ECBKA NEWSLETTER April 2014

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1 ECBKA NEWSLETTER April This is the month that we should all be able to have a good look at our hives if there hasn't been an opportunity already. I hope that everyone finds their bees healthy, happy & busy. The March meeting was a timely reminder from Frank about bee health with an update on current disease issues and some interesting information about the Asian hornet which is now perilously close to British shores. They look pretty scary but make sure you know the difference between these & the European hornet which does not cause a problem to our bees. Frank also recommended a new book, Healthy Bees Are Happy Bees, by Pam Gregory. We will be getting a copy for the Association library. I apologise for the lack of tea at the March meeting, there was a breakdown in communication. Tea will be making a reappearance at the next meeting on 10 th April. This will be a session on swarming, prevention & control. After the mild winter we have had this may be needed sooner rather than later so if you started with your bees last season, the honeymoon period is over & I would recommend that you come along and get your plan of action prepared. Margaret magwat53@hotmail.co.uk SUBSCRIPTIONS Members who have renewed or joined up this year should have received their electronic membership certificates by . This is something new for us and seems to be going well. It will certainly save us a few bob in postage! For those of you who have yet to renew membership, please send your subscriptions to me together with the renewal slip at the end of the newsletter. A receipt, new membership and insurance certificate will be ed to you in return Subscription Rates which include BDI cover and affiliation to WBKA are the same as last year 0-3 colonies colonies colonies colonies colonies Subscriptions fall due on the 1 st January each year. Although our subscription rates include Bee Disease Insurance cover, members should be aware that, under the BDI s forty day rule, where the subscription is not paid until after 31 st March, then there will be a period of forty days from the date of payment before BDI cover commences. If paid before 31 st March then cover commences immediately. Best wishes and good luck in Beekeeping. Huw

2 APIARY REPORT A quick update on the apiary overwinter. We have 8 colonies still, all surviving the winter so far. I had to feed 2 of them at the end of Feb. due to them being very light and the bees "knocking on the crown board" as they say. They were given fondant as the weather hadn't warmed enough for a syrup feed. I checked again recently and had to feed 2 more, but with a light syrup this time, and another feed for the one that had eaten all the fondant. It's really pleasing when you catch a colony that has run out of stores and save it with a feed because it would be heartbreaking if they died of starvation at this time of year. Even though, the thanks I got was my first sting of the year. (There is something quite thrilling about being stung don't you think, or is that just me?) Feeding light syrup now might also encourage the Q to start laying in earnest as she thinks that the nectar flow has started and can help build up a strong colony for possible splitting later on. As for the 2 colonies that were Q less last Autumn, Alan Surman gave a nuc that was united with one of them and I united these with a half brood from another nasty hive that we were given. This is a good strong colony now with good weight of stores in it still. The other Q less one was given a Q donated by Alan Iacobi through the post last October, it seems to be doing well too. I have not actually been through any of the hives yet to check for brood as it's still early to be disturbing them. Regular weekly apiary visits will start in April. I'll let you all know when the first one is. Hope your bees are doing well. Nikki DATES FOR APRIL Saturday 5 th April 2.00pm - Beginners' course practical session Monday 7 th April 7.30pm Beginners' course final session Thursday 10 th April 8.00pm Monthly meeting Swarming Wednesday 23 rd April 7.30pm Committee meeting You never can tell with bees Winnie the Pooh

