The varroa threshold

Timothy the beekeeper answered on my Facebook post about this blog: 'All of my hives are due for a varroa treatment in the next 2-3 weeks. As a beekeeper I try and keep infestation levels below a 1000 varroa threshold that means that I try to never let there be more than 1000 varroa in any hive. Problem is they double in numbers every few weeks. It forces me to have to put chemicals into my beehives. But if I don't my bees will die so it is the best of a bad choice.'The bag with Varroa poison looks a bit like a feedbag and it is also put on top of the frames

Timothy about Varroa

After the last entry Timothy the beekeeper mailed me this: 'It's weird to see mites outside the hive. The mite actually drains the blood from the bees just like a tick. The main problem with them is they spread viruses which actually do the killing. Varroa on it's own will only weaken a hive. Varroa and viruses of which there are over 15 will kill the hive. In the hive contaminated material is very rarely exchanged but the mite does this by biting one bee and that then becomes contaminated and then biting another and so on: spreading the viruses.'

The varroa mite

Beekeeper Timothy Stevens has put a new entry on Facebook that I like to copy here. 'Here is a very lucky or even unlucky photo. It shows a bee foraging on bramble. On closer inspection you can see a varroa mite on her. It looks like a purple disk on her side. The mite has wedged it's self in between the plates on the bee. This is the real face of one of the major reasons honey bees are dying and why almost all wild hives are dead. Because of these little mites I have to treat my hives to kill the mites. I have never seen a mite on a bee outside the hive. On a brighter note the weather today has been very good and if this continues I should receive some honey in return for my years toil. I usually remove the excess honey on the 10th of August however with the weather being so cold it has held the blackberry back and put my schedule back as well.'

Message from Timothy about swarms

Timothy wrote this post on FB today. I found it important enough to copy it into the blog for future reference of course.The thing about the trees is interesting. I notice that Tits and other birds also choose cavities in trees to build nests in. OMG so many thing to take into account when managing the garden. Yesterday I preformed a cutout. A cutout is when a established beehive is cut from some existing structure in this case from a flat roof. Beehives will move into any suitable space which a roof of a house represents. Normaly in nature swarms/beehives would move into cavity's in trees and caves. With our modern lives these cavity's are rare and most large trees are felled and certainly the rotten one which are hollow tend to be tidied up. This leaves manmade cavity's for the bees to choose from. This invariably means that the hive becomes a pest. In this case their entrance is directly above a doorway and presents a safety risk. So how does a cut out work. First you have to get access to the combs of the hive. From there I catch the bees using a bee vac which is esentaly a vacume cleaner slightly modified to not harm the bees unduly. As I remove the bees I cut the combs and separate brood(baby's) from honey(sticky mess) from wax. I am constantly on the look out for the queen and when I find her I catch her to unite later with her bees and her young. When all the wax/combs are removed and most of the bees caught I place a few combs back into the cavity to catch the last of the bees. I then come back in the late evening to catch these bees which stay on the comb rather than run into the wall or elsewhere. In the mean time I bring the baby bees/brood to one of my apairys and begin placing this brood in combs in a standard beehive using string wires and rubberbands. Then I unite the bees in the beevac with the brood. The last bees which are caught that evening are united later that evening. If I find the queen I cage her for her safety and will release her in a few days. Its a horrible job. It tends to cause damage to the property in this case minimal but in other cases quite a lot. This is the main reason beekeepers manage their bees against swarming. It is near to impossible to preform a cutout without killing quite a lot of the bees in the process as well which is disheartening for most beekeepers and certainly is for me. Hope this was of some interest. And sorry for the length of it but telling a small part of the story doesn't really do justice to the procedure.

Clew Bay Honey’s First Birthday

Message from Timothy Stevens beekeeper to among many others the Polranny Pirates. ‘Hi everyone. Sorry for such infrequent posts. Things tend to get a bit hectic in the summer with me. So here is a quick update no photos I’m afraid as I scratched the lens on the camera I use. I hope to get that sorted out soon and start getting more pics up. I celebrated my 1st year in business on the 20th of June. The year has truly flown for me. To think last year I was registering for tax and getting my company name sorted. The list of what has been achieved from then to now is massive. I started this with 19 hives and now have over 35 full hives and close to 40 nucs(half hives). I am well on line with meeting and surpassing my own goals for this year for growth. All I need now is 3 good weeks weather in July (a big ask I know) and I will be able to get honey into a few more shops.’ Congratulations to Timothy and hopefully the Polranny Pirate Bees will surpass themselves in supplying Clew Bay Honey! I’m going to Amsterdam now and I’ll be away for a few months. Most likely it will be very quiet on the blog for a while. The bees will be busy making honey and I shall miss all the fun.

