate, so it’s just different; it’s hard to compare. When I’m on the UK forum, and somebody says something I have to keep quiet unless they say something specific about how or what we do here in the US – then I correct them if I can.

    Steve: Sure

    Michael: But I can’t just say “you’re wrong” because you have a different climate to us.

  • Keeping High Standards

    Keeping High Standards

    It’s that time of the year when it’s time for me to start to get my hives ready for the winter. I’m currently treating all of them with Apivar, which means that the evil varroa destructor mites are taking a beating. If I had any weak colonies, I would combine them with stronger ones after removing the queen, but I don’t. I have plenty of nucleus colonies going into winter, and they are looking good.

    My bees are bringing in nectar from the Himalayan balsam plants which are commonly in flower at this time. I love this stuff. It saves me a fortune in sugar. There is very little in flower for my bees, so without the balsam, I would already be feeding sugar syrup to them.

    Heavy like lead

    Michael Palmer recently posted a video (below) showing how he feeds sugar syrup to his bees for winter. He is a commercial bee farmer with a lot of hives, so he needs to make sure that he feeds enough sugar, but not too much. Too much sugar is just a waste. If you overfeed a couple of hives in your garden, no big deal, but Mike has 700+ hives. That can add up to a lot of sugar. Commercial bee farmers often weigh their hives to establish how much syrup each one needs.

    I find it amazing how much you can learn just by watching one video. Again, this highlights the difference between hobby beekeepers and those with lots of hives. Commercial beekeepers need to be fast and efficient. They don’t do what they do by accident; everything has been worked out and learned over time. Standardisation is a significant factor in being successful as the scale of your operation grows.

    Mike talks about “hefting” beehives, which means lifting them by one side to feel the weight. As he has learned, not only would this be extremely tiring to do on hundreds of hives, but as fatigue sets in your judgement of what is heavy will become impaired. For those with a couple of hives, they need to feel “heavy like lead,” Mike says.

    Fast and Efficient

    One thing that strikes me when viewing the video is how much easier life is when you use standard equipment. If all of your hive stands, boxes and lids are the same, it will be easier to weigh them. What’s more, there will be less mathematics to do because every piece of similar equipment will weigh the same. I have a long way to go! My apiaries look like a random assortment of all sorts of different shapes, sizes and weights. As I grow my hive numbers, I need to keep this in mind.

    The idea of standardisation does not just apply to beehives. Many bee farmers perform various tasks to try to ensure that the bees in each apiary are at a similar stage to each other. In general, it is easier and quicker to manage an apiary if all of the colonies are at the same stage of development and similar size. If one hive looks like swarming, they probably all are. The same applies to feeding or adding supers, and so on. David Kemp once told me how the behaviour of bees headed by sister queens at Buckfast, back in the day, were all similar.

    Trip to the Heather

    Murray McGregor, who I interviewed for my book back in November 2017, was on the radio recently (BBC Radio 4, On Your Farm). It’s well worth a listen, in my opinion. It mainly concentrates on moving hives to gather the annual heather honey crop from the glens and slopes in Deeside, near Balmoral. Murray now has 4,000 colonies which is vast by UK standards, and by listening to this piece, we can start to understand the level of organisation needed at this scale.

    Extracting Honey

    While I’m providing links to content made by the beekeepers in my book, Richard Noel has an excellent video showing his honey extraction set up.

    That extraction line, which Richard says is far from the best, still represents a considerable capital investment for a non-commercial operation. I reckon it looks like it costs £20,000+ to get something like Richard’s set up, and then you have to consider the premises, the barrels, the means to move boxes and barrels around and the space to store them.

    My extracting set up is a far more modest affair, although each year I buy something to add to it. This year I upgraded my extractor, and it made life so much easier. The old extractor held four frames and had to be cranked by hand, or flipper in my case. The new one holds 30 frames and has an electric motor to take the strain. I had a decent honey crop; about 560lbs for the year. At one point it looked like we might have a bumper year like last year, but it was not to be. I’m hoping to at least double it next season as many of my nucs will become production colonies. It’s good to dream!

  • Mistakes!

    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.

