Hon. Newsletter Editor:
Peter Edwards
E-mail: beekeepers@stratford-upon-avon.freeserve.co.uk

JARS - URGENT

I will be ordering jars again during the coming week, so if you need any and wish to take advantage of the special prices that I can offer, you must contact me by 6 April at the latest.
Peter Edwards

WINTER LOSS RETURN

Last year we asked you all to complete a winter loss return - and we had a good response from 24 members.  The data provided some very useful information, which was collated and published in the June 2007 newsletter, so we have decided to repeat the exercise this year.  Please complete the form as at 15 April with as much detail as possible and then return it promptly, either by post, email or telephone.  For those of you who did not participate last year, please consider completing it this year - all information that you give will be kept confidential and your name will not be published.
Peter Edwards

DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME

"If a colony disposed to swarm should be blown up with dynamite, it would probably not swarm again, but its usefulness as a honey-gathering institution would be somewhat impaired."  C.C. Miller.
Peter Edwards

APIARY MEETINGS

Our first apiary meeting of the season will be held at Hampton Wood on 13 April at 2.30pm.  Do come along and see how our colonies have survived the winter - all are alive at the time of writing!  If you need directions please ring or email me.  ‘Formal’ meetings will then be held on the third Sunday of the month from May to September (all starting at 2.30pm).

Of course, we could not manage the colonies properly just with monthly visits to the apiary, so there will be many ad-hoc visits throughout the season, as and when required.  All members are welcome to come along and help, so if you want to know when something is happening you will need to keep in touch with our apiary manager, David Titcomb, on 01789 731242.

This year we will be trying to introduce a little more discipline into our meetings.  Mike Osborne has undertaken a full risk assessment at the apiary and as a result we will be asking everyone to sign in on arrival; there will be a briefing session at the start of each meeting, so that everyone knows what needs to be done, and we will also be checking to see that members and any guests are properly protected.

At each meeting there will be a ‘duty’ committee member who will take overall responsibility and we would ask members to ensure that they comply with any instructions given.  The person in charge must be made aware of any adverse reaction to stings, either at the meeting, or previously suffered by anyone attending the session.

It is important to remember that we are guests in the wood and that there may be other members of the public on nearby footpaths - their safety is paramount.

Denis Keyte will again be holding his ‘First Sunday of the Month’ meetings at his home apiary, Wootton Wawen, in May, June and July; these will start at 3pm.  If you need directions please contact Denis on 01564 792872.  Denis has very gentle bees - he usually works his bees wearing shorts - and the relaxed style of his meetings make them particularly suitable for beginners, with plenty of time to ask questions and to look at things in detail. Peter Edwards

No need for a suit of armour here!

MENTORS

As the new season begins, many associations are again using a mentoring system that has proved so successful and popular with new beekeepers.

Our association has had some success with mentoring - Mike Osborne has been particularly active in his support of beginners - but I am sure that there is plenty of room for improvement.

During the season Sue and I are usually out beekeeping several days a week and we are more than happy for other beekeepers to come with us, either for whole days, or just for an hour or two.  Obviously, the weather determines what we do and when we do it, so we are unable to provide any sort of timetable - but if you want to come with us then just keep in touch by telephone to make arrangements.  I am also happy to act as mentor by telephone or email to anyone who needs it, but please note that I may not be able to commit to visiting your apiary to look at your bees when our own colonies demand my full attention!

Perhaps some of you feel that you could act as a mentor to a new beekeeper, either as a telephone contact or by the occasional visit to each other’s apiaries.  If so, or if you would like a mentor, please let Mike or me know and we will set up a list to put people in contact.
Peter Edwards

FOR SALE

I still have a large number of National floors surplus to requirements.  No reasonable offer refused.
Peter Edwards

NOSEMA CERANAE AGAIN

We were discussing the use of Fumidil-β and other treatments for nosemas (N. apis and N. ceranae) on the Irish Beekeeping list recently and the opinion seemed to be that nosema is unlikely to develop resistance to Fumidil-β.  I am not so sure.  The use of Fumidil-β has always been at a relatively low level, partly due to cost and partly due to the fact that N. apis has never been regarded as a particularly 'serious' problem, so the opportunity to develop resistance might not have been very great.  If N. ceranae becomes a major problem, then that situation could change rapidly.  I also found the following on Randy Oliver's site (www.scientific beekeeing.com):