Ballycroy National Park

Yesterday I took Maureen and Monika, two friends from the OWLs who are staying in the Folly, for a visit to Ballycroy, the Ballycroy National Park and Visitors Center. There I asked the staff if they were thinking about getting bees. No, but they will have a talk the first half of August by a beekeeper from Westport. When we came back I saw that Timothy the beekeeper had put another storey on one of the hives. A sign that things are going well with the Polranny Pirate Bees! I asked Timothy and he answered this: ‘The bees seem to be growing well. They also have adequate stores which is encouraging as this time of the year is usually an issue. I think clover might be a bit early and sycamore which is all but finished certainly was late. The Visitor Centre is a nice spot. It’s probably Henry Horkan who’ll give the talk. Well worth a listen if you are interested he is quite knowledgeable.’

The uses of honey and wax in Ancient Egypt

Honey was the only sweetener the ancient Egyptians had. It was added to wine, various kinds of bread and cakes. Medicines and salves often contained honey. The practice was to apply honey to open wounds—a reasonable treatment considering its antibacterial and fungicidal qualities. Mead is also made of honey. Being universally appreciated jars of the stuff made excellent presents when visiting people abroad. Temples kept hives because Gods had a desire for sweet things too. Honey was found on the table and in the kitchen of the Pharaos and from them it went down the social strata. Even lowly servants dipped the finger in the honey jar. Demands ran so high honey sometimes needed to be imported. Wax was used for sealing things from the seal on documents to the inside of amphora. Wax was also used for plugging up orifices of mummies, as glue and in hair styling, in model making and painting. It was a universally used material, but not as candles. The picture is of the hair and hair extensions on the head of the mummy of Nefertari

Honey and wax harvesting in Ancient Egypt

In contrast to many other customs in Ancient Egypt the harvesting of honey and wax are a bit of a mystery. There is a picture on the wall of a temple about how the hive was evacuated. Smoke was blown into the back of the hive and the bees escaped through the entrance in the front. The rest is conjecture, but in Egypt traditions rarely change and it is pretty safe to suppose that neither has beekeeping. To harvest the honey the combs are gathered in a cow skin. Next the combs are crushed by treading on the skin. Through a hole the honey now flows into a container. What is left in the skin is washed out with a bit of water. Finally the honey passes through a sieve made of blades of grass. What’s left in the skin is the wax. The wax is heated to melting point in a water bath to prevent it from catching fire. Impurities floating on the surface of the liquid wax can be scooped up. Afterwards it is strained and put into a bag press. It has been estimated that for every kilo of honey somewhat more than sixty grams of wax can be won.

Beekeeping in Ancient Egypt

Apiculture was popular in the whole of Egypt but particular in the Delta region. Hives were made of mud or reeds covered with mud. Empty hives were also used as wall insulation of houses. The cylindrical hives were stacked horizontally, sometimes up to 500 together. The harvesting was done twice a year: in spring and autumn. Because of the climate there seem to have been no winter hibernation. The hives were transported to where the flowers were. They had to be moved again when the farmers were clearing the ground by fire after harvest or when the Nile water rose and it was necessary to bring the hives to higher ground. The moving could cause some logistic problems especially when there were many hives involved. It is all written down in queries, prayers and petitions and mercifully kept for prosperity. The drawing is of fields on the banks of the Nile and two huge statues near Luxor

Bellagorick

Once upon a time Ireland went for self-suffiency. That’s how it came about that the first and only electric power-plant running on turf was build on the massive bogs of the North Mayo plane. One could see it from miles around. A village with a post office, a pub, a shop and several houses had been build around the plant. You don’t see them in the drawing because they are in the valley where the river runs through that provided the power station with cooling water. It was a welcome stop in the middle of the nothingness of the immense bog. Was it a venerated landmark or an eyesore? Was is progress or folly? To me it was all of the above. But then Ireland became part of the big global economy and the use of turf as fuel was laughed at: too expensive, too labour intensive. Oil now, that was the thing. The drawing was made during the hot summer of 1983. I remember sitting by the side of the road, sketching at full speed being pestered by horseflies. One day they tore down the power station. A big bang and it crumbled. By then the post office was closed, followed by the shop and the pub. Most of the village stands empty. There is a wind-power park to the north of Bellagorick now because the already existing electric grid is at hand. Why this post on a blog about bees? Timothy’s colleague Jude from the Westport Beekeepers Association gave the excuse. He keeps a lot of hives up that way. Lovely heather honey no doubt.

