Beekeeping Blog March 2020 As the weather has improved , I have been able to get out with the bees more and more. It is one activity I can do safe in the knowledge I’m not mixing with other people! The bees will not wait for us no matter what is happening so we must keep inspecting and looking after them like I normally would.

On sunny days, bees have been out flying and were quite busy collecting pollen so the mouse guards have been removed. From the picture here, you can see that when pollen baskets are full, they are quite cumbersome and could easily get knocked off by the mouse guard as they try to re-enter the hive so this is why they have been taken off. I have left the entrance blocks in as this just minimises the cold air rushing through the hives on colder days, as we are not completely into every-day-is-warm territory just yet...(are we ever?). The horrible wet autumn and winter may technically be behind us now but for our bees, further pollen collection could be limited as Breeze Hill growers have not been able  to plant everything as soon as they liked. Although the bees seem to be collecting pollen now, this lack of field planting could mean that they have less to forage on later than they usually do. Therefore, one of my main priorities this month has been to make sure the bees get enough food, including pollen substitute. They have been fed  Candy Pollene ( a commercial feed)  and they seem to have doing well. This month, the first inspection was carried out. However, this inspection was not really an inspection. It sounds odd but there is always that time in the year before the season gets going that you want to know what’s going on inside the hive so you can prepare but it’s just a bit too cold to be taking the frames out. So, the first inspection was really a quick look inside. From this, I can make a good estimate as to how strong each colony is. The floor was scraped out to remove any dead bees or detritus from the over wintering period and then the box was put back down. It is really quick - 30 seconds per hive and then the result is recorded. This gives an excellent indicator as to how each hive is doing at this time in the year and allows us to plan accordingly for when the bees really get going next month (fingers crossed!).  I will write again soon. Freddie

 The Breeze Hill Bees.
The season is already drawing to a close, we have harvested 45Lb this year ,the best yet putting this 10Lb burst on the month of sunshine we had at the start of the season in May time.
The " girls" continue to amaze us when you consider that each  summer worker bee lives about six weeks and collects about a tea spoonful in that time! This is not mentioned pollen for the grubs, and Persepolis to seal up any draughty bits in their hive!
One diversion I had was when the contractors who are building the new houses off Nior way asked me to remove a wild swarm as their  geologist could check if a badger set was live or not.
I could not remove the bees they were, I think in an old dead tree. so I provided him with a suit and protection with my smoker that I used to keep the bees away , as it turned out the set ( that was abandoned) was just off their flight line so they were not in least but interested in what was going on!
But back to our Apiary that  hasn't been without its problems we went into last winter with six colonies, lost one through the winter ( unknown causes). Of the five survivors two swarmed both of which we caught  ,one we kept and the the other we gave to  a new keeper in the county ,bringing us back to six.
Subsequently two have lost their Queens ,both where re queened  from queens donated from our bee keeping colleges then  one of those failed !
This was really too late to try again  to re queen as there are very few drones later in the year ,thus we had no choice but to amalgamate the remaining bees with one of the other "queen right" colonies. So we  are  back down to four!
In the process of harvesting our honey we discovered that for the first time in our eight seasons the wax moth had got into some stored honey awaiting spinning This was a lucky find and I must be more vigilant in the future. The moths grubs can if left undiscovered completely wreck the wax frames with the resulting collapse of the colony.
So to bring things up to date, the bees are being fed with artificial food so we can be happy they have enough for the coming winter, and I am just about to give them all the remaining colonies their  annual dose of Varroa treatment .
So they should be pretty well set until I think about mouse and woodpecker guards and winter insulation as the year wears on.

I will write again soon.  Freddie  ( fastfreddie577@gmail.com)

