The Walrus and the Honey Bee

Steve Donohoe, Bestselling Beekeeping Author

Tag: Mike Palmer

Amazing Nucleus Colonies

As many say in the beekeeping world, ask ten people about something, and you’ll get eleven different answers. I don’t think that’s entirely true, but beekeeping is undoubtedly a ‘broad church.’ A common way to start beekeeping in the UK is to buy a nucleus colony; a small but perfectly formed colony of bees in a small box. Nucs comprise full-sized frames, all drawn out, with bees, brood and stores. All you have to do is drop the frames into a beehive, add further frames of comb or foundation, and away you go.

Nice Package

As I understand it, in the States, people tend to favour package bees over nucs. The absence of frames and brood may bring down the cost, and reduce disease risk to some extent, but problems can arise because it is not a balanced colony. A package of bees is more like a swarm, but in some cases, the proportion of nurse bees may be much lower than in swarms. Package bees also have the advantage of working with all shapes and sizes of beehives; shake them in and feed. Mike Palmer once told me that adding a frame of emerging brood a week or two later helps the colony by introducing nurse bees, which may deter their attempt to supersede the queen.

Mrs Walrus

As I have previously described, when Mrs Walrus was editing my book, she realised the income potential of selling nucs and wasted no time in strongly suggesting that I “up my game”. I was considering selling them anyway and got right to it. The nucs I make for sale are on National frames whereas the ones for me are on my prefered Langstroths. Luckily feedback from customers was excellent. I always feel a little sad about letting a nuc go. There is a conflict between keeping the best queens for myself and selling them on; I can hardly sell people poor queens, that would be silly.

Randy Oliver making nucs

The main point of nucs, however, is not to sell them to other beekeepers. I think they are the best way to take mated queens through the winter, so that should I need to replace losses I have them ready to go. They are like a comfort blanket; if I have plenty of nucs on the go, I know I have access to queens, bees and brood at any time.

Recently I spoke to some commercial beekeepers about how they make up nucs. I was primarily interested in ‘getting the biggest bang for my buck’ – making strong nucs from few resources. In the right conditions, it’s incredible how much you make from so little. Here’s what they said:

Michael Palmer

Made earlier in the season, fewer resources are needed. We begin about June 15. At that time, we’re into the main honey flow. We make up a four-frame nuc with two frames of brood (one sealed and one sealed/open), one frame of honey, enough bees to cover those three, plus one frame of foundation. These earlier made nucs will draw foundation in a second story and probably require a third story before the end of July, in preparation for the goldenrod flow.

After the beginning of July, I make them with three frames of brood. This is because our main flow ends mid-July and by the time they are strong enough to draw foundation the flow is finished…so we make them a bit stronger…to imitate how they would look if made earlier.

Many will need a third story, as I said, to stop swarming. The third is mostly comb, and the box goes in between the first two.

Murray McGregor

It depends on the type of bee and the nectar flows. What we do in our area with our bees is:

Up to end June Make up in a poly nuc one bar of sealed brood, one of honey, bees to cover those two frames, foundation frames to fill the box. Feed syrup until the foundation is drawn. After one week return to kill EVERY queen cell, then introduce a mated queen. We get over 90% acceptance. Three weeks after making up the nuc you have 4-5 frames of bees. They can be split into 3 nucs after 4 weeks, and this can continue so from one bar of brood you can end up with nine nucs of bees for winter!

End June to End August As above but start with 2 bars of brood.

Sept/October We use three bars of brood and covered with bees from three different colonies. They get confused and don’t fight. Bees from just two colonies will fight. Introduce the mated queen straight away.

Peter Little

Early on we make nucs up with a frame of brood, a frame of honey and three frames of foundation plus bees. Add a mated queen in a cage and feed 3 litres of syrup. They expand quickly and need to be split in two or three weeks.

The nucs that we sell need to be made up stronger. We use two frames of brood and three of foundation, plus 1 Kg of bees shaken from supers of various hives. They go into a box with a mated queen and 3 litres of syrup; in two to three weeks they are ready to sell. The advantage of using bees shaken from supers (above a queen excluder) is that there is no chance of transferring the queen or drones from the donor hives.

As part of swarm control and general management to keep hives of equal size, we remove a frame of brood from many hives each week. That brood can be used to make up nucs.

So, there you have it. Make nucs! It’s easy-peasy and well worth it.

Mike Palmer, French Hill Apiaries, St Albans, Vermont

Murray McGregor, Denrosa Apiaries, Coupar Angus, Scotland

Peter Little, Exmoor Bees & Beehives, Somerset, England

1st December 2020
Better Bees

Humans (and walruses) are part of the natural world. We are animals. Sometimes we like to set ourselves aside from nature as if we are not part of it, but this is wrong. However, there is no denying the powerful and often damaging impact that homo sapiens have made upon our planet and its inhabitants. Agent Smith in The Matrix convincingly described humans as a virus.