Meanwhile back in Achill

Yesterday Timothy swung by accompanied by Jude a colleague from the Westport Beekeepers Association. They had been replacing an aggressive colony at Achill Secret Garden with a more docile one. The hive now gets a new residence in Glenhest far from the madding crowd. Timothy also had installed a starter hive at Sheila McHugh in BullsMouth (another colleague of mine from the Achill Writers Group). He has now four and possibly five addresses in Achill of which three on Achill. That means that we will get our own ‘run’ in the future. Now Timothy gets in later and later because he has so much to do before Achill. Yesterday it was nine at night. The bees were grumpy and the midges out in full force. Still, the second hive has a honey box now too. The stores were sufficient and things were generally going well. One of the bee’s favourite summer flower is in bloom: white clover. The picture shows the first ones but soon the garden was covered… till Mike Wilson came yesterday to cut the grass. But there are still plenty left. The most enthralling ode to white clover is in Soma Morgenstern’s ‘In einer anderen Zeit’. If you read German it is well worth the effort. I found it ‘unputdownable’.It's in the library of the Polranny Pirates.

Bees in Ancient Egypt: Bee between the knees

The drawing I made in 1982 in the temple of Karnak. Surprise, surprise: a bee is visible between the knees of the Pharao. Ancient Egyptians celebrated the divinity of nature not only in temples but also on the walls of other structures. They did it in sculpture, in relief and in painting. The method was everywhere the same. In detail, with great skill and knowledge of the subject they depicted nature in all its forms: but always from the same point of view. They did not care about perspective or direction. They wanted the world to recognize immediately what it saw. That’s why Egyptologists came to know so much about what grew, flew and flowered. Apart from making art, the ancient Egyptians also did a lot of writing. Again it was done on walls but also on potshards and paper they made from papyrus reeds. They used a kind of pictogram based alphabet: hieroglyphs. Everyday business was recorded on shards, letters were written on paper and religious and official messages were chiselled into walls and pillars. That’s how knowledge about apiculture was as vivid then as it is now. Polranny Pirate in house Egyptologist Bert wrote: ‘The oldest pictures of nature in all its glory and in detail, as far as we know, was on the walls of the sun temple of Pharao Niuserre. He ruled in the days of the builders of the Pyramids almost 5000 years ago. It was maybe also the first time aspects of apiculture were shown.‘

Bees in Ancient Egypt: Divine nature

The people living on the shores of the Nile enjoyed the fertile shore and all that nature brought. But they were also sensitive to and reliant on the seasons: especially the rainfall in far-away central Africa where they had no power over nor knowledge of. And then there was the desert directly adjacent to the crops, where nothing could grow but harboured all kinds of scary things, both animal and human. No wonder that the religion of the Egyptians was nature fixated; not like our own religions that are human centred. Everything they had no power over the Egyptians considered sacred: possessed of divine powers, even the house cat. And the bees, which brought honey: the only sweetener the ancient Egyptians had. The picture was taken inside one of the many decorated tombs of ancient Egypt. A farmer is kneeling in front of his beehives. Again: thanks to Polranny Pirate Bert the Egyptologist

Bees in Ancient Egypt: All about location

Egypt in ancient times was a prosperous place, with its own religion and a highly developed apiculture. It had all to do with the Nile. The river Nile falls from high up in the middle of Africa down at a fast pace. It only slows down when it reaches Egypt. There it flows slowly and majestically through the desert. All the sediment the river took with it on its travel north settles in the calmer waters to the bottom. This was clearly visible after the seasonal inundations when fertilizing mud covered the fields. The Nile Delta where the river meets the Mediterranean See consists completely of sediment. The sediment made the land on both sides of the Nile very fertile and made the inundations both frightful and welcome. These shores rich in nature and protected from the surrounding world by desert were ideal for a sedentary existence of agriculture. With the agriculture came the beekeeping. (Thanks to Bert Hogervorst Egyptologist and Polranny Pirate)

