ECBKA NEWSLETTER September

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1 ECBKA NEWSLETTER September It's been a better summer than we have had for several years resulting in a bumper honey crop for many of us. Show season is over, the association apiary has moved to a new location, nights are drawing in and our evening meetings are starting this month, we look forward to seeing you there. I hope that some of the new members, who will be nursing their nucs through their first winter, will became regular attendees. The committee is now drawing up a programme for next year's meetings. We have had many well attended meetings over the last couple of years but it is not easy to come up with fresh ideas so if you have any suggestions please make them known to the committee. DATES Wednesday 3 September 7.30pm ECBKA Committee Thursday 11 September 8.00pm Microscopy (nosema testing) and winter preparation Thursday 9 October 8.00pm Making mead with Dinah Sweet Thursday 13 November 8.00pm Beekeeping quiz details to be confirmed - Thursday 11 December 8.00pm DIY honey show & seasonal get together THE ASSOCIATION APIARY Since the last newsletter the association apiary has been moved to a new site in Salem, a location more central to our members. Many members have worked hard to get the site up & running and we are particularly grateful to Paul & Basil for finding the site & to Paul for his negotiations and organisation at the business end of things. A working party prepared the sites for the hives where Keith excelled with his shovel skills. The hives are now safely installed with many thanks to Geoff, Melanie and Nikki who undertook the move. The bees from Harford have been joined by some additional hives, generously donated by member Colin Ward who has now given up keeping bees. Thank you again to Geoff, Melanie & Nikki who transported the new hives to the apiary. It only remains for the shed to be dismantled (Keith has already made a good start) and relocated and any help with this job will be greatly appreciated. There will just be time left this season for members, who are able, to join Nikki at the apiary on a Thursday afternoon. The location of the apiary will be posted on the members' area of the website as soon as a technical difficulty has been resolved. If you need directions in the meantime please contact Nikki or one of the committee members.

2 CILYCWM SHOW August Bank Holiday Monday was a miserable, wet day but it was anything but miserable in the show tent (in the honey section at least). Whether or not it was due to my nagging I don't know but we had an excellent number of entries in all classes. There were 26 entries for the honey classes, 9 frames for extraction and at least a dozen honey cakes so the judge, Claire Miller, was kept very busy. Thank you to Doug Taylor for volunteering to be steward. It is actually very interesting and you can learn a lot from the judge about honey & showing. For those of you who weren't able to enter any of your honey for the 'official' show because you didn't have time, couldn't get there, couldn't get any 1lb jars (sorry, it was me who had the last 2 from Ratcliffes!) or weren't confident that your honey was good enough, we will be having a DIY honey show at our December evening meeting where members will be able to judge the entries. You will hear more about that later in the year. As well as the honey show we had our ECBKA stand out on the field. Thank you yet again to Alan for organising and getting everything to the field and our star salesman, Lewis. Despite the weather there were very few left of the 80 jars of honey that were brought along. About 200 jars of the Association's honey have been sold at the 3 shows we have attended this year. Thank you also to those who helped to set up & strike camp and talk to the visitors to the stand. A lot of people came & went throughout the day but I know that Basil, Keith, Alan, John & Lewis were there for the duration. HONEY SHOW RESULTS 2 jars of light honey: 1 st Frank Gellatly 2 nd Linda Wallis 3 rd Margaret Watson 2 jars of med/dark honey: 1 st Margaret Watson 2 nd Linda Wallis 3 rd Chris Powell 2 jars of soft set/crystallised honey: 1 st & 2 nd Linda Wallis 3 rd Kate de Buriatte 2 jars of any honey (novice): 1 st Keith Hall 2 nd Vikki Davies 3 rd Doug Taylor

3 Frame for extraction: 1 st Alan Surman 2 nd Frank Gellatly 3 rd Nikki Grant Wax block or beeswax item: 1 st Nikki Grant 2 nd Linda Wallis 3 rd Nikki Grant Home made beekeeping equipment: 1 st Keith Hall 2 nd Kate de Buriatte Set recipe honey cake: 1 st Kate de Buriatte 2 nd Anne Theophilus 3 rd Sally Saunders Honey Fudge: 1 st Ted Perkin 2 nd Linda Wallis 3 rd Kate de Buriatte Bee / beekeeping photos: 1 st Linda Wallis 2 nd & 3 rd Margaret Watson Congratulations to Linda who won the cup for the highest number of points in the section and to Alan who won the coveted Blue Ribbon for the best exhibit in the section for his frame of honey (front left in the above picture). MICROSCOPY EVENING Our September meeting will be a chance for you to check samples of your bees for the presence of nosema spores. If it is your first time you may feel guilty or squeamish about killing some of your bees but if one of your hives goes into winter with a heavy nosema load it may not survive until the spring or if it does it will struggle & may fail to build up next season. If you do find nosema present now there is time to do something about it during autumn feeding. If you are attending the meeting you will need to bring a sample of dead bees from each of your hives. You will also need a pestle & mortar if you have one, a small bottle of water, some kitchen roll & unless you are happy to pull bees apart by hand, a small pair of scissors or tweezers. Microscopes & slides will be provided but if you have an additional microscope that you can bring please do. We will also have a talk about winter preparations. Frank has given us a lot of information in the recent Welsh Beekeeper magazine and in his seasonal notes in this newsletter. Please digest both those articles and come along with your questions. How to collect a sample for Nosema testing This is not easy! The ideal bees to collect are older flying bees, this is because they are the ones most likely to be infected and collecting them around the middle of the day is the time that infected bees are most likely to be flying. 1. Block off the entrance with something (grass, cloth, foam etc) and wait a few minutes for the returning bees to start gathering. 2. Scoop about 30 bees into a suitable container (matchbox, honey jar anything that won t squash the bees) This is the difficult bit but just get as many as you can into the container. If you use a matchbox, close it trapping the bees inside. If you use a jar slide a piece of card under the opening & then replace the lid without allowing any bees to escape.