3 Many thanks to John Dray, one of our newest members for the following contribution. EXPERIENCES OF A NEW BEEKEEPER It is the start of March and I have been a bee keeper since May of last year. I had intended to start with one colony, but with the late spring I had put out a lot of 'feelers' to ensure that I definitely got one. However, the hard, late spring meant that there were no nuclei available. Where would I get any bees? While at the Botanic Garden I found out about a bee auction in Gloucester to take place the following week. At the end of the auction I was the proud owner of an (officially inspected) nucleus of Italianish bees. Drove them the hundred miles home, feeling a sudden weight of responsibility. Put them in the apiary (at the bottom of the garden) and fed them syrup. I was so proud that I registered them on BeeBase, like a parent registering the birth of their first-born. I am sure that experienced bee keepers just enjoy their bees. They certainly appear to. For the beginner there is just a feeling of absolute panic. Whenever a frame is released from the grip of propolis and the buzz of the bees changes as they swing around there is the fear that they will scramble out of the hive. Whenever anything is moved and there is that crunch - the imagination thinks that a hundred bees have met a flat death. Are they warm enough, in the right location, with enough food? Should I go and sort them out or am I interfering too much? Should I be wearing washing-up gloves, leather gloves or nothing? The following day I transferred them to their new hive. They were on National frames, I was using 14x12 hives... so I put 14x12 frames around the nucleus frames (i.e. frames x12 foundation, 5 frames from the nucleus, frames 9-11 more 14x12 foundation) and hoped for the best. Kept feeding, but over the coming week no foundation was being drawn... so I swapped the outermost nucleus frames with foundation frames. That sort of worked, so I tried it again. Experienced bee keepers will know what happened to the bottom of the 'short' nucleus frames - lots of drone comb. I also think that I had confused the colony. The queen was not quite sure where to lay with the frames moving around. I even ended up with the start of a queen cup on one of the outermost frames. Was that lack of queen pheromone due to the frame juggling or the bees just trying to scare the annoying bee keeper? I put on a super of foundation and a queen excluder. Nothing happened in a week, so I took off the queen excluder. Then one frame was drawn. Fortunately, the fantastic flow summer saved me. A few days later all the frames were drawn and there was nectar in a lot of them on the way to becoming honey! I tried lifting the super to get at the brood box and suddenly realised why many bee keepers have back problems. Having been like lifting a feather it was now like lifting a paving slab. Over the coming weeks I put on two more supers. I put them between the brood box and the existing super(s) as I had heard that this encouraged the bees to draw their foundation as they have to walk past the foundation to get to the maturing honey above. (Realising as I went that you need a lot more kit than that supplied in 'beginners kits'.) In the meantime a bee farmer had ed me to say that he had another colony - Welsh bees. These were hived in a similar fashion to my first hive. Very different. Laid back on the comb, whereas the Italians were flightier. They went out in the rain in lower temperatures (which confused me - according to books bees don't go out in the rain), where the Italians were heat-loving and hydrophobic. At the end of the season, I harvested two supers from the Italians and one from the Welsh. My expectation for a first year was no honey. This was all joyful bonus. Best honey ever!

4 Even in the height of summer the Italian queen had quite a problem with chalkbrood. I had to cull her, which was a low point in my first year. Her replacement was Welsh and did very well until I treated both hives for varroa with MAQS. The successor did not survive the treatment. I rang up to get another replacement. It was now very late in the season and I got the bee farmer's very last mated queen. She is now well ensconced in the hive and managed to produce brood from the end of year ivy and himalayan balsam. (The whole apiary stank of ivy). It is now late February/early March I see that there are nice, fluffy Welsh bees coming out of both hives on warm days. Roll on spring! Yesterday I was celebrating St David's day at the Botanic Garden. I was trying to translate some of the Welsh from their signs (badly). I thought I had done well to translate that the plants from a particular border were used by cooks and bee keepers (gwenynwyr). However, the sign had said 'gwenwynwyr' which, as I am sure many of you know, is poisoners. Lucky I am not allowed in the kitchen too often. PS - I am a bee keeper in my first year. Please do not regard any of the above as good practice! Answer to the glove question - I move a lot more carefully when the risk of stinging is (in my mind) reduced. So I tend to use leather gloves but am trying to graduate to washing-up gloves. John MAY MEETING Don't forget that the May meeting will include a sale of plants and beekeeping equipment, so put in a few extra seeds if you are sowing anything and dust off your unwanted bits of equipment to bring along (clean of course). More about that in the May newsletter.