Bees in Ancient Egypt: He that Belongs to the Bee

Beekeeping is as old as written history and probably much older. Egyptologist and Polranny Pirate Bert wrote to the Blog about bees in ancient Egypt. Bees were considered holy and royal, which has the same status in Pharaonic Egypt. Bees were traditionally kept in the Delta of the Nile. The Delta was part of the kingdom of Lower Egypt. Together with the kingdom of Upper Egypt it formed the double crown the Pharao wore. The official title that went with the kingdom of Lower Egypt was: ‘he that belongs to the bee’. The word bee bi.t.y in the old Egyptian lingo stood for Lower Egypt. The t was probably dropped when it was pronounced and sounded like the English word bee. Because of its holy/royal status pictures of bees appear on every surface in every temple. When visiting Egypt you can’t escape them. Photo Internet (I should go and see for myself)

Queen Cups

The worker bees had been busy with the succession to the hive’s crown. Apart from the queen cell we also discovered several queen cups. The incumbent queen didn’t lay any eggs in these. A friend told me this morning that her mother, Mrs Feldbrugge from Zuidhorn in Holland, had six beehives in the back of her garden. A beekeeper put them in for her, just like Timothy Stevens did for the Polranny Pirates. But after a while she got very interested, followed a course in beekeeping and from then on took care of them herself. I’m sure I won’t go that far… Unlike Timothy she wasn’t keen on swarming. Too much trouble with the neighbours in the village when they were visited by an unwelcome swarm. She destroyed any queen cup and cell she found on a frame.

A Queen is waiting to be born

Theory gets always different when you see it in practice. On post 34 Virgin Queen of this blog I put a drawing of a queen cell that I made after a photo from the internet. This time I put a photo on the blog of a queen cell in one of my hives. Exciting! Will this become the new queen? Will there be more queen cells, potential Virgin Queens, palace revolutions? Will there be a swarm leaving the hive?

The weather

Finally the weather turned and the bees and I are out and about in the garden, And if that isn’t enough the flowers have joined us too. Everywhere things are in bloom. Not the planted variety but the things that grow in the grass whether you like it or not. According to Timothy the beekeeper worker bees visit around a 100 flowers a day. It would seem that there is enough for everybody. But after the cold spring the bees are in a feeding frenzy. They do not tolerate anybody else around and least of all me. I used to put one of those easy to fold chairs out in front of the hives about ten meters away and watch the activity as I would watch the tv: but not anymore. A defending bee is send out and first starts to annoy me and if I stay put to attack me. Now they even come after me as I’m weeding my veggie patch, well out of sight and the way. This picture of the new additions to the hives I took just before I was stung in the eyebrow. And me writing a blog about the little feckers… No gratitude!

The honey box that tops up the hive

In spite of Timothy the beekeeper’s dire predictions it was time to put a second storey on the one and the honey box on the other hive. How to get the worker bees to put the honey where you want it? It had puzzled me since starting this blog. The solution is quite simple really. A plastic screen is put between the third and second storey. The holes in the screen are big enough for the worker bees to creep through but too small for the drones and the Queen. That way the home staying workers oblivious of everything except the task at hand to continue storing supplies, can access the top floor. The drones however cannot avail themselves of those honey stores and the queen cannot lay eggs on the frames.

The weight of the stores

Timothy the beekeeper is detecting a problem in his hives: the feed stores are low. He checked the stores by weighting the frames in his hands. In Polranny they seem alright for the time being, but it might come to pass here too. I quote freely from his recent entry on Facebook Clew Bay Honey: ‘Most years have a gap in nectar producing plants in the summer. This is called by beekeepers in Ireland "the June gap". Normally bees store enough spring honey to get them over this gap and into the main honey flow. This year it is very possible that I shall have to feed the hives instead. This leads to an interesting problem: making sure there is no feed ending up in the honey that is harvested in August. If I feed too much I risk mixing and if I feed to little the hive dies… ‘ But today the sun broke through the clouds and the bees are in a feeding frenzy. I’m already stung when I went to spy on them. Photo Karin Daan

Drone cells

Timothy the beekeeper was here yesterday to have a look at the hives again. There was a southwesterly gale blowing and the bees were pretty upset. I put on the bee suit to be on the safe side. Indeed the bees were not amused when the hive was openend and they massed around me. The weather has had a negative impact on them. Nevertheless I could see real growth when the lid went off. On this picture the drone cells are clearly visible on the frame. They are the yellow balls. According to Timothy that is a seasonal feature. How he knows that those balls have future Drones inside and not worker bees, I'm sorry to say I didn't ask.

