What a spell of weather – the warm sunshine over the last weeks should produce a great crop this year. My bees are still in recovery mode and unlikely to generate any surplus. I am letting them do their own thing this year and hoping they will grow strong and healthy over the season with no stress from me! I am not going through them and am happy to let them throw off a swarm or two into the wild.

It is a great year to have a solar wax extractor!

I was delighted to find an oak tree on our front avenue with bees flying in and out – a wild colony in its natural habitat! It has been a rare sight in recent years. I will keep an eye on them to see if they survive. It would be a great sign if they do survive without any treatment for varroa and the like.

Use of Smoker – one of the mistakes we can make is using too much smoke on our bees. We were all told the story that smoke makes the bees think there is forest fire and as result gorge themselves on honey and ignore the beekeeper! To ensure they ignored us we over do the smoke – the more smoke the better. But all this does is stress the bees and cause chaos among the bees and makes it almost impossible to find the queen.

Use the smoker sparingly – a few gentle puffs in the entrance and then a couple under the crown board should be enough. If it isn’t enough it may be best to leave them alone for the day. You can generally tell by the sound of the colony how much smoke to use. The key is to have the smoker well lit and close at hand so you can deploy it readily. It is also important to put in enough fuel so your smoker does not go out…it can easily happen. It is a good idea to have spare fuel in your bee box.

I was interested to read of a beekeeper who found himself short of foundation and gave the bees some forty year old wax foundation which had white bloom and had lost its aroma. He laid the foundation out in the sun for a few moments until the bloom disappeared and the wax became flexible. He let it cool, put it into frames and the bees built out the combs perfectly!

Nucs 

Nucs are an important resource for beekeepers – you can use them to house a small swarm – to keep a queen – and it can be a source of spare brood to add to a colony. You can also create a nuc as a form of swarm control.

To make a nuc – have a nuc box ready – if you find ‘charged’ queen cells then you must find the queen. She will normally be on a frame of brood – transfer this frame to the empty nuc – make sure there are no queen cells on this frame or on any of the frames you transfer to the nuc. Transfer two or more frames of brood, one frame with stores and plenty of pollen and one frame with honey. The final frame can be a frame of foundation allowing the bees to draw out fresh comb. Shake in at least two frames of bees.

Move the nuc up to 4km away and leave for several weeks – you can leave the nuc in the apiary plugging the entrance with grass  – as it dries out the bees fight their way out and re-orientate to the nuc box. Be sure to remove the grass if they don’t find their way out a day later. The old queen will start laying and the nuc will grow into a new colony. The speed with which this happens will depend on the weather. If the weather is poor it is wise to give them a feed.

The original brood box will have open queen cells – leave a good queen cell and fill with frames of foundation. After three or four weeks you can check to see if the new queen has started laying.

It is a good idea to change combs – some people are recommending changing all the brood frames every year to control disease. I have read about two method you can use.

Bailey frame change.

You need a second brood box with undrawn wax  – take one frame of brood with the queen from the old brood box and place in centre of new brood box.

Block the bottom entrance, put on a queen excluder and make a new entrance above the queen excluder for the new brood box.  Sit that brood box on the old one and leave it there until the remaining brood below has emerged. As they emerge the bees move to the top box to mind the brood the queen is laying.

Give it a gallon of syrup and feed till all the frames are drawn out.

After three weeks all brood in the bottom box will have emerged and so you can remove the bottom box with old frames ready to be melted down. Gradually work the old frame in the new box to the side and remove once it is empty.

Method two: Shook Swarm

Move the hive to one side and put a new brood box with frames in its place – mix of drawn and undrawn frames or just drawn or foundation depending on what you have available – on the old location.

Find and cage queen. Hang her in a queen cage with candy in the new brood box – the bees will let her out in a day or two. Shake all bees off the frames of the old brood box.

Give them a gallon of syrup and feed till frames are drawn….it might be an idea to put a queen excluder under the brood box to prevent queen absconding! It can happen. Once there is brood you can remove it.  You do sacrifice some brood, so do it early in the season before much brood has appeared.

The most important thing about changing the frames is that stocks have clean drawn fresh frames for the season and you have removed any pathogens and chemical residues that may be in the old frames.

Introduction.