                                                         Early Spring in the Apiary

Looking back at my last post  from Breeze Hill  in 2018 it was as you recall a year of the "Beast from the East and then If I remember correctly about five weeks with out rain, as result we lost all our bees from our out apiary in Irchester  ( The Corner Field) and very low production  from our remaining colonies in Breeze Hill.  This was mainly due to no rain and the plants producing very little nectar for the girls  to forage on.
But as we begin our  eight  season of bee keeping with our sole Apiary at Breeze Hill the early spring signs are good . All three Colonies have come through the winter, I had fed them at the end of last year  and again both after Christmas and again at the end of February with Apicandi  a synthetic food that contains all the essential vitamins and  food supplements to give the bees a kick start for the new season.
The first hive I inspected ,the "Jane" colony was in the process of producing a new queen, how do I know this? Well the girls make "play cups" to start with , a sign they are thinking of doing something!
As it was early season there was very little  chance they were going to swarm so it  looked like the old queen was not preforming very well!
A new queen is created by the colony, who know they need one and feed selected grubs extra nutrias food stuffs (  often refereed to as "Royal  Jelly"). The chosen grub then develops several more chromosomes and becomes a queen.
True to  form several of these play cups had been taken down ( bees very  often do this) but two had been charged  and one sealed meaning a new queen had been produced she was now entombed to  pupate.
She will be the first of the two to emerge, she will sting the other through its cell wall to be come the new queen in about eighteen days time!  (she may  also live along side the old queen  for a while). 
Then the new "Queen Jane" will fly to get mated with drone bees ( males) that are just waiting to get a whiff of her and mate  ( Pheromones play a very important function in a bee colony).
A successful mating will result in the drone dying ( presumably with a smile on his face)  and the queen becoming fertile, this may well happen a dozen or more times! the more she has a successful encounter with a male the longer she will remain fertile  ( two to three years).

As for the other two hives ( Matilda and Bodica) both had eggs, grubs and sealed brood showing that all was well.
I will write again before the season gets going proper, but in case you have not seen it I recently posted about different types of bees and bee swarms that you may or have seen.  Freddie.



OUR FIRST BEE CALL OF 2019, yes folks it's that time again. As many of you know we are local bee keepers, on the council list and Northampton Bee Keepers Association.
There are lots of Bumble bee types, typically the queen has come out of hibernation, finds somewhere she can lay her eggs. This might be a bird box, or up under your eves or air brick. The first you probably notice as the youngsters emerge, fledge and start flying about This is when we get the call!
There is little to be done I'm afraid! Bees are not aggressive,
There will seem to be a lot, but in due course they will disperse as they mature and go out in the world to pollinate our crops and plants.
But there is only one type of honey bee! These are generally kept by bee keepers. But around late April ,through to june some colonies will swarm. This a natural way of procreation of species. Seeing a swarm in the air or arriving on your property can be very alarming! But the bees are well fed and only interested in keeping with the old migrating Queen, DON'T PANIC! They are not in anyway aggressive, they are simply waiting for scouts to come back with a DesRes!
You can call the council, call me 07895 088 401. Or wait for them to leave, they will when they are ready.
But we can usually collect them , it's a free service, hive them or give them to a new keeper ,

The story of my Bees in 2017

The Story The Breeze Hill Bees in 2017

The story really starts going into the winter of 2016/17.

we had two colonies of bees Matilda   and Bodica on the left, we had also an empty Top bar hive that we had brought in the end of season sales and it we want it to weather in over the winter.

The Bodica colony was on the small size being just on the minimum of six frames of bees to survive the winter.

About now in Feb 2017 looking at my diary we had a very cold snap and although we didn't know it until we were able to carry out our first inspection about a month later, that cold snap was to much for the small Bodica colony and being unable to keep themselves warm.

.So It was not until the end of April and the start of the swarming season that we where able to both replenish the empty hive with a swarm we collected from AJ Plants in irchester where one of their two colonies colonies had swarmed and also we had our first residents of the top bar hive from performing an artificial swarm one of our own hives that was on the point of swarming as well.

So we have two new queens! “2017 Bodica” and the rather salacious named Top Bar Mary!

Just a couple of weeks later on May the 7^th and without any of the normal warning signs the Matilda colony swarmed, I was there and it is a spectacular sight. With just a few minutes they had settled around the queen on a small bush . So I was able to rush home get my swarm collection kit, collect the bees and put them in a Nuc ( a small hive for use for short periods). This meant no disturbance for at least three weeks to allow the New Queen Matilda to get out and get herself mated.

A day later we had two call outs for the NBKA so it looked like the swarming period was well under way! We were able to find home for both of these with new keepers looking for their first colonies.

Just another two days and I thought that “Top Bar Mary” hive looks very quite donning my suit to have a look and they had all flown, obviously not impressed with the “Natural “ home I had provided !

Never the less this was not a problem as I had you will recall a swarm from the Matilda hive and they went into the top bar, Thus old Queen Matilda in the Nuc with her swarm became the new Top Bar Mary! In the Top Bar hive. All very confusing.

