Busy, busy, busy.  The swarm season is reaching a quieter period but we're still in the throes of recovering several colonies which have set up home in some very awkward locations.  There's the bees in a hollow tree which now has more sand and cement rendering than bark, the bees 35' up a brick wall in Abbeywood and the three separate colonies in the upper storeys of a beautiful Elizabethan manor house.  More of the challenges we faced and the solutions applied to them in later blogs.

Another wild colony set up home in a very old national hive, (2 supers glued together), which was transported to the Apiary early this year.  Several attempts have been made to get the bees to leave this box which is full of a higgledy piggledy mass of comb.  We tried placing a brood chamber, fitted with frames of drawn comb, over the old box and feeding them 1:1 sugar syrup and we tried to bleed them out of the old box using a Snelgrove board. These attempts were only partially successful.  Yesterday, Saturday 18/June, Bill Mundy gave a demonstration of how to extract the bees using a method derived from the historical technique beekeepers used with Skeps, (frame-less woven straw hives).  First of all he moved the old box from it's location and placed a box containing some drawn comb, which has now become their new home, in it's place.  The old box was placed on a stand in front of a chair in which Bill positioned himself.  A super with one end covered by a sheet of plywood was fixed edge to edge and tilted at a 30 degree angle above the old box so that the whole assembly looked like a chest with it's hinged lid partially open.  Bill then began to strike the old box rhythmically on either side.  After about 2 minutes the bees could be seen marching up into the "lid".  After 5 minutes or so of this treatment most of the bees had left their old home and we were able to take the lid with it's cluster of bees and shake them into their new home.  We cut out bits of the old comb, some containing eggs and young brood and some stores of honey and nectar.  These were fitted into frames with chicken wire tacked on one side and secured in place with a strand of wire wound around pins on the other side.  These frames were installed in the new box on the old site.  Job done!

Bob Kent has kindly offered to help members of Dartford Beekeepers with the BBKA Basic Assessment.  Anyone interested should contact me and we’ll organise study and, mock exams.  Bob has taken and passed the exam and his experience is a valuable resource for potential students.  The Prospectus and syllabus can be found on the BBKA website - http://www.bbka.org.uk/learn/examinations__assessments/basic_assessment 

We've had one or two problems with the feral bees situated about 6 metres from the pavilion, they were put there very late one night early in the year and they seem to consider the communal area in front of the hut as within the boundaries of their defended territory.
We've had an incident where bees managed to get into a lad's smock because the waist elastic was not tight enough.  Please be vigilant and tell the others present if the bees are getting frisky.  The good news is that over the past few days they've been very quiet and settled and we hope to move them several miles away in the near future.


Barry

Broad Beans, Vicia faba

Broad Beans, Vicia faba, is a major source of nectar and pollen for the Honey Bee.  A very important factor in favour of  B. beans is early flowering especially when they are autumn sown.  Farmers and gardeners often choose to sow an autumn crop to occupy the land during the winter, to produce an early crop and to avoid major infestation by the dreaded blackfly.  The nectar and pollen produced early in the year give the Bees and other pollinating insects, notably Bumble bees, an early start in building a strong colony and storing surplus honey.  If the Beekeeper is fortunate enough to be near a farm that sows Feild Beans as a forage crop there may well be a surplus of honey for the Beekeeper, when the beans are sown as green manure however, they are ploughed in before they flower.

Barry

Dr.Nikki Gammans on Bumble bees, Pavilion mods and Feral bees.

Next Saturday, June 11th, Dr.Nikki Gammans will give a presentation on Bumble bees.  She is currently engaged in a project to re-introduce The Short-haired bumblebee (Bombus subterraneus) which is extinct in the UK but survives in New Zealand and Sweden.
We've made a few alterations to the Pavilion. The partition wall onto which Bill Mundy projected his Powerpoint presentations has been removed and the end wall, of the Pavilion, panelled in plywood and painted white to make a new larger screen.  We estimate that we will be able to accommodate an extra eight people seated for Talks or Presentations.
The Apiary now has four colonies one in each of the Beehaus,  the Dartington, the Top Bar hive and H7 (a national).  Another six colonies, (5 frame Nucs) will be collected soon.
We also have a feral colony temporarily housed on site.  This colony is in a very old very decrepit brood box and super all glued together with propolis and wild comb.  We placed a new brood chamber with frames of drawn comb and foundation over the colonies wild home, in the ancient boxes, in the hope that they would move up into the new box so that they can be properly managed.   They have moved into the new chamber but are still using the old boxes extensively so we have re-configured the tower to comprise a floor, the new deep, then a Snelgrove board and on top of this the old component of their home.  We intend to bleed off as many of the bees as possible into the lower chamber by manipulating the Snelgrove board entrances.  Colin the colony's owner intends to re-queen at the end of the month and move them to a new site.
See you on Saturday
Barry

Plants for Bees 2 June

Blackberry, Brambles Rubus fruticosus

The factors that make a good bee plant are the number of flowers it bears, the quality and quantity of nectar and pollen produced, the length of time that they produce flower and the time of year when those flowers are producing bee fodder.  These factors can be weighted in order of their importance. For instance flowers that produce pollen and or nectar very early in the year such as winter Aconite, Crocus and the various Willows allow the bees to build the strength of the colony ready to exploit the main flows of nectar later in the year.  Added to the above the Beekeeper must consider the fact that bees concentrate their efforts where there is most nectar / pollen closest to the hive, thus a large area of inferior flowers will be preferred to flowers which individually yield more forage but are scattered in small groups.

Blackberries score highly according to the all the above criteria and are a major source of pollen and nectar for bees and many other insects. They are very widely distributed and cover large areas.  Added to this, individual plants flower prolifically from May to September covering the periods when there is little nectar available from other plants.

Management of Blackberries is easy. All you need to remember is that they fruit on last years growth, so after they have cropped prune out all the old growth and leave the current year's stems (the green ones).  To make life easy train this years runners in the opposite direction from last years.   

 When the insects have done their work of pollination the brambles  fruit prolifically.  A win - win situation, stores for the bees and jam for us!

Barry