‘Fumagillin [sold as Fumidil-β. PE] has been successfully used to control nosema since 1957.  Although we have seen no sign of resistance to it by N. apis yet, other species of nosema problematic in insect culture have become completely resistant to the drug (Idris 2001).  Therefore, it would be wise to explore alternatives.  This would allow us to rotate treatments in order to avoid the development of drug-resistant nosema.’
Peter Edwards

INSPECTING COLONIES

Most of us will make the first full inspections of our colonies during April, so this is a good time to think about why we inspect and what you should look for when going through colonies.  Those of you who have bought, and read, Ted Hooper’s excellent ‘Guide to Bees and Honey’ will know that he suggested five main questions that you should ask yourself:

1. Has the colony enough room?

2. Is the queen present and laying well?

3a. Is the colony building up in size at an appropriate rate?  (Early inspections).

3b. Are queen cells present?  (Later inspections as the swarming season approaches).

4. Are there signs of disease or abnormality?

5. Has the colony enough stores until the next visit?

Of course, it should be easy for experienced beekeepers to make these judgements, but perhaps not quite so easy for beginners with very little experience of what is ‘normal’, so let us look at the questions in a little more detail.

Q1 is relatively straightforward.  In the spring most colonies expand rapidly, so it is really just a matter of ensuring that the bees do not run of space.  Joe Dod, of Harrogate & Ripon BKA summed it up neatly in an article about supering:

‘When a colony's bees (not brood) are covering 7 frames, typically late March or early April, they will need supering. Scrape winter brace comb off the top bars and fit a clean queen excluder. Ideally the first super should be drawn comb but foundation will do if you haven't any. If the colony is strong, there is no harm in popping two supers on. As March turns to April, good colonies will explode into activity. The novice is easily caught out in April by not having enough supers on. Two rules of thumb here: put on another super when the previous one is half full of bees and bear in mind that one frame of sealed brood will be two frames of bees next week. As brood frames are twice as big as super frames, one full brood frame will require four super frames to accommodate the hatching bees!’

If in doubt, give an extra super rather than risking overcrowding, especially in an out-apiary - empty comb actually encourages bees to collect more honey.  When it comes to the brood nest, be aware that the amount of space needed will depend on the race of bee - native bees will be happy with a single box, but those awful imported yellow ones will need two!

Q2 is also straightforward - good areas of eggs, laid in a discrete pattern, together with areas of sealed worker brood (i.e. flat cappings) will indicate a good laying queen.

Q3a is perhaps the most difficult for beginners as it requires either experience, or knowledge of how other colonies are progressing.  If you have more than one colony then it can be helpful to compare them, but beginners may still be concerned that their colonies may not be doing as well as they should.  The answer is simple - go and look at other people’s colonies!  When I first started keeping bees - way back in 1981 - I often spent time with David Titcomb when he went round his hives.  We would look at perhaps 40 hives in a day - probably the equivalent of a year’s experience for someone with just a hive or two - and it quickly became obvious which hives were doing well and which were not.  So if you need experience, take advantage of the wealth of expertise available within your own association!

Q3b can wait!  The recent cold weather makes it unlikely that we will get many swarms before the end of April, so I will cover this next month.

Q4 will not wait.  If you do nothing else, then do inspect your colonies thoroughly for disease in the spring and in the autumn before putting them down for winter, but you really should be looking for disease at every inspection as some diseases, e.g. European foulbrood, may only be seen under certain conditions.  We will look at the mechanics of inspecting in a minute.

Q5 will depend on how often you inspect your bees, but as a rule of thumb, a colony should never have less than the equivalent of two full frames of honey.  Before the flow starts you will have to judge the amount that they have, because the honey will be stored across the brood frames, but if there is plenty of honey in the supers then there is obviously no problem and Q5 can be ignored.  This situation changes again when the early crop of rape honey is removed, as the brood box may be full of brood by then and colonies could starve if there is a prolonged spell of bad weather.  The answer to this can be summed up in one word - vigilance!