5 WBKA SPRING CONVENTION 2014 It's the third weekend in March and I'm heading over the Sugar Loaf towards Builth. Must be the WBKA annual convention. Despite the journey lacking the excitement of last year's, I still managed to miss the opening speaker, not due to snow, but being refused entry as I was still clutching my first mug of tea of the day. That, and the hall was packed to standing. So while I was waiting for the first seminar, I made my first sortie around the trade stands. The usual traders were there with all manner of tempting bee related goodies. Heaven! It was obvious that the early bees had been in as the piles of hive components had already been seriously depleted. Folk walking out pushing loaded sack trolleys as we arrived was the clue. Maisemore's looked like they'd been stripped by hoards of robber Beekeepers. With 5 minutes to go, we joined the short orderly queue to the lecture hall, and managed to have a chat with fellow keepers from Swansea. By the time the doors opened, the queue was out the door into the canteen area. But when the doors opened, no one came out, so we packed ourselves into the already packed hall. Memories of scrunching into Clapham Jct to Vauxhall commuter trains in the morning rush sprang to mind. Wally Shaw was first up, continuing his talks on swarming, this time pre-emptive swarm control, or how to try and manage the swarming impulse. The first part was presented last year and written up in the Spring 2014 Welsh Beekeeper magazine, so we were expecting the solutions to all our swarming problems. However, Wally had different ideas, and had made this into the second instalment of a three part series, the third part out next year, doing a Lord of The Rings on us. I can see this running and running and it turning into a Hitchhikers style trilogy in five parts. A number of strategies were explained about what could be done to delay the swarming impulse, much of it already well known. However, the importance of weather was raised as there is now evidence that the bees can apparently decide they are going to go after 5-7 days of poor weather. It's all done by the workers passing vibration information to the queen by holding the queen and shaking her for a second, just about every second of the day, coupled with a change in her diet. So they are planning to go before the beekeeper can see any visible preparations. We need a vibration sensor! Next up was Richard Ball from Devon who had valiantly stood in at short notice to cover Glynn Davies who had to withdraw due to ill health. Richard talked about the 'Foundation of good comb' and took us through all the good reasons we should be regularly changing our comb in order to maximise honey and brood production, and probably more importantly, minimise the spread of diseases to keep our colonies healthy. He also covered the way to manipulate the boxes in a brood and a half set up to get maximum brood, which was also mentioned in Wally's talk, and was a light bulb moment for me. Lunch and some fresh air was next, before the afternoon session given by Bob Smith (no relation) on 'Honey Bee Nutrition' and its importance to bee health. This was about the importance of pollen to the honey bee diet, and how many of us are overlooking this by concentrating on feeding syrup rather than a balanced diet that