4 3. Label the container so that you will know which hive it came from and then freeze it to kill the bees. If you are collecting the sample more than a day before it will be tested then leave it frozen until the testing day. INVERT SYRUP Frank will be bringing a supply of invert syrup, for Autumn feeding, to the September meeting for anyone who requests it. If you would like some please let Frank know before the day so that he knows how much to bring. Frank has some containers but please provide your own if possible. From my own experience, unless you are very strong, I would suggest 15 litres max.. I had syrup last year in 25 litre containers & they weighed about 40kg! Contact Frank at: FrankG@ec-bka.com. SEASONAL NOTES FOR SEPTEMBER I ve just put the second Apiguard treatment on my hives today, having taken the honey off in the second week of August. The mite drop hasn t been very significant, but enough to justify the treatment. My honey yield has averaged 50lb per hive; being an average, some did much better than this and, of course, some less, but I m happy with the overall result. Interestingly the yield is slightly down on last year, but I had more colonies getting through last winter to bring it in. The other observation from this season is that some queens have been slow to mate and a few have failed altogether. I have a drone layer and a couple of hives that are empty, presumably where the queen failed to return from mating. The next important job is to carefully go through each apiary, check for disease, queen laying and unite any colonies I don t want to put through winter solo. Then I ll rationalise frames, making sure each colony has a good set of drawn frames, preferably with stores, but ready to take syrup. The empty hives will be brought back into store, and surplus good brood frames fumigated with 80% acetic acid over the winter. Feeding the bees is likely to be uppermost in most beekeepers minds this month, I covered a lot of winter preparation last month so I ll concentrate on feeding now. A decent colony of bees will need 40 lbs of stores to get it through the winter. Some of this may already be present in the colony in the form of honey in the brood box. Sometimes a strong colony of bees will have used all the brood area for breeding and stored all the honey in the supers, which have been extracted by the beekeeper. In these circumstances the bees may need more feeding than those that have been more frugal in their efforts and hung onto their honey down below. Some beekeepers like to leave a super of honey for the bees and others collect a heather crop specifically as

5 winter feed. You can heft the colony or weigh it with a spring balance on each side if you are unsure whether there are enough stores. As far as equipment is concerned it makes very little difference to the bees how you get the food into them. Beekeepers, however, have their own particular preferences and there are advantages and disadvantages to each. There are frame feeders which deliver directly into the brood nest and reduce the likelihood of robbing, but take up valuable comb space and only deliver fairly small quantities of syrup at a time. These are better kept for feeding nucs in summer. There are rapid feeders that require bees to crawl through a central aperture to get to the syrup. They can be small and need an extra super or lift, but can be topped up easily without disturbance to the hive. Then there are Miller and Ashforth feeders where bees go up through a central or side entrance into a chamber to get at the syrup. These fit particularly nicely on to single walled hives and allow all the feeding for a colony to be done in one go. They also provide a place for spare bits of comb to be left for cleaning up without fear of robber bees gaining access. They are particularly good for out apiaries. Finally there are contact feeders. These require the least effort on the part of the bees and for the cost conscious they can be made for free from plastic buckets with a lid drilled with some small holes. The disadvantage is that they need a spare empty super or a special eke and a bucket to collect all the drips that leak out when you turn it over until the vacuum is formed. Timing of feeding is also quite important. If you feed too early you run the risk of over stimulating the queen into laying copiously and creating an extra demand for the food that you have given, possibly causing it to be eaten up too soon. If you leave it too late the weather may have turned too cold for the stores to be properly ripened thereby running the risk of dysentery and the spread of nosema during the winter. Plans can be affected by a long Indian summer and you may need to check there are still sufficient stores if this happens. Bees will continue to store syrup regardless of whether they need it or not, whilst conditions are right for them to do so. They do not store syrup because they are hungry nor do they leave it because they are full. Bees do not work this way. They are programmed to collect stores when conditions are right. Syrup should be taken down by the bees very quickly. A gallon can easily be stored in 24 hrs. If it isn t there is something wrong that needs attention. Syrup can be fed warm or cold, made at a recommended rate of 1kg to 1 pint of water. Warm water helps the sugar to dissolve and bees prefer warm syrup. Mine get invert syrup which they store very easily. Some beekeepers like to feed candy and a very few may recommend dry sugar, however candy is not particularly appropriate for winter use and dry sugar is just plain lazy. Ivy flowers are budding and will be out in due course, let s hope for a good autumn so foraging can continue on this and the Himalayan Balsam and heather, amongst others. A colony with ample stores is not only set up for the winter with energy rich food but the stores also act as excellent insulation so a well fed colony is doubly protected against the rigours of winter. Frank (with thanks to Pam Gregory)

6 St Fagans Nikki has sent a link to an interesting You Tube video. or type 'beekeeping by rotation system you tube' to find it. I haven't had time to watch it all yet but I want bees like that! That's all I have time for I'm afraid, I apologise for being late getting this edition out to you it's been a hectic couple of weeks. I'm going to start leaning on some people for contributions as they seem to have dried up of late so you may want to duck out of sight if you see me looming. Please send contributions to newsletter@ec-bka.com 2014 Committee Margaret Watson chair Geoff Saunders secretary Huw Jones treasurer Frank Gellatly Jen Dancey Paul Smith Stephen Smith Contact: committee@ec-bka.com

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