The Rise of Farming

Thousands of years ago, many humans changed from being hunter-gatherers to farmers. This enabled populations to grow and new diseases to flourish. We “domesticated” animals because they had value, such as producing milk, eggs, wool, leather, meat, wax and honey. Yes, the honeybee has been farmed by people for a very long time. Beekeepers are farmers of bees. Whether it’s on a large scale selling honey in bulk to wholesalers or hobbyists with a couple of hives, we are intervening in the lives of another species.

One consequence of farming has been the modification of animals through selective breeding programs. No doctorate in genetic science was required. Farmers bred from their best stock, and over the years the nature of that stock changed. Actually, the same happened with agricultural crops and flowers for the garden. The yields of plants such as rice and wheat have been boosted by cultivation and breeding. This has been necessary because of the enormous population growth of humanity. Genetic modification has been a recent phenomenon.

Selective Breeding

My point is that farming and selective breeding have been going on for millennia. Breeding better bees is trickier than improving cattle because honeybee queens mate on the wing with multiple drones from multiple colonies. You, the beekeeper, can control which queens you choose to breed from. Even if you have no control of the drones, over time selectively raising daughter queens from your best stock will push the nature of your bees in a particular direction.

What is a better bee? It depends on what you want. Some traits are inherited and can, therefore, be magnified or reduced through selection. Personally, I’m not a fan of bees that run all over the combs and drip off at the corners. Nor do I like bees that attack me at every opportunity and follow me around, waiting for the chance to strike. Also, being of slothful disposition, I prefer my bees to stay in their hive rather than swarm off to pastures new. Swarm control can be hard work and the bees that don’t swarm produce more honey in my experience.

Richard Noel with a few queen cells

Swarmy Bees

There was an interesting exchange on the Bee-L forum about “swarmy bees.” Peter Armitage wrote:

The matter of so-called “swarmy” bees came up in conversation with one of my beek buddies the other day when I mentioned to him that one of our pioneer nuc suppliers/breeders had imported eggs from Ontario to deal with increased swarming in her stock. Her stock had been built by her father, who had made too many nucs with swarm cells for too many years, she said. Remember that we’ve had importation restrictions here on the Island of Newfoundland since 1985 and therefore no free movement of genetics here for 35 years.

My buddy said, “I don’t like that term ‘swarmy’. It’s their natural reproductive method. Talking about ‘swarmy bees’ is like talking about ‘hoppy rabbits’.”

And yet, in popular musings among beekeepers, you will often hear admonitions and cautions related to building stock from swarms or swarm cells. Our beekeeping literature points to excessive swarming as a heritable trait that can be bred out of the stock.

Making Increase

Hobby beekeepers often don’t want to get too deep into raising queens using cell builders and grafting. This is fair enough. They wait until a colony makes swarm cells, then they use those cells to produce more colonies. One swarm cell goes into a nuc, along with frames of bees, brood and stores. A month later the queen is mated and the nuc can be made ready for the winter to come.

Wild honeybees will swarm frequently, but many of those swarms will die. A balance must be struck for the species to survive. Colonies that swarm too much become weak and cannot make it through winter, and if their swarms are weak and die also, then that’s the end of those bees. We manage our domesticated honeybees in order to minimise loss of swarms. We use artificial swarm techniques to make new colonies from swarm cells so that they don’t fly off. Beekeepers are inadvertently exaggerating the swarming tendency but not allowing the swarms to fly off and potentially die. This is not good, in my opinion.

My Solution

My solution is to raise queens by grafting the larvae from hives that have not shown a willingness to make queen cells. Some bees, if given space at the right time, will not entertain the idea of swarming. They build big colonies and make lots of honey. Other bees don’t seem to care about the space; they are going to swarm anyway. If I just made new colonies from swarm cells, I’m pushing my bees in the opposite direction to the way I want them to go. At this time of the year, I change the queens in my hives that swarmed. The new queen is one that I made from stock that I like. If I don’t do this, next spring they’ll be producing swarm cells and on and on it goes.

No Science Degree Required

Dr Richard Cryberg wrote about how little we really know in terms of the parts of the DNA responsible for specific traits. That has not stopped selective breeding being a success:

Behavioural stuff is always at least in part genetic in every critter. My Dad had a registered Holstein dairy cow named King, who had a dominant aggression gene. Most dairy cattle are nearly pets; they are so docile. King was not a pet. She was sneaky mean. About half of her daughters had this same behaviour. One granddaughter also had this behaviour, and at that point, Dad sold every cow he owned with King’s blood. We never had another cow like her at all. It had to be genetic.

Homing Pigeons, Bees, Whatever

Pigeons have been selected for homing or to not home. A decent racing homer will come home from 500 miles the same day of release. A roller will not come home from one mile away way over 90% of the time. Clearly, homing is genetic, yet we do not know of a single gene in pigeons that results in homing or lack of homing.

There is the same anecdotal evidence that swarming in bees is inherited.  If you select for non-swarming, you can get far less swarming. If you propagate from swarm cells long enough, you will get bees you can not keep out of the trees. I have had such bees and know the history of them going back 40 years. For that whole time, they were propagated by catching the owners own swarms and mainly by starting new colonies from swarm cells. Randy Oliver has commented he found low swarming fairly easy to select in his own bees.