6 the bees need to get all the amino acids and protein they need. The interesting results of some trials he had done in Kent using pollen traps to try and establish the foraging areas of two of his colonies were described. These showed that even though the colonies were standing side by side in the apiary, they were found to have brought in pollens from completely different sources. He also noted that the bees from both colonies seemed to prefer the varied pollens that were available in a number of SSSIs that were close, rather than from the many acres of mono cropping that were just as close. The bees obviously knew what was good for them. He also brought home the massively impressive logistical capability that bees have to feed themselves and the huge area over which they forage. Considering each grain of pollen weighs mg, and each load that a honey bee can carry is about 10mg, that s between 3 and 5 million trips the colony will make to collect the 30-50kg they need over a season. Also, we talk about bees foraging up to 3 miles from the hive, which sounds a lot but is actually huge in terms of square yards. Even a 1 mile radius foraging range equates to a strip of land 100 yards wide by 55 miles long. Impressive or what! And that brought us to the final session which was Question Time with a panel of experts comprising the day's speakers plus our very own Frank. This year was much better than last, both in the numbers and variety of questions asked, and the size of the audience - no snow this year! And then the only disappointment of the day. Just when I needed a cup of tea for the road, the catering had gone home! But apart from that very minor blip, another excellent day that was informative, thought provoking and inspirational. I left determined to try and be a better beekeeper, and to make sure I valued the health and well being of these amazing creatures. For as Bob Smith and others have pointed out, we may only be in this for the honey, but if our bees decline, then there will potentially be a very big hole in the food producing capability of the world. We are lucky to be their guardians. I can recommend attending. Roll on Stephen FRANK'S SEASONAL NOTES FOR APRIL April heralds the start of the active beekeeping season. The time is right for a major spring inspection to give the hive a good spring clean and to sort out any problems that might have arisen over the winter. Traditionally, this is the time to change the hive floors and, if you ve had your inserts under open mesh floors, check the debris for natural mortality mite drop. If you treated last year with thymol and oxalic acid, expect levels of Varroa to be low. Anecdotally, this appears to be the case across the country. If required, you can use thymol in April, prior to putting supers on. You should replace any hive parts that are sub standard and brood frames that you are not happy with before they get filled with brood. I take a bucket with me in order to collect any brace comb that I remove from frames and brood boxes. This clean up is best done when there aren t too many bees in the hive and makes hive inspections easier later on, especially when checking for queen cells. I am also using this first

7 inspection as an opportunity to clip and mark any queens which were not done at the end of last season. It is especially important to give a thorough spring brood health check. Good health and a good queen are vital to the bees success, and April is when your diligent management last autumn pays its dividends. Happily, winter losses appear low so far and colonies are coming on well in the warm weather. Typically, as I write this at the end of March, I am seeing 3 6 frames of brood in my hives. You should keep a record of the numbers of frames of bees and brood on each inspection and watch them increase. Refer to your notes when swarming season starts and keep a close eye on the strong colonies if you don t want to lose a swarm. Where colonies are really strong, it is quite possible to have an early swarm before the end of April. Now is the time to be thinking about spare equipment with which to hive any swarms and enable swarm management. Strong colonies may also need a super before too long if we get a nectar flow. It s best to use drawn worker comb in the first super to encourage the workers through the queen excluder. As the first generations of downy new bees hatch and take their first tentative flights, they re-establish the colony s life cycle. The brood will start increasing dramatically and the protein in pollen becomes particularly important to the colony. There are very few areas in this country where there will not be enough pollen for the colony. Even so, some beekeepers like to provide pollen patties. There are an increasing number of useful bee plants in flower at this time of year. The most important bee plant by far is the willow, especially in rural areas. Willows provide both nectar and pollen in abundance which gives a welcome boost to the bees spring development. They are seldom advisable in the garden however, so it is all the more important for beekeepers to cherish the wild areas nearby. Of prime importance too, is an easily available water source - admittedly not such a problem in Wales. There is a clear relationship between brood rearing and the colony s water requirements. Brood rearing demands lots of energy and this energy has mainly come from stored honey that needs diluting before it is used. A clean water supply close to the hive will be invaluable to the bees. It will also help to train them to the water source you provide rather than your neighbours pond. The water must be arranged so the bees won t drown in it. Bee books always suggest a container filled with moss or water running across a corrugated surface but my own preference where it is possible is for a natural pond feature. The shallow edges needed for a wildlife pond and the native pond plant called frogbit make a very popular drinking site for bees Committee Margaret Watson chair Geoff Saunders secretary Huw Jones treasurer Frank Gellatly Jen Dancey Paul Smith Stephen Smith Stephen's bees on the muscari You can now contact the committee by e mail to committee@ec-bka.com

8 To: Huw Jones Hon Treasurer, ECBKA Dolau Bran Cynghordy Llandovery SA20 0LD Please renew my ECBKA membership for the year Name: Postal Address: Current address: Amount Enclosed: (Cheques may be made payable to ECBKA )