  • The Voice of Michael Palmer

    The Voice of Michael Palmer

    Sorry about the audio quality on this clip; somebody once asked if I used a potato as a recording device! I don’t, but I actually think my iphone does it better than my portable digital recorder, which is what I used for this. Anyway, I still think it’s worth listening to this nine minute audio clip from my interview with Mike Palmer in July 2017. He talks a little about the business side of being a bee farmer in Vermont, USA. The voice of Michael Palmer:

    Rough Transcript:

    Steve: What about the split of your revenue? Is it mostly honey, queens & nucs?

    Michael: Yes. When we make a honey crop the revenue from that is huge, and much bigger than the rest. For instance in the last two years I averaged 30 tons. That’s a huge amount of money.

    Steve: Yes

    Michael: But you don’t make a big honey crop every year. I forget exactly what it is, but I used to have to get a 40 pound crop per production colony to pay my bills. That was before I sold nucs & queens. Now I sell enough nucs & queens to pay my labour bill, which is huge, it’s for sure the largest single cost I have. So, having my help covered, whether I make a honey crop or not, has really changed things.

    Steve: Great

    Michael: Now I actually have money left at the end of the year. Sometimes a lot of money. Last year I bought a new truck, to lower my tax burden and I needed a new truck; my old truck was sixteen years old. It’s really changed everything. Diversification of your income is really important. If you look at any farming, say dairy, it’s the same thing. Dairy farmers selling to the packer, or bulk purchaser – they’re getting a terrible price, in some years they make less than it costs to produce. But if they are able to change that milk into a finished product, a value added product, they’re going to be ahead, and it helps to insulate against those bad years.

    Steve: Of the nucs and queens, it seems to me that queens would be more profitable, because it’s one insect, a small package in the post, is that right?

    Michael: But the amount of time involved in raising those queens, from cell builder set ups and grafting is huge. I spend every day from the first week in May until the first week in August raising queens, running cell builders and mating queens – it’s a huge amount of labour.

    Making nucleus colonies, provided I have the queen…I can make up 50 nucs in a day, and put the queens in. Then ten days later I have to check on the queen, see that she’s laying, and replace her if not. The amount of actual hands on time with making nucleus colonies is pretty small.

    Steve: Whereas the queens are a big deal

    Michael: Exactly. So if I sell 175 nucleus colonies for $200, which is $35,000 and I sell 800 queens like I did last year, at $30 each, it’s less money [$24,000] but more time. But they fit together because I need to raise queens to make nucleus colonies, so all I’m doing is raising extra queens to sell, and I always have spare queens on hand.

    Steve: Who buys the nucs, is it mostly beginners?

    Michael: I would say so, beginners, back yard beekeepers, part timers…sometimes bee clubs – they might buy 20 at a time. I did at one time sell 100 nucs at a time to a company for a few years, until I realised how much they were charging on the resale. They were making more money than me, and I was doing all the work, so I stopped.

    Steve: That reminds me of something I was going to ask you, about pricing. Some people are more willing that others to raise prices and you seem a bit reticent to, I don’t know, push it.

    Michael: I think my prices have traditionally been a bit low.

    Steve: Considering that your product is probably a bit better than most…

    Michael: I decided this year to raise my prices up to what other people are getting, and they didn’t even blink. I’m hoping that price transfers into my production hives when I get ready to sell them. If a nucleus colony goes for $200 should not a production colony go for $300? I would think so, with all the ancillary equipment, and supers and so on. Can I get that? I don’t know.

    Steve: I hope you’re not planning on that anytime soon

    Michael: No, not soon.

    Steve: One day.

    Michael: Yeah. It really depends on how much help I can get over the next few years, whether I cut back a little bit. One of my helpers is thinking about taking a school teaching job and the other is talking about going back to school to get a masters degree…if I have to go back to the drug addicts again…I don’t really want to go back to that again.

    Steve: No

    Michael: These last few years have been so nice, with good help, and I don’t want to go back. So if it comes to that, I can sell off my New York State bees. Some of them are an hour and a half away. I have 450 hives or so over there. I could sell those and focus on my Vermont bees, but still do my nucleus colonies and my queen bees.

    Steve: In a way that’s a little pension fund sat over there in NYS.

    Michael: Yes it is. That’s why I’d like to get as much as I can. We don’t get a pension.

    Steve: Do you ever compare notes with beekeepers in other countries to see how it differs?