Honey Production

We know of other things in bees that must be genetic, based on the same type of information. Clear back in the early 1930s the U of Minn did experiments on breeding for honey production.  They documented an average colony honey production improvement that was remarkable over a few years simply by killing queens from poor producers and replacing them with queens raised from good producers. This work was done with a rather small number of colonies — only about 35 or 40 as I recall. No new blood was brought in during the experiment, other than perhaps wandering drones. This work was reported in Bee Culture back in the 1940s and in “The ABC” book at least until the early 1970s. Yet, we still do not know of one single gene that is involved in better honey production.

If you want better bees, however you define “better,” you need to get selective, or buy queens from a beekeeper who is.

4th August 2020
Pragmatism or Xenophobia?

Beekeeping is Local

Maybe I am naive or just positive and optimistic, but I’m sure that to many people I have some dangerously liberal ideas. For a start, I deliberately travelled all over the place to meet experienced bee farmers to see what I could learn. Then I wrote a book about the inspirational people I met, and I believe that lots of people will buy it and read it. How silly is that?! It should be in print before the end of this year…hopefully.

I often hear the mantra, “beekeeping is local,” and I completely agree. The combination of climate, micro-climates and available forage by month are all variables which change from area to area. There can be enormous differences in how honey bee colonies are doing, even if they are only a few miles apart. One crucial lesson that we learn on our beekeeping journey is to respond to what is happening in our hives. Even bees in the same apiary can need different treatment depending on what they are up to.

Nevertheless, I hear from beekeepers who have decided that any information or point of view from outside their area is more likely to be harmful than of use. Bah humbug! I understand that the timings of beekeeping activities will vary considerably, but surely I can learn something from somebody who has kept bees for a living for fifty years? Isn’t the knowledge and experience of a successful bee farmer in the USA or Australasia or Central Europe of value to all beekeepers everywhere?

Old Curmudgeons

Many beekeepers are middle-aged or older, so perhaps one might expect them to be set in their ways. (This EU report contains the data).
That would be wrong; I’m in my mid-fifties and try to stay open-minded. Very experienced beekeepers that I interviewed for my book remain willing to learn, to adapt, to do whatever it takes to improve.

EU Report on Beekeeper Ages

Do we ignore Tom Seeley because he didn’t study bees in the UK? What about Sue Coby on instrumental insemination? Randy Oliver has spent much of his life studying bee diseases and varroa mites; is it all irrelevant to me? After all, he’s in Grass Valley, CA and I’m in Cheshire, UK.

Raising Queens

Many successful beekeepers raise queens because it gives them more control over their bees. When you see the difference between the temperament, honey production and disease resistance of different colonies it seems evident that we should want good queens in our hives. Is queen rearing that different between the USA and the UK?! I think not.

One of my Breeder Queens

Having spoken to David Kemp about the queen breeding that went on at Buckfast Abbey in the 1960s, I’m sure that we can learn lessons from the past as well as from abroad. Mike Palmer talks about how he turbocharged his beekeeping operation by making two changes; raising queens and over-wintering nucleus colonies. The lessons were there in the past for those prepared to look. I challenge anyone to learn nothing from the likes of Mike Palmer, Randy Oliver and Ray Olivarez from the USA. I learned plenty and look forward to sharing their stories.

Richard Noel in Brittany, France is an up and coming commercial bee farmer with a popular youtube channel. He says that it was a visit to Mike Palmer in Vermont that convinced him to “go for it” with his bees. I visited him to learn about somebody in the rapid growth phase of his business, and also to find out about Asian hornets. It was worth it.

Lessons from Life Stories

Regarding stories, they are the most treasured things in my book. Beekeeping is not all about techniques and tips and tricks. I loved hearing about how people got started, about the triumphs and disasters along the way. I appeal to all beekeepers everywhere to open their hearts and their minds to the ideas and experiences of good beekeepers wherever they may be. We need to keep bees based on what we see in our hives and our local conditions, but we should not ignore the wisdom of the past nor the wisdom from over the pond or down under.

20th August 2019
Visit to French Hill Apiaries

I noticed that Vermont beekeeper Mike Palmer has now got a website, so here are some notes from my visit to meet him 18 months ago:

The Journey to America

I stayed with Mike and Lesley Palmer for a few days in July 2017. My daughter Clíona, who is also my beekeeping assistant, was happy to tag along for my trans Atlantic adventure, and I was grateful to have her company. Long distance travel is not my favourite thing, particularly the endless waiting around at airports, so I always try to bring somebody along. We flew from Manchester (UK) to Atlanta and then on to Burlington in Vermont.