On the 19^th of May I had a quick peek into the new Matilda's hive and a routine look in the new Bodica to find that both were in the process of a producing a small number new queen cells, meaning that the previous queens had for whatever reason failed or were failing and a superseedure was in process. I WAS BEGINING TO THINK I WILL BE GLAD WHEN MAY IS FINISHED!

We had Three more call out before the end of the month a also quite a few more that turned out to be bumble bees in bird boxes ect.

During all this time we had been dusting the bees each time the hive was opened with icing sugar as the bees then clean each other and dislodge and Varroa mites that might be on them.

The colonies then seemed to settle down and in early July I was able to take four frames of honey from Bodica and two from the TOP BAR hive. with more coming along from all three colonies in time to spin some frames for honey for our open day on 12^th of the August. In total we collected about12 Lb , selling about half to offset our costs .

Shortly after that it was time I sent honey samples down the the Botanical gardens of Wales, where a young lady is doing her PHD and I hope that in the not too distant future we will get the results from where the bees are feeding and I hope it will have been on our beans, strawberries and fruit bushes.

We also to started feeding the bees with either sugar water, then later fondant and Commercial feed to ensure they had sufficient stores for the coming winter.

In mid September the weather was cooling thus the queens egg laying was slowing considerably and thus a lot of the cells ( were the Varroa hide) are open I put on MAC chemical strips on both Matilda and Bodica along with Varroa boards underneath so I could count the drop of dead Varroa and thus make an assessment as the level of infestation. Which had in fact been quite high.

In December the day and nigh temperatures had dropped considerably so it was time to put on insulation, Woodpecker guards on the the two National hives and mouse guards on the entrance ways.

Last but not least on January the 9^th this year all the colonies both  on Breeze Hill and at our Corner field Apiary in Irchester had their Christmas present of 1 KG of Commercial feed called Api Candy to ensure that food supplies does not become an issue before the first plants start to appear for the worker bees to start foraging.

But as with last year we will not know the real story until we can do our first inspection this year.

Summer is Here!

Looking out the window its hard to think that summer is here! Its already starting to rain and we are promised two more days then a brief   respite before the next low pressure comes across the country.

But summer is here never the less and the last days of spring up to now has been a very busy period for  Honey Bees and the fledgling period for Bumble Bees so the phone has been red hot!

The last one last night at the end of a quite Sunday afternoon was from the Landlord of the Ranleigh Arms about a swarm that was in his elderly neighbours garden. We got them just as a rain shower arrived , so by the time we had found them a new home we were pretty soggy. Needless to say just as we finished , the sun came out!!

This was swarm was number seven since the start of May.  And we had lost count of the number of calls and advice we had given about the docile Bumble Bee.

There are various opinions of why Honey bees swarm, the one we subscribe to is that as the weather warms up the queens egg laying really gets into gear,  its not long before the hive  rapidly becomes   congested. It’s the adult bees that decide  its time to find a new home, so that don't feed the queen so much and chase here about to get her fit to fly, because she has not been put since here mating time shortly after she emerged. They also start the process of starting a a new queen by selecting up to a dozen healthy grubs to be fed more food and turned into queens

The  Resident Queen obviously gets the message! ,And she will   normally fly on the first sunny period after rain or a cold period. Usually first thing in the    morning.

She takes most of the adult bees with her, leaving the the juveniles to look after the brood until the first of the new queens emerge , who will sting the others  to death  in their cocoons to ensure she is  the one the throne.

Mean while the  old queen has flown, usually not far and settled on a bush or fence ,

This is when we get the call!

Once settled in their temporary home, they send out scouts and will when they are ready depart for where ever the scouts decide is a desirable permanent home.

Obviously the good keeper will very often see what is going to happen and splits the hive taking the pressure off the over crowding and with the aid of one or more of the new queen cells form a new colony.

So at the time of going to press, we have found new homes with new keepers for three  swarms, one we wanted to keep, but they absconded , but we did keep two other so we now have the grand total of six hives in two locations.

I will write again soon, kind regards to you all. Freddie

First Inspection

Well spring is definitely here, today on the April 3rd the temperature was hovering around fifteen degrees early afternoon. So it was time for a full inspection at the Cornerfield Apiary .

But a couple of days earlier I had had my first look in the “Matilda “ Colony which as you will remember is the surviving one down on our Breeze Hill Allotments.