The shopping basket of the worker bee

The worker bee never leaves the hive without her shopping basket. Nature attached it permanently to her hind leg. When she sticks her head into the flower the pollen gets stuck to her head and thorax. With her front legs moistened with nectar, she gathers it up and brings it to the pollen comb. There the pollen is combed, pressed and put into the basket. The nectar gives the pollen in the basket its colour. That’s how the beekeeper knows from which flower or honey source the bee has been foraging from. Once the pollen is in the hive it’s gets stored by the home worker bees. They mix it with honey and pack it firmly into store cells. The mixing with honey has to do with keeping it safe from going off. Photo of the bee with pollen on her hind legs: Timothy Stevens. Drawing by me.

The life and times of worker bees Part 3 Foragers

After the learning stages in and close to the hive the worker bees venture out into the great big world to find the honey source and bring pollen and nectar home. As Timothy the beekeeper already said: the bee is stupid but the hive is clever. And so the worker bees dance the story of the best honey sources to each other generation after generation for tens of thousands of years. They perform tremble dances to let the home front know that foragers are returning with the goodies. Worker bees also scout the ‘nesting’ place for the swarm to go to when the time has come for the queen to leave the colony and start a new one. Photo Timothy Stevens

The life and times of worker bees Part 2 The Ottoman Empire

The next stage in a worker bee’s life is guarding the hive. They also take on the task of receiving pollen and nectar from foraging bees. The society of bees is both highly structured and well functioning. Even the occasional palace revolution is embedded into the structure of perpetual order. Few societies both in the animal and human world are like that. Most societies thrive on chaos both from within and from without. The Ottoman Empire is the only society comparable to that of the bees, to my mind. As in the hive in Ottoman society everybody knew his/her place and thrived in it. Individuality was not encouraged and justice didn’t mean in fairness and reasonability but in stability without change. No wonder the Empire lasted 450 years and only came to grief when the chaos around could no longer be kept out. The photo I took in 1966 in the Central Taurus Mountains of Turkey, home ground of the erstwhile Ottomans and famous for it’s honey. On a plateau stand about a hundred hives close together.

The life and times of worker bees Part 1 Carers

Worker bees, not surprisingly, do the work to keep the hive healthy and happy. As Timothy the beekeeper said: bees are stupid but the hive or colony is intelligent. And well organized. Worker bees don’t all do all the work all of the time. Worker bees start their working lives feeding the queen and larvae and doing cleaning duties. For the purpose they have Royal Jelly producing glands. But when they get older and the glands stop functioning they build comb cells for the eggs to be laid in. Photo Amanda Stevens

Drones and queens

The queen will fly out on a sunny day to the congregation area and mate with many drones. When she enters the mating zone a cloud of drones will follow her till one gets so close he can move over her flying body and grab on to her. The mating lasts a couple of seconds. The force of the sperm release propels the drone backward and his penis snaps off. That is the end of the drone. No happy returns for him. Considering the short time the mating takes it is amazing that somebody managed to photograph it. My drawing is from a picture I found on the Internet. The queen stores the sperm of this and all the other drones she mates in her spermatheca to be doled out at will. A young virgin queen has a limited time to mate. If she can’t fly because of bad weather she won’t get mated and will lay only unfertilized eggs. She’ll become a drone layer. That is why I’m so worried about the continuing bad weather we’re having. But maybe that delays the virgin queens being born too.

Rain and Damp

Rain and damp have plaqued these shores for the last 5 weeks. I'm worried about the bees. Are they warm enough? Can they find a honey source? Are the hives thriving? I was very glad to hear that Thimothy the beekeeper was due for another visit. He came late in the day. It was dry but overcast. The bees were still active but not like earlier in the day when they were going in and out of the hives in large numbers. Now the midges were out and for the first time this year they were stinging: much too early for my taste. Apparently when Timothy was here the last time and I was in the Burren, he had discovered that mites pestered the hives. He had put tablets of poison in the hives that he was now taking away again. But there was also good news. The hawthorn had come out in bloom like I had never seen before. Timothy took a photo of one of his bees feasting on the hawthorn blossom.

Corraun Mountain a mating site?