Atlanta is a huge airport. The soft Southern voice over the tannoy was matched by the friendly smiles and the Georgia accents of the shop assistants and waiters. “I love your accent, are you British?” Clíona was asked as she purchased a rather fetching garment with “Atlanta” emblazoned across the front. We managed to resist the huge bags of Reese’s peanut butter cups, tempting though they were, and headed to a Chinese restaurant called P.F.Changs for a delicious chicken fried rice meal. The service was friendly, helpful and prompt, and the food was great. It felt right to be in America.

I had never met Mike Palmer but as we came through the arrivals lounge at Burlington he was easy to spot with his ponytail and spectacles, which I recognised from pictures and videos on the internet. Just think about how incredibly generous he was being; he had not only agreed to be interviewed in the middle of the busy beekeeping season, but he drove for an hour to meet us at Burlington airport on a Sunday night and insisted that we stayed with him at his family home. I had warned him that he might regret that decision because there are rumours that I snore. Loudly, apparently. He rather typically replied, “I said you can stay at my house, not sleep with me!”

Summer in St Albans

Mike’s house is at French Hill Apiary on the edge of St Albans in a beautiful forest area. There are cedar tiles on the sides of the house with a slate tiled roof and a red brick chimney pointing skywards from the centre. We were welcomed by a large white wolf like creature which turned out to be his pet Maremma sheepdog, called Wilson. It took a few days for Wilson to get used to the strange invaders from the UK, helped by our realisation that the couch was strictly for use by dogs, not humans. There were cats too, and they were none to pleased at being moved to the floor from their cosy chairs, but they clearly have a comfortable life and accepted the inconvenience as a small price to pay for the warmth and shelter on offer.

One thing I noticed very quickly, as an avid tea drinker, was the absence of an electric kettle. They did have tea but clearly coffee is the drink of choice in the Palmer home and there is usually a jug of hot coffee on hand. There was a very large mason jar of Mike’s honey to the side of the coffee machine which I quickly sampled. It was good honey as expected; proper honey from proper beekeepers is always good. I placed the tea bags, which I had brought with me from England as is my custom wherever I travel, next to the honey. As the song says, “wherever I lay my tea bags, that’s my home,” or some such thing.

Sleep came easily whilst I stayed in Vermont. Mike, in common with all farmers, is an early riser and, weather permitting, he likes to be out working by 6:30am. I tried to keep up but I am a night owl so could usually only manage about 8am. It was two or three days before I actually sat down to formerly interview Mike, because a combination of jet lag and disorientation meant that I did not trust myself to ask questions coherently. As it turned out, like every other beekeeper I have ever met, Mike could talk for hours about bees with very little prompting from me.

Queens on the coffee table

Upon waking and staggering downstairs to munch on some muesli and gulp down some tea I was amazed to see how many queen cages were lined up on the coffee table, each emitting loud buzzing sounds periodically. These were queens with attendant workers that were waiting to head colonies. As the days passed the number of buzzing boxes decreased, until on the day I departed for home I think just a couple remained.

That first morning Mike drove us to his cell builder apiary in his enormous RAM 3500 pick up truck. Everybody in the area seems to have a pick up truck and Mike’s is a particularly fine example. The top of the tyres are at about waist level. The apiary is next to a corn field hidden amongst trees. There are a lot of trees in Vermont. It is home to several giant cell builder colonies, seven or eight boxes tall, plus a great many nucleus colonies stacked up in their colourfully painted four frame pine boxes. The nucleus colonies were five boxes tall and in groups of two, so two colonies were side by side with a shared roof and entrances pointing opposite ways. They thrive in this configuration, each colony’s warmth being shared with its neighbour.

Out in the Nuc yard

The mission for the day was re-queening the nucs. Actually, my mission was to take photographs and ask lots of questions, but Mike’s was re-queening. He raises his own exceedingly good queens, nice big fat beauties, generally quite dark in colour, and at this time of year he will carry out regicide in the woods of Vermont, but only where necessary. Any queen that is not performing will be killed and replaced. He checks the amount of brood and the brood pattern as part of the process of determining whether Her Majesty will be granted a stay of execution.

Mike uses shorthand notes written on duct tape which is stuck on each hive’s roof. It’s yet another use of duct tape in beekeeping (there are so many). I soon got the hang of his notes and was able to read the history of the colony by reading them. “WDQ” is short for “White Dot Queen” which in this case meant a queen raised in 2015, so the note ”KWDQ” meant “killed White Dot Queen”. Generally the notes show whether brood or honey frames were added or removed, for example “-2FB” (minus two frames of brood), when new boxes or frames of foundation were added, changes to the queen and, rarely, comments on temper. A comment is not needed for good temper!

16th January 2019
At Least I’m not Starved of Metaphors

Gosh, I’ve been running around like a blue-arsed fly, a headless chicken, a striped ass ape…[insert favourite metaphor here]…which is not how your average walrus likes to be. We are sedentary creatures. We like to muse, and ponder, and pontificate; the occasional stretch is delicious, but all this frantic activity has unbalanced me. It has also slowed down my blog posting which just won’t do; I need the discipline of regular posts to keep the old writing muscles in shape. I have set out the steps that I must take to produce a book of wonder that will grab the beekeeping world by storm, and the first of these steps is regular blogging. I have slapped both flippers in admonishment and remade my vow to keep this ship sailing, keep this show on the road, keep the flag flying…you get the picture.