The mechanics of inspecting colonies

In order to inspect brood it is necessary to shake the bees from the frames - all of them!  But if you are hoping to find your queen and perhaps mark her (highly recommended), then you will obviously need to do this before shaking; and as we go into the swarming season there may be times when we want to use queen cells that are on the frames - and it is absolutely critical that these are not shaken as the young queens inside will certainly be damaged.  So my preference is to go through the brood box quietly and quite quickly, with a minimum amount of smoke, until I know what I have in there.  I do not use cover cloths as I think that the queen then runs away from the light and is more difficult to find.  After finding the queen, and clipping and marking her if necessary, I then shake the bees off the combs so that I can have a good look at every cell for disease.  Finding queens is not difficult - just a matter of practice.  Use as little smoke as possible, work as quickly as possible without causing unnecessary disturbance, and use the ‘eye- trapping’ technique, i.e. let your eye go rapidly round the outside of the comb first (to check that she is not about to go round to the other side), then scan the centre of the frame in a zigzag pattern.  Do not look at every bee, rather let you eye look for a different pattern as queens are often surrounded by a rosette of attendant workers.  They also stand higher on the comb, have reddish legs and a more horny abdomen.

The technique for shaking bees is more easily demonstrated than described!  Lift the frame until it is perhaps half way out of the brood box, then with your fingers, flick the frame upwards and then immediately flick it down with your thumbs - practice with an empty comb!  The bees will then be moving upwards when the frame is flicked down, causing them to lose their footing and drop gently into the brood box.  Do not just lift the frame out and shake it downwards, causing all the bees to crash either on to the floor or the tops of the frames; remember that queens are delicate - and valuable!

Record keeping

This month Sue and I will start our own inspections in earnest and will hope that the weather is good enough to do a full inspection and assessment on every colony.  We will look at every comb, checking for disease and to see that queens are laying good worker brood; at the same time we will note how well the colonies are building, recording the number of frames of brood, and we will also make an initial assessment of temper.  Because we mark all our queens, we will know that any unmarked queens are the result of supersedures last autumn, so this will be recorded and the queens marked with a yellow spot to indicate that they were ‘born’ in 2007.  All this information will help us to choose our breeder queens during the coming season.

Do you keep records?  If not, why not?  Records can be as simple or sophisticated as you like, but they are an invaluable tool in the management of colonies, particularly so when selecting colonies from which to breed, but also as an aid to working out what went wrong when problems occur at a later stage.  Simple records can be based on ticks in boxes based on Ted Hooper’s five questions, but you may like to flesh this out with assessments by scoring colonies for things like temper and productivity on a points system from 1 to 5.  Why not give it a try?
Peter Edwards

RED(D)S UNDER THE BEDS!

Many beekeepers use Ted Hooper's well-known five questions as an aid when inspecting their colonies.

In my hive records, I used to enter my answers to these questions in columns headed 1, 2, 3, etc.  Unfortunately, I've a poor memory for numbers and could never remember what each number represented.  At the back of my hive-record book, I had to write down the meaning of each number and consult this at every inspection.  Sick of this, I decided to devise a mnemonic for remembering the five questions.  I came up with the following:

R = Room E = Eggs D = Development of (a) colony (b) queen cells D = Disease S = Stores "REDDS" reminds me of the old phrase "Reds under the beds" that was common during the McCarthy-era witch-hunts in the U.S.  I now label the columns in my notebook R, E, D, D, S and have no problem remembering what they stand for.
Eoghan Mac Giolla Coda, published in the magazine of the Galtee Bee Breeding Group, The Four Seasons, courtesy B.E.E.S.

BEES WANTED

Our treasurer, John Beaumont, needs bees - nucs, colonies or swarms.  Offers to John please on 01926 484094.

DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME EITHER!

Here's a suggestion published in 1853 Wisconsin USA. We can only wonder how many may have tried this advice.

"Some one having suggested that the administration of chloroform to bees would put them to sleep long enough to obtain their honey, a writer in the Boston Cultivator says he has tried the experiment with perfect success, the bees were put to sleep and have slept soundly ever since."
Peter Edwards