They where all happy, they still had a smidging of Candy Pollen synthetic food left. But with plenty of sealed brood and grubs , Matilda had been very busy and maybe I should have looked a little earlier! Any way we found her trapped her under crown of thorns and marked here with the white colour of last years queens ( 2016). One down three to go!

The first Colony we looked at on the Cornerfield site was Queen Anne's, she had been very busy and again I had been a little late because as you will recall we leave the queen excluder off for the winter so the queen can get to the stores in the “Super”, she had taken full advantage of it and started laying in the super  instead of down in the Brood box where she lives in the summer. But no big problem because what she had laid will all mature and the workers will clean out the cells and fill them with honey. In fact they had already started on one and it had a full one side of honey, some already sealed!

When we we then looked in the brood box , for only the third time in five years ( this is the start of my six year) Georgina and I found the her , trapped her under the crown thorns and marked her  with white for 2016.

The next colony was “Victoria” or it should have been, except there was no Victoria! Before we discovered that however we could see that the colony was quote small with very little activity in the “Super” and very little of the food I had put on on my last visit eaten.

But as soon as we started looking in the brood box we came across a charged queen cell. So obviously for unknown reasons the resident queen had been “lost” and because there was some grubs and sealed brood . The colony had started on the road of producing an “emergency” queen. They do this by choosing one of the worker bee grubs and feed it with extra Nectar and Pollen, it then transforms by a minor miracle into another queen . The queen is dead, long live the queen!

The is does mean however that we should not disturb the hive for a month. This will give the new Victoria time to emerge spread here wings and go a get mated and start laying this years brood.

The last hive we looked in was Queen “Elizabeth”, she was a 2015 ( marked blue) queen from a swarm that I had captured from our hosts apple tree. Incredibly this was the largest and most vibrant with about ten frames of busy girls , lots of sealed brood, grubs and some honey being collected. We found our Elizabeth up in the super, so we had to brush he off into the brood box before putting on the excluder. I think this colony will be the first to swarm.

So with this in mind I have set a Bait box a small hive box called a “Nuc” with some food in it so if they do swarm when I am not there they might ( big might!) go in the bait box.

But hopefully I will pre-empt this , spot what they are going to do and carry out an artificial swarm. Then use in the bait box/ Nuc to transport them back to Breeze Hill where we do need another colony.

We that's about it for now I will write again soon Freddie.

Spring in the Apiary

Hi ,well it the first day of spring to day , so its time to put the first blog of the new year. I hope you have all come through the raveges of the last big blow. Our allotment was a bit battered, but an inspection of all the hives proved that they were all intact although with a couple of fallen branches on them!

Its not generally possible to open up hives through the winter period because keeping the clustered colony warm is essential There has been a few warm days as you know , but I was never around to take advantage of them!

But one colony I was able to peek inside at was the small “ mated cast” I referred to in my last blog. Sadly they did had not survived , probably several very cold nights we had as well. So the Bodica Colony is no more!

What I am able to look at however however is the bees stores. Now you will know by now that we leave the first “super” that the bees collect on the hive because that is their store for the winter. One of the problems of the several warm periods we have had this winter is that the bees become more active. Now normally on the odd warm day in the winter the girls will come out for a fly around and do their business!

But on an extended warm period they remain active and the consequence of that is they eat more food!

So there is a risk then of starvation, as a general there is no way the bees can collect more nectar or pollen to replenish stores so this period from February to April is a food critical period for the bees.

In previous years I fed to bees with sugar water after the end of the session ( late August, Sept time) or if cold and wet, fondant because then there is no risk of damp sugar fermenting that can have a server effect on bee health.

I feed them again in reverse order just after Christmas . This year I have given them Api Candy and commercial formulated food substitute that has all the ingredients a bee needs and is not effected by temperature or weather changes.

This proved to be the right move because all the colonies are up in the top of ( probably) empty “Supers” feeding on the Api Candy sachets placed over the feeding slots in the top board.

So looking forward the signs are good but not guaranteed that we will come through with one colony on the Beeze Hill Apiary and three on Cornerfield site.

I have just decided it s time to check my swarm collecting kit because as you know we are the swarm collectors for the Council and our Association in the borough

, and it wont be that long before the phone starts ringing!

I will right again soon kind regards to you all Freddie