    Michael: Yes. Our friends in New Zealand, they are just flabbergasted that we don’t get a pension. I get no government pension after working as a farmer for my whole life. The only thing I have is the sale of my bees. I hope I don’t stay in it one year too long, and have a big catastrophe or something right when I’m getting ready to get out of it.

    Steve: Yeah

    Michael: Like a big varroa crash, or a new disease comes along. We don’t have that great an inspection program, so what would happen if a beginner started keeping bees in used equipment by my breeding station?

    Steve: It could completely ruin you

    Michael: If they got foul brood into my mating nucs…I don’t know if I’d ever rebuild it again. So yeah, I’m concerned about that quite a lot.

    Steve: Can you get insurance for that?

    Michael: No. 

    I don’t use antibiotics and haven’t for twenty years. I used to use them, Americans are famous for using them; I used to dust the inside of the hive to keep foul brood away. I haven’t done that for years and years, and I haven’t seen any foul brood in my hives.

  • Bee Boles and Blarney

    Bee Boles and Blarney

    Last week I hopped over the Irish Sea for a short stay in the ancestral homeland. I had volunteered to be Mike and Lesley Palmer’s driver for a few days. Mike had finished his bee talks in Cork and was spending some time in County Clare before moving up to Northern Ireland to continue his speaking tour. It rained lots, and the sea crossing was a little rough, but only a little; those big Stena Line ferries are very stable.

    Tough Times in Tipperary

    Before I met up with the Palmers in Ennis, which is a delightful town, I stopped off in Toomevara and Nenagh in North Tipperary, where my family comes from on my father’s side. Presumably, the good people of Ireland have come to terms with all of the foreigners arriving to discover their roots. The Great Famine of 1845 to 1849 was a time when vast numbers of Irish men and women either died or emigrated. The population fell by 25% at that time, and a million souls lost their lives prematurely. My father had cousins in Canada, and I have discovered a relative in Australia. My lot came to Southampton, England, which is where both my grandfather and father were born.

    I spent some hours in Nenagh visiting graveyards and photographing Donohoe headstones. A walrus must have a hobby! The funny thing is that all human life can ultimately be traced to Africa if you go back far enough. Nationality is not just about where you draw a line on a map, it’s also about a period in time. Sixty thousand years ago we were all Africans. I wonder what the racists make of that? Like many who have tried before me, including my father, I find it impossible to trace my Irish roots further back than the 19th Century. As more people submit DNA samples, the chances improve of making links with close genetic relatives. In the end, it isn’t especially important.

    Three bee boles

    Mike Palmer and Bee Boles
    Mike Palmer and Bee Boles

    Anyway, I must steer this gently towards bees, what with it being a beekeeping blog. Michael Palmer is interested in bee boles ; recesses in old South facing garden walls, used to hold skeps of bees. A skep is what we kept bees in before modern hives. We travelled to the impressive Dromoland Castle and met Dorothy the gardener who was delighted to show us the bee boles. They are over 500 years old. She also rummaged in a storeroom and emerged with a giant wooden beehive dating back to the early 1900s, so we had a good look at that. It was much larger than most modern hives, similar in size to a Dadant hive, with double walls, a gabled roof and a curious patch of open mesh floor. People who think that mesh floors are a new idea should think again.

    Old hive with partial mesh floor
    Old hive with partial mesh floor

    Dorothy told us that she had worked there for thirty years. The gardens are looking good, particularly the rows of pear trees trained into cordons. She said that fifteen years ago she was visited by George and Laura Bush. The First Lady was a keen gardener.

    After that, I drove to Bunratty Castle to explore the folk village which I found very interesting. It’s touristy, even on a rainy day in March, but worth a visit. To walk around old homes and see the furniture and decor that my great grandparents would find familiar was a treat. I purchased a beautiful blanket from Kerry Woollen Mills to take home to Mrs Walrus, who has Mediterranean blood and feels the cold.

    Getting ready for April

    I’m back in Manchester and have been dividing my time between writing my book, putting wax foundation into frames, building nuc boxes and trying to defeat the laws of physics by waterproofing my shed roof. This is a dangerous time for honeybees; many colonies starve to death in March, so I have made sure that I have fondant for those that need it. In a few weeks, with a bit of luck, the weather will be mild, the dandelions in flower and bees will be building up rapidly.