Once on a summer day I climbed Corraun Mountian. I started out from the northeast where the lonely little lakes hug the steep incline to the top. It’s a quietly beautiful but slightly creepy place that the sun only reaches very early on a cloudless day in high summer. When I climbed the top of the mountain was out of sight all the time so I didn’t really know where I would end up. Finally I came to a shoulder north from the top. It was so steep I crawled on all fours. On the last bit a lovely sweet smell reached my nose. It must have been the heather that was in bloom. Around me circled an enormous amount of bees. Where did they come from? There were only two beekeepers on the peninsula and one was my neighbour in Polranny and the other an old man in Owenduff Tonragee; both miles away. When I told the story to Timothy the beekeeper he was very interested. It might have been one of the elusive drone congregation areas, he reckoned. The drawing of Corraun Mountain was made from the north or Belfarset side.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

I was away staying with friends in the Burren. When I came back after a mere five days, not only did the County Council in name of the Irish Water Board install a water meter next to the gate to the Polranny Pirates hideaway, but Timothy the beekeeper had also put an extra storey on one of the starter hives. You can never lift your heels for a second without the world you left behind changing completely. I missed out on all the fun! Now I have to wait for the first water bill in a long time to be put into the mailbox and Timothy to come back to do the second hive.

Drones

The world of bees in which I submerge myself is getting more interesting but also more unsettling each time I look into a new phenomenon. This time it is drones, the male bee. They are born out of unfertilized eggs and do not work. Their sole purpose is to mate the queen. The fate of drones is that they either die after mating or are forced to leave the hive in the winter. To prevent inbreeding drones don’t mate the resident queen but go to a collective destination with all other drones from up to 200 different hives. There the drones wait for the virgin queens to arrive. A bit like the old Irish ‘dancing in the crossroads’ where the young men of the different villages gathered, some of them with a penny whistle or a violin or a uilleann pipe and wait for the girls to turn up to dancing and courting with. The drones visit more than one mating site and if they do not strike lucky they have to go all the way back to the hive for refueling. As there are many more drones than queens and even thou the queen mates more than once, there are still plenty of drones that don’t get laid. The same congregation areas are used year after year and as new inexperienced drones arrive every year the place must be clearly signposted in bee-speak but unseen and unheard of by humans.

Virgin queens

Queens are raised in specially constructed queen cells that start out as queen cups. Queen cups are larger than the cells in a normal brood comb. Once the reigning queen lays eggs in the queen cups the worker bees start building it up. As the young queen larva pupates the workers cap the cell with beeswax. The new Virgin Queen lifts the cap off when she is ready to emerge. By then the reigning queen has usually left the colony in a huff with a swarm. As soon as the old queen has left the hive a palace revolution breaks out with different virgin queens vying for supremacy. During the revolution the virgin queens are all over the colony restlessly seeking out the competition. For the beekeeper it is a nightmare trying to find and isolate them before they sting each other to death. Nature has provided the virgin queens with a stinger without the usual barbs making it possible for them to sting more than once without dying. The colony remains in swarm mode till all but one virgin queen have left or are killed leaving the hive depleted. Again it is the movies that my imagination turns to: The Virgin Suicides (1999) by Sofia Coppola, but most of all Harem Suare (1999) by Ferzan Ozpetek (Polranny Pirates collection). It is not so much that the movies spin a similar tale, but that the world of the bees is still completely unreal to me. I take to anything that even vaguely puts me on firm ground.

Larvae and the making of the queen

The creature that comes out of the egg is the larva. Before becoming proper bees larvae undergo moultings and spin a cocoon within the cell in the comb and pupate. All larvae are first fed on Royal Jelly which is produced by a gland of the worker bees. Later they get fed on honey and pollen except for the future and reigning queen, she’ll gets always fed on Royal Jelly, hence its name. The worker bees decide who is going to be queen when the old one is either weakening or dead. To do so they choose several small larvae and make special royal cells or queen cups where they feed them a lot of Royal Jelly. This type of feeding triggers the development of the queen’s long abdomen with fully developed ovaries and spermatheca. Collecting these data from the Internet I immediately get associations with costume dramas like the gloomy and fateful Elisabeth (1998) by Shekhar Kapur (part of the Polranny Pirates' film collection). I’m sure others will spring to mind as the kingdom of the bees is like a matriarchy.

