I Think It Might Be Autumn

The weather weird-ing continues, one stormy night followed by a day of rain and showers and the daily temperature has dropped by around 12C.  The usual couple of months where the temperature slowly ramps up in spring and then descends in autumn haven’t happened this year which is a great pity as it is those months when most of the outside work gets done.  Never mind, there is always next year

The harvest this year is much less than usual at my place; the cold spring along with the wet early part of summer which then over a couple of days turned to an extremely hot summer with no rain meant not many pollinators made it to my place and the plants themselves struggled to grow.  However in august things started growing so I had some fresh vegetables.

The nectarines were rather small but tasty.  The ones in the basket above are the white fleshed type.  The yellow fleshed ones, which are generally sweeter, only had 2 fruits that made it through to somewhere near ripening and they were both eaten by the hornets before they were ready to harvest.

The peaches though did reasonably well. 

Most of these were knocked off by the wind but I don’t leave the peaches on the tree until soft, again because of the hornets, wasps and ants.  As soon as they start to go yellow, I go through the tree and give each one a gentle twist and take off those that basically come away in my hand.  They are still hard but I found this way of ripening them somewhere on the Internet and it works better than any other method I’ve used.  The peaches are laid out on a cotton cloth and covered loosely with another one.  I check them every couple of days and remove any that are starting to go off but on the whole they soften ready for eating.

This year it was the early flowering almond that got the best of the weather.  Usually it doesn’t produce much as normally it gets the worse weather.  I don’t have anywhere near as many almonds as last year but that will make these even more tasty. 

The wild hazel trees have struggled too.  Most of the hazelnuts above I think are empty – they don’t fall out of their cases – but I will open them just the same until I convince myself that my theory works.

I lifted the shallots a few weeks ago and they hadn’t produced many large bulbs.  I’ve used a few but the majority will be going back in the ground for next year.

With the changing of the climate I think that saving your own seed is going to become more important to ensure that the plants you grow can flourish in your particular environment.  Lets just hope we can stop the EU legislators from banning us from saving and using our own seed so we have to fill the coffers of the mega companies.

The bees are still here too!

The swarm has probably quadrupled in size over the summer so I’m hopeful there will be enough of them to survive the winter; there needs to be a big enough group to generate enough heat to keep them warm and alive through winter.  However, I don’t think they have enough honey so I’ve not taken any for myself and have started feeding them some heavy syrup.  I will keep feeding them this syrup for a couple of weeks as I think they still have time to convert it to honey.  If however the weather looks like it is going to degrade further I’ll have to stop and change to fondant. 

Today though they were out and working and were bringing in a lot of pollen. 

Yesterday when I checked them, I also fitted the mouseguard as part of the winter preparation.  Again the bees were very patient with me despite me faffing about and intermittently closing off the entrance while I tried to get the height of the guard right.  Note to self, fit the mouseguard before filling with bees next time!

They adapted to the mouseguard really quickly and it will serve a double purpose.  Not only should it stop any mice from entering and building a nest to overwinter in the warmth of the hive but it also makes the entrance more defendable.  That point was brought home while I was doing my hive check. 

I’d just opened up the hive when I noticed a hornet taking rather a lot of interest in the bees that were on the crown boards I’d taken off.  Thankfully it was the European hornet and not the Asiatic.  I gave it a bit of a dousing with the water spray and it moved off.  About a thirty seconds later I realised it had returned.  I’d not seen it come back but a couple of the guard bees had wrestled it to the ground and were battling to kill it.  My boot came down rather heavily as I didn’t want there to be any chance of it going back to its nest and telling the others.

A Bit More Bees

I collected my wild colony of bees in a standard Langstroth brood box, but because of my height or rather lack of it, I don’t want to be lifting heavy supers so I’m trying out the horizontal version of a Langstroth hive.  While the hive itself is more difficult to move, the frames are always easy to reach.

So the morning after collecting the colony I put the traditional hive in place and let the bees out and gave them a couple of days to orientate while I fed them sugar syrup to help persuade them to stay put.  As they didn’t all fly away immediately I was hopeful that we had got the queen.  Even if we hadn’t  I knew we'd got eggs and uncapped larvae so they could raise a new queen.

As I still had bees after a couple of days it was time to move them to the long hive. There is a rule of thumb for moving hives, you either move them to a spot less then 3 ft away or more than 3 miles away.  So despite the two hives looking slightly different I decided to just exchange them but making sure the new entrance was in the same place as the old one and transfer over the frames.

So we went from

to

My experiences as a beekeeper are rising exponentially at the moment, every check of the hive is another learning opportunity.  I’ve fed the bees for about a month but now they have had time to mature and have a complement of flying bees along with the improvement in the weather and the return of flowering plants, I’ve stopped.

I’ve still not seen the queen though, partly due to not yet being able to make a proper inspection.  One of the reasons for this is that where we’d used rubber bands to to hold the wild comb against the frames the bees weren't keen on them and had started chewing through them before they’d built up enough new wax to hold the combs in place.  The combs were falling off the frames and into each other and in general a total mess was in process of starting.

