68 An unexpected visit

In two days I’m going back to Holland and don’t expect to be back before November. That means, no more Bee Blog entries. And suddenly Timothy the beekeeper was there again. He was called to Achill Secret Garden for a suspected swarming. He dropped by to see if any of my hives needed extra room. One last drawing I had to make although it doesn’t really add anything new to the blog. It turns out that one hive that came from a split hive in Belfarset is struggling. The other Belfarset split is doing swimmingly and got a new Pink honey box. The old Polranny hive whose splits are now in Belfarset needed another honey box too also Pink. It gives colour to the garden as if there isn’t enough yet and while on a visit somewhere one will instantly recognize one of Timothy’s apiaries. This year’s colour is Bright Orange. But first the last of the Pink has to be divided before I will see Orange on any of my hives. Timothy posed the question on feestboek: which colour will it be next year. I’m for Turquoise. I’ll keep you posted. (68 colourful hives 13-06-16)

67 A new apiary

My neighbour Annie Masterson had been on to me for more than a year now. Her grandson Alan, who took over the apiary of his Grandfather had no time to come down to Achill to take care of the last hives that were left. Alan had already taken a number of the old hives, restored them and places them with his in-laws in Galway, but the ones left over were suffering. Alan should get in contact with Timothy the beekeeper, but never got around to it. Now Annie Masterson herself was taking action. She told me that when Timothy was again in the Achill area I should bring him around. He had already been up the boreen once and had discovered that the two hives were both dead. Now was his chance to put in a few starter hives and bring the apiary to life again. With his van full of splits put into styrofoam starter hives it should be up and running in no time. Timothy was a bit unsure what his role would be. Would he be managing Alan’s or was it going to be his own? Annie Masterson made no bones about it. She showed him a box full of brand new frames and other beekeeping implements and said. This is your. Do with it whatever you want. I learned something new here: there are two sizes used in beekeeper land: Commercial and National. Apparently Timothy uses National and the apiary at the Masterson is Commercial. But according to him it doesn’t pose a problem. For now the old home made hives are replaced by pink and green painted starter boxes. He will take it up from there. One of the commercial size handmade hives in 1974. (67 hive CM February 1974)

65 Checking on the split hives

Timothy the beekeeper was back. This time he came to check on the hives he split last week. This time he had done the Achill run the other way around. He had first gone to Bull’s Mouth and The Secret Garden. The back of his van was loaded with starter hives. Three of them had colonies in them that he had split from the split hives of last week. They all came from The Secret Garden. In Bull’s Mouth the hives are not doing as well. Maybe it is the wind that is forever changing there. The channel works like a trough. Timothy had brought his bee suit for special occasions with him for me to wear. It was a beautiful clean white suit without any patch up, rents or dirt. I felt privileged! I took a chair and settled at the side of the apiary where I had a good view of the proceedings. And I wanted to catch his face in the sketch. I’m getting used to work in a suit. Even with latex gloves on it doesn’t present any problems. To get the stage set he first had to prop up a fuchsia branch heavy with enormous red flowers that hung over one of the hives and blocked part of my view. I offered that he could cut it, but he said it was lovely and it wasn’t interfering with the bees. Timothy works very fast and I didn’t get much time to do anything else but register the bare essentials. Still I got two sketches done. On this sketch he is about to lift the top of the middle hive to check if this one has a queen, or at least has queen pods ready to produce a queen. Very important: that the colony is strong and growing in size to be able to produce honey for harvesting later on. (65 checking the split hives 04-06-16)

64 Old and New in Polranny

We go back two weeks to 15 May. Dutch photographer Con Mönnich was back in Polranny after 42 years. He did sme catching up with old memories. A lot had unrecognisably changed and it took a while for him to find back his bearings. One of the places he revisited was the farm of our neighbours the Masterson. Sadly 20 years before Pat Masterson had passed away. He was a great lover of bees. When he was home from constructing the motorways in England he often sat in front of the hives enjoying the rituals of the bees. His children left Polranny; his apiary was neglected. Grandchildren wanted to pick up beekeeping again, but they live up the country, have small children and busy careers. Beekeeping has to wait. In February 1974 Con photographed one of Pat’s homemade hives. I remember there were a great number standing together in a clearing of a mixed stand of spruce and apple trees well protected from the wind. When Con took the photo it was cold and there was no activity around the hive. On the picture you can see how lovingly the hive is constructed with a small balcony and overhang to protect the entrance to the hive. When Con came back to the house in Polranny the weather was beautiful: warm and sunny. The bees were enjoying the warmth and were busy gathering nectar and pollen. Timothy the beekeeper was inspecting the surviving hive. All was well. Some things never change. (64 old and new in Polranny CM 15-05-2016)

63 What happened

Of the two hives we had one died over the winter. Timothy send me this answer when I reported to him in February when the sun came out that there wasn’t any activity in one of the hives. ‘Both hives should have adequate feed as both are on double brood box and received substantial autumn feed. However it is quite possible that one of the hives had died out. This is a normal process with beekeeping with winter mortality rates in Ireland averaging about 10%. I expect this rate to be quite lot higher this year (30%+) with a combination of the bad summer for queens mating and pollen gathering followed by the mild and damp winter. It is very difficult to keep the hives dry this winter as there is no real let up with the weather.. Winter deaths in hives can have several different causes from disease (nosema, varroa or acarine) to bad stores (fermented stores etc.) or queen issues (failing queen, unmated queen, attempted supercedure that failed, loss of queen).’ As it turned out one hive was dead and one was thriving. Timothy even put a new storey on top. But he couldn’t find the queen. The old queen that he had marked and clipped must have died and been replaced by a new queen. This time around he came with a van full of starter hives and brood boxes intend on literally making the most of the thriving hives and the consistently good weather spell we’ve been having. The sketch is of the inside of the van and the antique smoker Timothy restored for daily use. (The Beekeepers Van 27-05-16)

Dividing the hive

Timothy Stevens the beekeeper came around do a very special procedure. I was quick with the sketchbook. Afterwards he send me this report: 'Today I was looking after the beehives I have in achill both on the mainland and on the island. Peti Buchel drew some wonderful drawings of some of my activities today. I have a beehive located at her house. Since losses were so high this winter I have been doing a few splits. A split is where you break a hive into two or more pieces. In this case I broke the hive into 3 peices. 1/3 of the hive stayed at the apiary(bee yard) and the other 2 parts went to another apiary a few miles away. A hive of bees normaly only has one queen so when they are split like this 2 of the 3 parts will have no queen. These two parts will know they don't have a queen after only half an hour or so and will begin the preparations to produce a new queen. this means picking a few very young larvae(baby bees) and feeding them a very rich diet of royal jelly(food like a mothers milk), this will allow the young larvae to become queens instead of workers. I am using this to increase my number of hives that i have. each split is a full brood box(bottom box of a hive) and is strong enough in bees and brood to be able to produce a few quality queen cells. It is important when doing something like this that everything is very strong and you have ample bees to feed the young queens. If you don't have enough bees to do the feeding the queens will be very poor quality called scrub queens and are unlikely to be able to mate and take over the hive. When I got to the next apiary i repeated the process on the strong hives there and the splits made in this apiary came back to Peti Buchel garden. Hopefully the weather stays as good as it has been the last month or more and I will have a wonderful season.' The sketch is of the original hive divided in three.(dividing the hive 27-05-16)

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.’

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.

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.

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.