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

If you need a swarm this year please ring our new Swarms Officer, Moira Osborne, on 01789 731745. (Moira already has a list of the members who indicated on the membership forms that they were willing to collect or help with swarms).
Mike Osborne

Peter Edwards 

 NATIONAL INSECT WEEK

I see that 14-20 June has been designated 'National Insect Week', with the backing of the Royal Entomological Society and BBC Wildlife magazine.

Clearly, there will be opportunities to promote our Association, beekeeping in general and, I would hope, our honey - but there are also many activities for those interested in learning more about some of the other insects with whom we share this world. Further details are on the website set up by Plymouth University:

http://www.nationalinsectweek.co.uk/

A project that we, as beekeepers, really should be supporting is the Rothamsted Research Bumblebee Nest Survey. Details are on their website:

http://www.rothamsted.bbsrc.ac.uk/pie/BumblebeeSurvey/

or you can write for a pack to National Bumblebee Nest Survey, Rothamsted Research, Harpenden, Hertfordshire, AL5 2JQ.
Peter Edwards

Many people seem to find swarm control difficult and often simply cut out the queen cells, hoping that the problem will go away. Of course, this very rarely works and is really a pointless exercise as the bees simply build more. So I thought that we might look at the easiest, reliable method of swarm control - the artificial swarm - step by step.

Creating an artificial swarm is a simple procedure that can be done at any time when there are queen cells in a colony and the queen is still present. So if you find only unsealed queen cells with larvae in them, it is time to make an artificial swarm without delay. If you have no equipment ready, cage the queen securely and then you can return to deal with the colony later. If there are sealed queen cells then they have probably swarmed and it is too late (ring for advice on what to do next if you need it!).

Rather than try to remember each move by rote, it may be more helpful to think about the principles involved so that you have a clear idea of what you need to do.

The purpose of the procedure is to remove the brood combs (with the queen cells) and the young bees from the colony, leaving the queen and, of course, the flying bees as an artificial swarm. The brood combs are placed in a hive on a new site beside the old hive. Although it can be done by setting up an empty hive beside the old one and moving the combs across, in practice it is usual to simply move the old hive to one side, put a new box on the original site and then put the queen back in it where the flying bees will join her. Here is the step by step guide:

1. Remember that you must never shake the bees off a frame with queen cells if you may want to use one of those cells later.
2. Remove the roof of the hive and place the supers on it.
3. Pick up the brood box and place it on a new site 2-3' to one side of the old one.
4. Put a new empty brood box on the old site.
5. Find the queen in the old box and put her and the frame that she on into the new box. It is essential that there are no queen cells on this frame, but before you destroy them all, be certain that there are good queen cells left in the old box! Ideally, this frame will have no young larvae (so that the artificial swarm cannot make queen cells from them) and you might prefer to choose a suitable one and then put the queen on it.
6. Fill the new box with foundation or empty drawn comb, put on the queen excluder, supers and roof - and breathe a sigh of relief! You have now created your artificial swarm. (Note that it is better to use some drawn comb because returning bees will have nowhere to store pollen until foundation is drawn and will put it in the supers). Check that they are not building new queen cells after a few days - remove any that are found.
7. If you can't find the queen, proceed as above, but shake or brush all the bees down in front of the new box, remembering not to shake queen cells. Then put the old box with the brood and queen cells on top of the supers and leave for a couple of hours. The queen will be down in the new box and young bees will go up through the supers to cover the brood. Remove the old box and continue.

You can deal with the old box, which contains the brood, young bees and queen cells. There are a number of ways that this could be used, e.g. split it into nucs (probably up to three), use it as a new colony or allow a new queen to mate and then unite it back to the new box - effectively re-queening the original colony without making increase.

For the first option the frames are simply split between 3 nucleus boxes, making sure that there is a good queen cell in each. For the second and third options:

1. Go through the frames and find a good shaped queen cell, wide rather than long, and with a deeply patterned surface rather than smooth. Choose an unsealed cell so that you can see that there is a healthy larva in it (pearly white floating on the royal jelly). This unsealed cell will not hatch in less than a week and this point is important later.
2. Destroy all other queen cells on the frame with your chosen cell - do not shake the frame, but you can brush off some of the bees gently (use a twist of grass) to ensure that there are no other cells.
3. Shake the bees off the other frames and destroy any queen cells.
4. Close the hive and leave for 7 days.
5. By now the queen cell will be near hatching, but will not have hatched, and there will be a considerable number of flying bees. When the queen hatches and flies to mate, there is a danger that the bees will leave with her and not return - a mating swarm. To prevent this, move the hive now to the other side of the hive containing your artificial swarm. The flying bees will join the artificial swarm, strengthening it, and the new queen will emerge in the weakened colony that will not swarm.
6. When the queen is laying you will have a new colony, but could then kill the queen in the artificial swarm and then unite the two boxes if you did not want to make increase.
   Peter Edwards

I know that some may think that I have written on the subject ad nauseam, but it is perhaps timely to put on my Disease Liaison Co-ordinator's hat and remind you all to look for brood disease in your early inspections this year. We have had outbreaks of AFB and EFB in recent years and, whilst I know of no outbreaks so far this year, we can be sure of one thing - there will be more outbreaks at some time in the future. So what do we need to do? Just two things:

• Examine brood thoroughly. This means shaking most of the bees off the brood combs and looking at each cell that contains brood. Make sure that you know what healthy brood, sealed and unsealed, looks like so that you can detect anything abnormal. If you do think that you may have a problem, then there are plenty of good photographs in various books and National Bee Unit leaflets that may help, but if you are unsure then please shout for help. Advice is free and you all have my email and telephone number - the answering machine is always on.
• Handle bees hygienically. Beekeeping is a branch of animal husbandry and we should all bear this in mind when handling our bees. In the May 2002 newsletter I gave details of how to use gloves and soda-wash when handling colonies. For those without access to the Internet I can supply copies on request.

Can I also remind everyone that it is Association policy that anyone handling colonies at our Association Apiary must wear disposable gloves and use the soda-wash that we supply. Association apiaries are wonderful places to exchange diseases!
Peter Edwards

These are enclosed with this month's mailing. Please check carefully, especially the BDI cover, and let me know if there are any errors.
Will Spencer

Our website is two years old! It has 103 pages, 119433 words and has had 3325 visitors.
Peter Edwards