Sometimes life throws stuff at you and you just have to go with it, accept that the universe does not bend to your will, and keep the faith that better times are ahead. We walruses do not visit churches or mosques or synagogues, for obvious reasons; our place of worship is out on the high seas, where Nature herself rules unchallenged, sometimes gentle and still, other times raging and brutal.

This is my church

There are cycles to life and to everything, just as there are cycles charging around the streets of Amsterdam at this very moment, ridden by people in a hurry to mow down the unwary tourist who dares to step out from the pedestrian area into the cycle lane. How dare they? I’ve often wondered why cyclists evolved from ordinary people peddling down the road to these lycra clad, multicoloured, shaven legged superheroes that shout at car drivers and pedestrians in equal measure…but I digress. Come to think of it, this whole piece so far is one big digression, because I haven’t mentioned bees yet. Hah! I have now.

Here in the UK we are just about prepared to admit that Spring might be here or will be along shortly, and beekeepers across the land are waking from their slumber, flexing the old hive tool muscles, and preparing to have a peek at their bees. The first question for novice beekeepers is, “Have I still got bees? Am I even still a beekeeper?” The Winter months are a test for the bees and their keepers, and sadly at this time of the year we discover that things don’t necessarily always go to plan, and some of our colonies will probably have perished.

Starvation is the usual way that colonies die over Winter and into Spring. When you visit the apiary and see bees flying from most of the hives, but one or two are quiet, the suspicion arises that all may not be well within. The thing about starvation is that it doesn’t just happen because the beekeeper failed to leave enough food for them (in frames of honey and pollen). That can happen and can be remedied by adding sugar to the bees in the form of fondant or “winter patties” which are placed directly above the clustering bees. There is also this thing called “isolation starvation” which happens because, in cold weather, the bees are tightly clustered and cannot move far, so even if there is food a few inches away they may not get to it and will die.

I have lost bees to both types of starvation, and it’s a horribly sad, guilty feeling finding them dead in the Spring. Sometimes I suppose it may be Nature’s way of removing poor bees from the genetic pool, but mostly I reckon it’s down to the beekeeper. When you have many colonies a few losses, sad though they are, become just another job to sort out, but for hobby beekeepers with a handful of hives, it can be a demoralising setback.

From my experience, I believe that isolation starvation is often caused by taking colonies into Winter that are just too small. Most beekeepers know about feeding bees in the Autumn, after taking their honey, although they may not be sure just how much stored food the bees will need. There are plenty of books explaining this, but I suspect few hobby beekeepers weigh their hives to be sure they have enough stores.

Bees clustered for winter in Scotland

A large colony will form a large cluster when the weather gets cold so that it will be covering plenty of frames of honey. It will also be able to generate a lot of heat (see my post on heater bees) which will enable more movement of the cluster around the hive, and it will be less tightly clustered and more able to reach out to honey that is a few inches away. A small colony may just make it through a mild Winter, but bees continue to die off over time and eventually, if the weather turns icy, they will bunch up tightly and not be able to move. Even if they have plenty of honey in the hive, they won’t get to it. If there is brood in the colony, which is likely to be the case from February onwards in my area, the cluster of bees will not leave it to chill. It takes a certain number of bees to cover the brood to keep it warm, so if the number of bees is low, they may just sit there over the brood and not find food. This is why one of the tasks of Autumn is to combine weaker colonies because one strong colony will do much better at surviving Winter than two weak ones.

There is a difference in behaviour of clustering bees depending on the beehive they are living in and the way they are treated. Mike Palmer keeps bees in wooden boxes, as do most beekeepers across the world, but his nucleus colonies are huddled together for warmth and wrapped. He found that when two boxes of bees are brought together the cluster forms at the side walls where they touch. The heat of one colony is used by its neighbour and vice versa. They form one large cluster with half in one hive and a half in the other, so each side has a hemisphere of bees which together makes a ball. It was a discovery for him, but he later found out that it had been described in books from over a century ago. This undoubtedly helps with survival, but it also means that the frames with honey and pollen need to be on the side of the box nearest to where the two hives touch. Peter Little keeps his overwintering queens in a box split into four small colonies above a large production colony so that the warmth rising off the colony below keeps the smaller ones warm.

Polystyrene Nucleus Hives

I have noticed something peculiar in polystyrene brood boxes. In a wooden brood box the bees cluster and form their brood nest in the centre, but in a poly hive the walls seem to be the warmest place, so there is a tendency for them to cluster against a hive wall, especially if it is a small colony in a big box. From what I have heard little colonies can be overwintered in small poly nucleus boxes far more successfully than in wooden boxes, but I don’t have any hard evidence for this. I have seen hundreds of Murray McGregor’s overwintering nucleus colonies, all lined up in their painted five or six frame poly boxes, and he assures me that they do measurably better in his climate in polystyrene than in wood. He should know. It is undoubtedly the case that the bees need to be cosy in their hive, so a smaller colony needs a smaller hive. They do not benefit from having acres of vacant space around them.