So a carving knife joined my beekeeping kit and I bought some different stuff to tie on the combs.  The ties are lengths of thin plastic tubing that is slightly stretchy and designed to tie in plants.  The knife is to cut the comb between the frame and the scissors to trim the tied ends of the tubing.

Considering what I was doing to their home the bees were really calm.

A week later, another check showing a bit more of the kit and a couple of extra frames with foundation.

I’m gradually getting better at keeping the smoker alight.  I’ve once had it go out mid inspection but was able to continue as I had my water spray and could ‘persuade’ any bees that were taking too much interest in me to head back to the hive.  I also use the water spray to clear away any bees that may have landed on the back of my bee suit before I take the suit off.

My bees, they really are there, they just carry on working on the comb as long as I don’t keep smoking them.

The smoke agitates them so I use it by the entrance before I start the inspection so they fill up on honey, (they are less likely to sting if they are full of honey), and then try only to use it around me if I have a bee that is insistent on flying round me.  They really are very calm and as long as I don’t drop the frames or knock them they tend to leave me alone to get on with the inspection.

I’ll be inspecting them again early in the week and really hope to see the queen.  There were lots of uncapped larvae last week so something has been laying eggs but it could be laying workers so I really need to see the queen.  One positive sign though is that while I have spotted a couple of queen cups I’ve not seen any queen cells.

Bees like all insects need water but can’t take off from the surface of water and drown if they land on it so I’ve put in a bee drinker for my bees and any other insects that need it.

More Bee Stuff

Before I could get the bees, I needed to wire some frames to accept the wild comb.  After a bit of research I realised that there are almost as many ways to wire a frame as there are beekeepers!  So this is my way, based on how I was shown by Frederic a local French beekeeper, but I’m sure it will evolve every time I have to do it. 

This is my frame wiring kit: Empty frames, tacks, tack hammer, pliers, cutters, stainless steel frame wire, crimpers and a board.

First up I place the two tacks that will be used to secure the wire.  These are just off the line of the pre-drilled holes – these frames are wired side to side not up and down – in order to not weaken the structure.  The tacks are put in enough to just poke through the other side but still leave enough protruding to wrap the wire around

I then pass the wire through side to side starting by the tack nearest to the top of the frame and finishing by the tack at the bottom of the frame.

I then wind the end of the wire a few times round the bottom tack to secure it.  Working back towards the top of the frame I hand tighten each length of wire, securing it in place by folding it down the side of the frame with my thumb.  When I get to the top of the frame, I at first tried tightening the wire a bit more using the pliers but quickly decided that it didn’t make enough difference to warrant fiddling around with the pliers.  So I just pull the wire hand tight and wind it a few times round the tack to secure it before cutting the wire from the reel.

The tacks are then driven home to secure the wire and the ends of the wire trimmed so that they don’t interfere with the edges of the hive and don’t rip your gloves.  I then trim most of the excess off the end of the tacks so they don’t poke too far into where the foundation and comb will be.

While the wire is now reasonably tight, it’s not tight enough to keep the foundation rigid.  This final tightening is achieved using a crimper.

I run the crimper over each strand until each is no longer loose but not so tight that it is in danger of breaking or warping the frame.

The frame is then ready to take the wild comb or to mount a sheet of foundation. 

I did prepare quite a few frames of foundation as well but completely forgot to take any photographs so that will have to wait for another day.

I’ve Bee-n Busy!

Sorry for the terrible pun but I just couldn’t resist it.

I’ve been taking bee-keeping lessons on and off for the last few years.  I’d finally got round to getting my hives but thought I’d missed the boat this year to go and collect a swarm.  However, I received an e-mail from a friend who said she knew of someone who had come down to a holiday home and discovered a bee’s nest between a window and its shutters and did I know of anyone who could remove it.

Well, I’d only held a frame of bees once but luckily one of the members of the local bee group I’m with, (Martyn), had been to assist in the removal of one of these nests and was eager to have a go himself.  I wanted bees so despite the distance away the bees were we decided we’d remove them.

The bees had built their combs over the handle of the shutters so we couldn’t get at the nest from the outside but the window was  really easy to get at from the inside.

We tentatively opened the window and applied some smoke.  Some of the flying bees came into the room but most of the bees remained on the comb and Martyn then cut the comb to size and detached it from the window.  We attached the comb to the frames with elastic bands and placed the combs and as many bees as we could collect into the Langstroth hive I’d brought along.  Considering we were in effect destroying their home, the bees were remarkably good tempered, something I’m really happy about.

We then had to do something we’d rather not have had to do.  We had to abandon and destroy the bees that hadn’t stayed with the comb.  Normally we would have left the hive for a day or two and collected it a following evening when hopefully most of the flying bees would have gone back onto the comb.  Unfortunately, one of the occupants of the house suffers from anaphylactic shock from bee stings and because of that we had to remove the bees as soon as possible.

But I am now a bee-keeper and there should be more bee posts to follow.