My bees are still struggling and I am struggling to come to terms with the decimation that occurred this winter and into the spring. Last week I met a bee-keeping friend in Tyrone, Larry Monteith who  had a similar experience this spring.  As he rightly said,  “we always tend to blame ourselves first when things go wrong”.  He puts his losses down to the exposed location of his colonies and the long drawn out winter. Here is an explanation on the Thorne’s webpage. “This winter past we have observed a large loss of colonies. The colonies that have died out seem to fall into three groups: sizable colonies that have died out with lots of stores (usually ivy or rape honey, set so hard the bees can’t use it), small colonies too weak to survive, that probably should have been united to give a stronger stock (20/20 hind sight is a wonderful thing). The third group are colonies that appear to have dwindled away (sometimes the queen is still present, often she isn’t). This latter group are usually put down to poorly mated or failing queens”.

As  I said last month, I am trying to nurse my remaining hives back to health and have given them pollen supplement and I also treated them for varroa using apivar, a treatment I have not used before. Apivar is a longer treatment process than others but it does hit the mites at all stages in their breeding cycle during the weeks it is in the hive. This gives a lower mite drop in the first instance but a larger mite drop overall.

There is no sign of swarms although Larry had a swarm arrive in one of his vacant hives last week. There are two colonies of bees in the eaves of  roofs here – I am hoping that they may throw off a swarm and go into one of the bait hives I have set up. What is very good news is that they have survived the last two winters and no one treated them for varroa or gave them a pollen supplement!

People often say to me, Glenstal must be an idyllic place to keep bees – all those big, brightly coloured flowers – rhododendrons etc. The truth of the matter is somewhat different – rhododendrons can cause paralysis in honey bees though bumble bees seem to love them!

It is not the brightly coloured flowers that produce nectar it is the less showy ones and ones which you often don’t even notice. Why is this? Flowers have a problem with sexual reproduction – they can’t move! And so they need to employ an outside agency to deliver their male gamete to the female. Some plants use wind and others use insects. Insects need some incentive to persuade them to come visit.

We have elaborate strategies to attract a mate but plants had invented them long before we came on the scene – bright colours ( red, yellow, purple) – scent and nectar. Nectar is a food reward for the insects.

Some plants hedge their bets and use belt and braces – colour and scent – others use scent and nectar…others just produce nectar. It is this third category that are of most interest to bees and other pollinators; bramble, clover, sycamore trees, white thorn, and ivy. As these plants  produce nectar, they don’t need to dress up in elaborate, brightly coloured petals to attract insects – their flowers remain so small that some people don’t even notice the flowers -many people are surprised to hear that ivy has a flower at all.

Several flowers also use colour for a secondary purpose – to help insects save time and not  visit a flower when it is already pollinated and no longer producing nectar. The horse chestnut flower when it opens has a yellow spot at the base to guide the bees to the nectar pot – when the pot is empty flower the yellow spot goes red. Bees don’t see red and so this labelling device stops bees wasting time on flowers that are no longer productive.

Bees under threat.

A third of Irish bee species are threatened with extinction with bumblebee populations are falling year-on-year due to removal of hedgerows and ditches, use of pesticides and insecticides and climate change.

May 20th was the first ever global World Bee Day and hopefully the EU ban on insecticides linked to declining bee populations ,will help prevent further deterioration of the pollinators here.

We can help bees by maintaining hedgerows and planting bee-friendly flowers including snowdrops, wallflower, lavender and crocus. Professor Jane Stout, of TCD, who helped establish the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan, said while “pretty tough”, bees were under pressure.  “It’s not just pesticides but fungicides and insecticides too,” she said. “It’s also changes in how land is managed, which impact on habitats to nest and over-winter, and there’s fewer flowers to feed on. “We also have diseases which are becoming more prolific along with changes in climate with extreme weather events. “Bees are pretty tough, but all of these different drivers seem to be pushing them to the edge.”

The recent survey of Irish bumblebee populations in 2017 found that they had fallen by 14.2pc compared with 2012. Of the 100 bee species here, 30pc are under threat of extinction.  I must get myself a guide to the bumblebee species in Ireland. I was watching and listening to them working on a huge rhododendron last week – there were at least three species evident.

Gerry Ryan, from Dundrum, Co Tipperary,  president of the Federation of Irish Beekeepers’ Associations, said cutting of hedgerows, removal of ditches and use of pesticides was having an impact.  “The natural environment is the best,” he said. “This time of the year you have the blackthorn in flower, and next week you’ll have the whitethorn and they’re very valuable for our bees. Bigger farmers and horse owners are taking out all our natural hedgerows left to us by generations of people who have gone before us.

“There is a decline, but in honeybee terms we’re holding our own. I’m in a nearly organic environment, but we have members in south Tipperary, Meath and Kildare who are decimated.”

Useful tip: Cross fire Smoking

If you smoke straight in the front of a hive you are likely to split the bees and encourage they to move to the sides of the hive and make it more difficult to find the queen – an alternative is to point your smoker left and right and encourage them to move to the centre.