Right then, I have now fulfilled my duty by talking about bees. I think that the whole business of overwintering bees and getting a good start in the Spring is one of the essential parts of beekeeping, along with swarming, managing varroa mites, and identifying and dealing with diseases. It’s not an easy or a cheap hobby, but it is rewarding, not just in honey but in time spent as part of Natures ever changing cycles.

14th March 2018
The Eternal Question

How to prevent swarming?

I previously wrote about some potential factors involved in the swarming of honey bees and why swarm prevention and control are so important for the beekeeper. The idea that we can prevent swarms is probably misguided; it is after all what bees are programmed to do, it is how they reproduce, but we must nevertheless educate ourselves and do what little we can in this regard.

The people who are most qualified to advise on swarming, or any other honey bee management topic, are the commercial honey farmers who manage thousands of colonies and rely upon their efforts to earn their living from it. This is why I will be quoting from such people extensively here – they have lived and breathed a life with bees and I would rather take heed of their words than those of a keen hobbyist or a well read scholar.

“If I were to meet a man perfect in the entire science and art of bee-keeping, and were allowed from him an answer to just one question, I would ask for the best and easiest way to prevent swarming.” C.C.Miller, 50 years among the bees

I referred in my last post to a study in New Zealand by I.W. Forster which concluded:

“Four methods of hive manipulation commonly used for swarm prevention failed to reduce its incidence. Colonies with first-year spring-reared queens made no attempt to swarm. The incidence of swarm preparation was less for colonies with first-year autumn-raised queens than for those with second-year queens.”

I have read of beekeepers who have older queens and no swarming issues, but I think that is the exception rather than the rule. We know that there is a strong genetic factor associated with the propensity to swarm so these older “non-swarmy” queens are little treasures to breed from, I would suggest, assuming they have healthy and productive colonies.

Raising Queens at Buckfast late 1960’s

My favourite beekeeping writer is R.O.B Manley, who was the first person in England to manage 1,000 colonies, and my favourite book of his is “Honey Farming” published in 1946. I know that things have changed since then, particularly the arrival of oilseed rape and varroa mites, but honey bees are still honey bees, and swarming still happens. Here is something to ponder from that wonderful book:

“I have no doubt myself that the best hope of reducing the incidence of swarming lies in breeding from non-swarming strains, strains that is, that show much less addiction to swarming than is the case with the average colonies. I believe that if we systematically breed from queens and drones of strains that have swarmed little, and have produced much honey, and have not suffered from disease, we shall in that way lay the foundation of successful honey production.”

“…after a time, unless we are careful how we breed our stock, strains are liable to arise that have the swarming tendency too highly developed, especially as we ourselves have a propensity to breed for profligacy, sometimes without paying enough regard to other traits, and that is why I, basing my opinion upon personal observation of many thousands of colonies, have come to the conclusion that the character of the bees themselves is the most important of all stimuli that set in motion the swarming instinct.”

Perhaps, then, it is no coincidence that successful honey farmers tend to have their own successful queen rearing operations.

More sage words from Manley on the inevitability of swarming in some circumstances:

“If you want to get your living from honey production you will be wise to ignore the theories of those who say bees ought not to swarm; that they will not swarm if properly managed etc. The reality, well known to every bee farmer in the world, is that they often will. We can never in any circumstances, under any management, in any climate, at any time during what we call the swarming season, rely upon absence of swarming in any strong healthy stock that has not already swarmed. With well bred bees we may expect that the incidence of swarming will not be much greater in most seasons than 10% – 15%, but in some years no method of management whatever will prevent swarming from being more prevalent than that, no matter what the strain of bees. On the other hand, in some seasons swarming will be almost absent, even if the bees are of a “swarmy” breed, and in spite of bad management.”

I’ve got to admit, if swarming in my colonies was down around the 10% – 15% mark then I’d be very satisfied, and would surely have plenty of honey to show for it. I re-queened many of my colonies last August with stock bought from Ged Marshall and Peter Little so I am hoping that these undoubtedly superior genes will help me out in the season to come. For the hobby beekeeper there is certainly merit in breeding from your best queens, for it can only improve your stock, but somebody with hundreds or thousands of potential breeders to choose from will always be ahead, so my strategy is to buy in good queens then breed from the best of them, and perhaps buy in some more every few years just to keep the quality up. This all assumes that you can find a source of good quality queens. I hope to be able to get hold of some of Jolanta’s queens in future to see how Murray McGregor’s bees do in my rainy corner of England.

Overwintering Bees (Murray McGregor)

Genetics and queen age aside, the other strategies used by commercial beekeepers to try to prevent swarming mainly involve providing enough space for the queen to lay eggs and for workers to store incoming nectar.

When I asked Mike Palmer about what he does he said this:

“…we put the supers on early to get the tree bloom and the dandelion bloom, and that acts like a reversing, so the bees can move up onto empty comb. If the queen feels she wants to move up and lay in the supers, so what? I don’t use excluders.