The nucleus or nucs or colony of bees

Bees live in a colony. Timothy the beekeeper calls a small colony a nucleus or nucs. There are three different kinds of bees in a colony: drones, workers and the queen. Each nucleus contains one queen bee: the only egg producing female bee in the hive. Depending on the season there are up to a few thousand drone bees: fertile males and tens of thousands sterile female bees, the worker bees which produce and shape the wax honeycomb on the frame. The queen has a spermatheca, a reproductive organ to receive and store the sperm from drones. Using the sperm selectively she actually choses which of the eggs she lays is fertilized. Drones develop from unfertilized eggs while future queens and worker bees are born out of fertilized eggs. Queen, drones and workers are different from each other. The trained eye of the beekeeper can tell them apart.

The anatomy of bees

Bees as all other insects have no inner skeleton. Their’s is on the outside in the shape of a hard outer shell. You hear the shell crunch when (by mistake of course) you crush an insect under foot. The muscles are attached to the inside of the shell as are the organs. The body of the bee is divided in three parts: the head, the thorax and the abdomen. On the back of the hind leg is the device for gathering pollen. On back scales are the spiracles, the openings for breathing. The frist one is a blind but the next two are the major breathing tubes and the rest play a minor role. The bees don’t have a nose. Compound means that the eye is build up out of many small visual units. Note also the nifty antenna cleaner on the foreleg. Nature has provided the bee with many handy gadgets. The drawing is mine made after examples I found on the internet.

What are bees?

It is fun having bees in the garden and being properly impressed by them, but what are they? I went searching for knowledge. Bees or in our case apis mellifera mellifera, are flying insects closely related to wasps and ants. They are important pollinators and produce honey and beeswax. Bees are found on every continent except Antarctica and where ever there are flowering plants. Bees feed on nectar for energy and pollen for nutrients. Most pollen is used for food for larvae. With their long tongue they suck the nectar from the flowers and pollen is gathered via the hind leg. Bees have two pairs of wings and a stinging hook for defense. The best-known bee species is the European honey bee. Ours is a sub species called the native Irish honey bee. Beekeeping is also known as apiculture.

Labeling frames

I could witness the move of the nucleus of one hive to the other from close up thanks to the beekeeper suit I wore. Now I noticed that each of the frames had a sign written with a red marker pen. I asked Timothy the beekeeper what it meant. It was his system for marking the function of the different frames. F stood for Foundation, S for Store and DB for Drone Base. I wasn’t far advanced in the knowledge of the Apiculture in our Apiary to fully understand the meaning, but there is always room for improvement on my part. It was time to take off the beekeeper's suit and go surf the internet.

Moving house

Timothy the beekeeper was satisfied with the work the nucleus of bees in the Styrofoam hive had done the past weeks. They had industriously been filling the combs. Now it was time to proceed with the good works in their new abode. When you move house you take all the good stuff with you and transplant it in a new environment: the same with the bees. The frames well cleaned of excess bees wax go in one by one in the same order. And of course the position of the queen bee will be checked.

Anaesthesizing the bees

The Styrofoam starter hive was placed on top of his neighbour to make room for the brand new wooden hive that will be the bees permanent home. Timothy the beekeeper gives every year a different colour to the hives he makes himself. This one should have been a bright pink as he assured me it was this year’s colour. But it had a brown tarnish: ‘Store bought,’ he said. What a pity. I love a bit of the old pink. The lid was off the Styrofoam box but before he was able to move the swarm from the one hive to the next Timothy had to give them a dose of the anaesthesizing smoke from the bellows.

In a beekeeper’s suit

Timothy the beekeeper was going to replace the Styrofoam starter hive with a proper wooden one where more storeys could be added to. It meant an unexpected house move for the bees. It was something that would upset them. To view the procedure from close up I had to be dressed accordingly: in a beekeeper’s suit. To be inside the suit was not as sweaty and claustrophobic as I expected. Highly recommended as alternative to a niqab or burka.photo Karin Daan

Putting up the sheep fence

During the rest of the month of April it was very peaceful around the starter hives. The weather that had been beautiful and summerlike changed for the worse. On the very last day of April Timothy drove up again with Amanda and a very small blue-eyed sheepdog puppy. They had just been to Achill where Timothy had put two starter hives at Achill Secret Garden (not four as I have posted; the Styrofoam hives had not been emptied yet into the wooden hives) where Amanda had been stung on the forehead. They had also inspected a promising site at Saula. Timothy was going to put the sheep wire up and change the Styrofoam hive into a wooden one.

