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.

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 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

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.

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.

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!

The Queen gets her wings clipped

Timothy the Beekeeper took out a pair of old fashioned bended nail scissors and clipped the queen’s wings. ‘Now she cannot fly anymore. When another new queen gets born and this one leaves the hive to swarm she won’t get very far,’ he grinned. Our neighbour had bees and once one of his queens followed by a swarm landed with us. We weren’t home at the time and before my neighbour had located the errant queen, she had established herself under the roof of the porch, between the ceiling and the roof covering. He never managed to get her out and for years when it got hot in the summer we could smell the honey.(photo Amanda Stevens)

Looking for the Queen

The swarms in the starter hives were new. The bees were still small in numbers and the queen bee had not yet been identified. That was what happened next. Beekeeper Timothy Stevens took out every single one of the frames that hung inside the hive. He and Amanda studied the bees on them carefully till they recognized the queen. Which one of the thousands of bees was the queen? To me they all looked the same. ‘But the queen has a longer thorax,’ Timothy said. ‘That is how she distinguishes herself from the others.’