I think queen excluders select for the least prolific queens because prolific queens will swarm with an excluder unless you do something to that colony like split it or take brood away. So they move up and by the end of the dandelion you have honey at the top in the supers, then the brood cluster and then empty space in the bottom box, so now it’s time to reverse the brood boxes to put the empty space above the brood. At that time, if they’ve been working well, we can put another one or two supers on. Once the bees are making honey and they have space to store it, it seems to take care of the swarming impulse, and they just get on with making honey.”

Mike has his bees coming out of Winter on double brood boxes and he puts supers on early to catch the Spring blossom flows and dandelion, then reverses the brood boxes after that and adds more supers as needed.

How can you tell when inspecting a hive that swarm preparations are underway? Back to Manley:

“If you find your bees are building out foundation it is hardly necessary to trouble further, so far as possible queen cells are concerned. If the queen is spreading out onto new comb and covering it with eggs as fast as the workers build it out (laying out, we call it) there will rarely be queen cells. If the queen is very swollen and heavy with eggs, it is very unlikely that cells are present, at any rate cells with larvae in them, though there may be cells with eggs.

If foundation is not being drawn and the brood nest does not appear to be expanding, look carefully over most of the brood combs, for you are likely to find queen cells. The same if the queen is looking light and if she is slackening off in her laying.”

I am flying off to New Zealand tomorrow, although I don’t actually land in Christchurch until Wednesday morning. It is Summer there and the swarm season may well be over, but I’ll certainly be asking commercial beekeepers about what they do. Springtime here in the UK seems a long way off but it is wise to use this downtime to reflect on seasons past and plan for the one ahead. Dealing with swarming must surely be one of the prime considerations of beekeepers, wherever they are on this beautiful planet of ours.

14th January 2018
Total Body Workout

There is an ancient symbiotic relationship between the walrus and the honeybee. We have all heard the expression, “float like a walrus, sting like a bee”, and this bond has been forged over millennia – we depend on each other. It’s not always easy though. I have had plenty of disasters in my beekeeping time, but my stripy furry little friends are very forgiving, which is why, despite everything, I still have a few colonies and some of these even give me honey.

As I referred to in my last post sometimes things can get serious. The deliberate killing of a queen is not, on the face of it, a very supportive act. But re-queening is the best thing for the colony as a whole, if not for the unfortunate exiting monarch herself. The introduction of a healthy young queen in August will hopefully result in more eggs laid in the Autumn, and consequently more bees to help keep the colony strong through the challenging winter months. It should also lead to a quicker build up of new bees in the Spring, with perhaps a lower propensity to swarm. That’s the theory anyway. If it’s good enough for Mike Palmer, it’s good enough for me.

I spent a few days with Mike’s team in Vermont as they moved from apiary to apiary, inspecting every colony meticulously in order to be able to make the big queen related decision: should she stay or should she go? His beekeeping helpers are a great asset to Mike, showing that he has the people management skills to match his affinity with bees. They work hard, help each other out and have some entertaining conversations whilst picking their way through more frames of bees in a day than I do in a month. Oh, and yes, they do get stung. One of them said to me, “I’ve been stung thousands of times over the years, and one thing I’ve learned – it never hurts any less.” Apparently being stung just inside the nose is the worst place. I look forward to that one.

So, back to my modest apiary near Lymm in Cheshire with my daughter Clíona, fresh from the Vermont trip, bursting with our new found knowledge. My efforts at rearing my own queens, having been less than resoundingly successful, had led to me buy mated queens from a stunningly good queen breeder – Peter Little of Exmoor Bees and Beehives. I now know for sure what good queens can do – I have seen it in Vermont. My queens were pretty average. Quite prone to swarm, a little bit moody, and not, apart from one hive, making a lot of honey. Our mission was simple: replicate what Mike Palmer does and re-queen if necessary.

Most of my queens were unmarked (no coloured dot on the thorax). These are described in my notes as “NDQ” (No Dot Queen). They have a very effective cloaking device making them extremely hard to locate. The expression “needle in a haystack” could easily be changed to “queen in a summer colony”. One little queen amongst fifty thousand workers. Hay doesn’t crawl or fly either.

It took five hours to re-queen my colonies. Five hours of lifting bee boxes, shaking bees, staring endlessly at masses of bees hoping to catch a glimpse of the large abdomen and distinctive gait of the queen. Once the old queen was squished, the new one was introduced using a wire push in cage (see photo). This keeps her in the colony on a frame with some emerging brood but apart from the workers, because surprisingly often a newly introduced queen is killed by them. They see her as an imposter, possibly because of her smell, and at first she is probably stressed, dehydrated and not laying eggs. I kept one of my own queens because her brood pattern was perfect and all was going exceedingly well, but the rest were replaced with a new YDQ (yellow dot queen).

We have to come back in four days to check that she is laying, that there is no other queen in the hive (it happens), before pulling off the wire cage and releasing the new mother of the colony to meet her new family. This method of queen introduction is the one with the best success rate according to many honey farmers, past and present.