Bees in Achill Secret Garden

As honey source is the ultimate condition for keeping bees Achill Secret Garden is the place to be. On the last day of April on their daughter’s thirties birthday Timothy the beekeeper installed no less than 4 starter hives in the seaside garden of Pirate’s friends Doutsje and Willem. The garden with all its flowering plants and shrubs is a haven for hungry honey bees. Doutsje and Willem improved and beautified an existing hundred year old seaside garden on the east coast of Achill Island. Since 1967 they have been working non-stop to make this garden the pride of the island. During the past winter they have cleared a section where wind damaged trees darkened the ground. Timothy chose this place for his beehives. It is far from the house and the visitor’s route through the garden.

Quiet is a beguiling word

All looked wonderful with the sun shining and the bees a-buzzing. The sheep were safely put behind bars and forgotten. The next upset came from Facebook of all places. That happens when you make a blog and link the blog to FB every now and then. Lilian Voshaar a Polranny Pirates’ friend and environmental activist in the Amsterdam district called De Pijp wrote: ‘I wonder if there is enough to eat for the bees through the year. Here we try to make the best of it by advising different plants for different seasons to accommodate insects.’ To which Timothy Stevens the beekeeper answered: ‘I shall be keeping a very close eye on stores for the bees. I am not certain that there will be forage in the height of the summer in Polranny and June may prove troublesome. This is one of the main reasons that I have only installed two hives to see if the location can stand that and if it can I shall increase the number. From late this month the hives will be seen every week and inspected every two. I also intend to pay close attention to the pollen coming into these hives and others I have placed close by to see what the bees are foraging on.’ Well! Never a dull day!

A home for abandoned shrubs

Every now and than kind people give flowering shrubs to the Polranny Pirates to embellish the garden. Unfortunately they usually are put somewhere to be dealt with later and then forgotten. Sad really. But now I had an idea: I would put flowering shrubs along the screen that stands in front of the beehives. There were four abandoned shrubs in different stages of pitiful to be put to use. I put them in but they hardly made an impact. Next I went begging for sad shrubs with my friends of Achill Secret Garden. They gave me another six orphaned shrubeens that were on the verge of very sad. Now there is a start of a kind of hedge along the screen. That is if nothing dies on me.

In the Green Zone

The hives were now neatly tied up and weighted down with a rock. As an extra precaution Timothy the beekeeper said that when he was coming back he was going to put a sheep wire fence around the hives making it a kind of compound where no terrorist sheep could penetrate; a bit like the Green Zone in Bagdad. The next day the damaging sheep had disappeared. Later I was told by Polranny Pirates’ friend Annie Masterson that Johnny her grandson and Michael, Peggy’s son had moved the offending sheep quietly like, under the cloak of the night back to the pen where they belonged. After that all seemed quiet on the western front.

Fit to be tied

I was so upset about what the sheep had done to the hives that I was fit to be tied. I was sure the exposure of the inside of the hive to the elements would lead to the death of the whole swarm. What would that do to Timothy the beekeeper? Only one day after he managed the hives and so deftly and knowledgeable cared for his beloved bees. I was sure he would deem me unfit to host his bees as I could not even protect them from fecking sheep! Timothy would pack them up and take them away leaving me all alone. Then I knew that the bees had entered my life big time. But Timothy was unimpressed: ‘No harm done’, he said. ‘This is sheep country. Something like this is to be expected. It could have been worse. I should have tied the hives up properly.’ What a relief!

Damaging sheep

The next morning I was in total despair. Over night the sheep of neighbour Peggy , foraging for food away from home, had dislodged one of the hives. Part of the inside of the hive was exposed and bees were flying around angry and disoriented. I called Timothy’s mother as I didn’t have his phone number, to ask if she could tell him that there was an emergency. Then I got into the car to get Peggy and drag her to the scene of the crime to get her sheep sorted. But Peggy was nowhere to be found, probably hiding under the bed as soon as she saw my red car racing up the driveway.

The bellows

Before they left Timothy the beekeeper showed the workings of his smoke producing bellows. It was a beautiful gadget of unditerminable age made out of copper and was full of dents. It was obvious that it had seen a lot of action in its working life. A friend had given it to Thimothy. The leather on the bellows had badly deteriorated but after it was replaced by part of an inner tube it worked again. The smoke is supposed to have a calming effect on the bees and is produced by smoldering hay or straw. Amanda photographed it all on her smartphone. Notice that the wooden starter hive is not tied up to the hive stand nor weighted down by a stone. It would cause great drama the next day...