2013 - Our first Honey

September 2013

                                                      

Dear Reader, if you remember, we ended the last blog with our four bee hives merged into two, in the hope that the combined colonies would survive the winter.

We made shelters of roofing felt to protect the hives against the ravages of winter and held them together with strapping to stop any animals from knocking the hives over.

Tasteful orange strapping keeps the deer and badgers away.

In preparation for next year (2013) we placed an order with Apimiel in October 2012 for two new swarms and two mated queen bees to be delivered in the Spring. The two new queens were for when we split the hives back in to four.  The plan is that we will have six hives, two hives at each of the three locations.

The Bee Club still met occasionally during the winter months - the photo below was taken in Steve's barn and is of us making our own "supers" from planks of oak bought from a local wood yard for €20.

Winter was very,very cold here with blizzards and lots of snow. Happily the snow started to fall the day after Sharon and I left for a holiday in Australia and the Far East. It was very, very hot there.

Winter comes to Village au Franc

The Great Barrier Reef

Once Winter had departed and Spring was well and truly with us we dis-assembled the hives. Obviously, two of the hives did not have queens, so we had no option but to take frames of brood from the good hives and put them in the other two, just to keep the colonies alive.

The swarms arrived at the end of April, but not the queens as the weather had been so bad everything in nature was one month behind. We installed the hives at Janey's without incident.

We continued nursing the queenless hives with brood frames from the good hives and, when we were lucky, frames containing queen cells.

SHOCK HORROR -  Steve's good hive has a laying worker - the frames are full of drone cells!

The following quote was taken from Beekeeping For Dummies (Kindle Locations 3720-3724). John Wiley and Sons.

"If your colony loses its queen and is unable to raise a new one, a strange situation can arise. Without the queen substance wafting its way through the hive, no pheromone inhibits the development of the worker bees’ reproductive organs. In time, young workers’ ovaries begin to produce eggs. But these eggs aren’t fertile (the workers are incapable of mating). So the eggs can only hatch into drones (male bees). You may notice eggs, larvae and brood and never suspect a problem. But you have a huge problem! In time, the colony will die off without a steady production of new worker bees to gather food and tend to the young. A colony of drones is doomed."

To get rid of a laying worker is not an easy thing. You have to take the hive boxes at least 100 yards away, take out the frames and one by one brush off all the bees on to the ground. You then take the empty boxes and frames back to the spot you took them from. The theory being that only bees able to fly (not the laying worker) can return to the hive.

Well, we did this but, sadly, there were no photos 'cos we were all smothered in bees, thousands of them. How we escaped without a single sting is beyond me. We put frames of brood and queen cells in the empty hive along with new frames of foundation wax, crossed out fingers and waited.

YIPEE, it worked. We have a queen and the beginnings of a new colony. Whew.

JUNE - The Queens finally arrived - one introduction was successful, one not. The unsuccessful hive was left to fend for itself and in due course made it's own queen!

JULY - The two new hives at Janey's are working really well. One looked as if it has a case of dysentery (poo on outside of hive) but it recovered without intervention.

AUGUST - Janeys second hive started to make excess honey in the super, lots of it. So much so that we invested in a new stainless steel honey extractor and put bee escapes in the hive so that we could steal the honey frames without the bees getting too angry.

On Saturday in mid August we met at Janey's, took the honey frames from the hive and ran to the kitchen where everything was set up. Luckily, it was a bee free zone.

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We harvested 18 pound jars of honey. Five jars each each plus three for making mead.

Later that month during our normal bee club afternoons we saw that three brood boxes were choc-a-block full of either honey or brood. We had a second honey "event" and 

harvested another 6 pounds from two of the large frames. The Bees were not happy about that, so we have decided to curtail our honey exploits and let the bees alone for a while.

September 5th - made the mead from HFW recipe. Have to wait until xmas to drink it.

So, gentle reader, at this point in the year, we have six healthy hives which we will leave alone now until mid-October, when we will :-

•      remove the super frames and start sugar syrup feed.
•      dust the bees with icing sugar to remove any verroa mites.
•      cover the hives with roofing felt to protect against the winter. 

Lets hope that without all the intervention we had to make this year, i.e. continually taking frames of brood to keep other hives alive, we should have six healthy hives, a zillion bees and a heavy honey harvest in 2014.

Here's to 2014.