After all this sweaty, smoky, stingy, back achingly seemingly endless work, I returned home, had a quick bath, and promptly fell asleep in my walrus rocking chair. I briefly stirred to eat dinner but soon went to bed and slept the long deep sleep of the marathon runner.

If I had to do that every day I’m not sure how long I would last. I go to the gym, I walk my dogs and take hiking holidays in the hills. But five hours lifting bee boxes and finding queens is seriously hard work. I have a new found respect for all the hard working men and women who do that for a living. All I can say is, honey is seriously under priced.

6th August 2017
Regicide in the woods of Vermont

I’m back home in Blighty after a wonderful stay in Vermont, a very pretty corner of the USA near the border with Canada which reminded me of parts of Scotland. Instead of whisky they have a big maple syrup industry, and instead of the midge it’s the mosquito. This year they have had lots of rain, which has impacted the likely honey yield and queen rearing operation (queens don’t go on mating flights in bad weather), so it felt very much like home. Whenever I visit North America I am always jealous of the sheer scale of the place – so much more space than here. But they do have guns, no NHS and Donald Trump so it’s far from perfect.

The purpose of this adventure was to interview Mike Palmer for the book I am writing. This was accomplished with ease in his living room, with the comforting sound of buzzing coming from forty odd caged queens lined up on the coffee table. Mike is a good talker and is very willing to pass on his experience and wisdom to anyone interested, which is rapidly becoming the majority of beekeepers worldwide. By the way, the caged queens were well looked after by attendant worker bees and were just waiting to be introduced to their new homes in Mike’s hives. They had been taken from his mating station having been inseminated by the local drones (male bees) and were all set to head colonies into the winter.

Here’s the thing about beekeeping on a large scale – it is basically farming, except the livestock does not go “moo” and it is free to roam, unconstrained by fences or streams or roads. A dairy farmer knows where his cows are but a honey farmer only has a rough idea where his bees may be (see what I did there?). The clues to the bees’ journeys are there in the hive, the colour of the pollen being brought back and the taste of the honey, and the distinctive odours emanating from within. But a farmer’s livelihood depends on the quality of his or her livestock, whether bovine or bee, so the whole issue of breeding is absolutely critical.

Mike Palmer has a big queen rearing operation. His best queens are selected and bred from, ensuring that quality is maintained from year to year. His cell building colonies are enormous towers perched amongst trees on the edge of a field of corn. Corn is no good for bees, and local farmers seem to grow little else, but thankfully there are still plenty of flowering plants in the area to keep Mike in business.

At this time of the year Mike and his team of helpers descend on an apiary and thoroughly inspect each hive, looking at how old her majesty is (signified by the colour of a dot on her back placed there after mating), how much honey is being stored, the brood pattern, temperament and so on. In many cases the queen will be slowing down after a busy life, and if left alone will eventually be replaced by the bees themselves or will perhaps become a drone layer. So the solution? Kill the queen! The queen is dead, long live the new queen!

It sounds brutal but killing queens and replacing them with vibrant healthy new ones is a vital part of running a honey farm. This is how the farmer keeps control of his livestock, which are kept healthy and productive. There is no fuss or ceremony; nobody passing by would know, but there is regicide going on in the woods of Vermont, and this is as it should be – for both bees and lovers of honey.

30th July 2017
Looking forward to Vermont

I shouldn’t be surprised by this; trying to interview busy beekeepers in the middle of the beekeeping season is almost impossible. It would appear to be an activity best reserved for the winter months, when our buzzing little friends are tightly clustered in their hives, no doubt dreaming of the day it will stop raining. In fact, that sounds like me in the winter. Come to think of it, I wonder just how many days a year I get to see actual blue sky? It can’t be many.

I was in Andalusia in April where the sky was very blue and the lavender was alive with the sounds of industrious insects. I often holiday in Cyprus where the sky is also exceedingly blue, although my favourite time is at night when I can lay back by the pool, stare up at the clear night sky and see an amazing explosion of stars, planets and galaxies far far away…And a few years ago I visited a friend in Saskatoon in the Canadian midwest, where the sky is so big and so blue that I found it hard to look where I was walking because the temptation to just look up was so powerful. Manchester is not like that. Here, we just accept the inevitable; that that the sun does exist but we won’t see it today.

The reason for my digression into meteorology, apart from the fact that I’m British and therefore somewhat obsessed, is that in two weeks I travel to Vermont, USA to meet Mike Palmer, a bee farmer who knows more about bees than most bees do. I am excited to be able to interview Mike and see his apiaries, but there is also an outside chance that I might see some blue sky, trees, lakes and hills, which makes the trip very worthwhile – even worth the jet lag which turns me into a zombie for days at each end of the trip.

I am very grateful to Mike for agreeing to see me at such a busy time. It means that the fantastic, bestselling and life affirming book that I am writing is going to be more than just a dream. Can’t wait!

9th July 2017