ECBKA NEWSLETTER August 2014 www.ec-bka.com Unless you live in a desert you cannot have failed to notice the copious nectar flow of the last few weeks. My bee shed is now bare apart from the stepladder I will need to take off the supers. It was good to see more than 20 members (& 1 guest) at the apiary meeting on 13 th July. The bees behaved and those present had a pleasant afternoon inspecting the hives. Thank you to Geoff and Sally for providing refreshments and to all the other bringers of cake too. This was the last apiary meeting at the Harford site and the plan is for the move to the new site to begin once the honey has been taken off the hives. At the last committee meeting it was agreed unanimously that there should be a weekend apiary meeting each month throughout the active season to give members more opportunity to get together and compare notes. Following my plea last month I have recruited 3 mentors for our beginners for which I am hugely grateful. We have beginners now requiring mentors in the Llandyssul and Ammanford areas and I am still hoping that someone not too far from Llangadog can also volunteer. Show season is now underway so we're hoping to see as many members as possible at one of the shows this month. THE TRAP SHOW Many thanks to Alan for organising the stand and rallying the troops for the Trap Show. Thank you too to Linda, Simon, Lewis and Basil for their help throughout the day. Despite not being in a position with much passing trade, Lewis used his unique selling techniques (eskimos and fridges springs to mind) to sell more than 40 jars of the Association's honey. There was a lot of interest from visitors to the stand though I think half the population of South Wales have bees in their roof this year. If you go looking for trouble in a beehive you will find it
DATES Saturday 16 th August ECBKA at the Llandeilo Show Monday 25 th August ECBKA honey show at the Cilycwm Show Wednesday 3 rd September 7.30pm Committee meeting Thursday 11 th September 8.00pm Microscopy and Winter preparation Thursday 9 th October 8.00pm Mead Making with Dinah Sweet (to be confirmed) congratulations Well done to members Keith Hall and John Dray who have both recently passed the WBKA Basic Assessment. To take the Assessment you need to have kept bees for a minimum of one year so if that will apply to any of you next year please consider having a go. LETTER OF THANKS Most of you will not have met Honorary Life Member, Alan Iacobi, long time friend of Alan Surman and a supporter of our Association for many years. Alan, who lives in Gloucestershire, has been remarkably generous to us on many occasions, donating books to our library and bees & hives to our apiary. When we ended up with just one struggling colony after the winter of 2012 13 Alan came to the rescue and gave us bees to get us back on our feet. Alan took the decision to give up beekeeping so that he could care for his wife until she passed away. On hearing that Alan was restarting his beekeeping activities we were only too pleased to be able to repay him in a small way by giving him 2 nucs (bred from his own queens) from our apiary. As chair of the Association I recently received a lovely letter from Alan thanking us for the bees. I know that Alan reads the newsletter, perhaps one day, Alan, we will get to meet you. TOP BAR HIVES I seem to have had a lot of conversations this year with people who have an interest in top bar hives. This is something I know very little about. I thought it would be useful if those with any experience or interest knew who each other were. If you are someone who keeps bees in TBHs, has had previous experience of TBHs or is interested in keeping bees in TBHs and you would like to be in touch with others of a like mind, then send me your contact details (newsletter@ec-bka.com) & a note of
your TBH experience & I will compile a list to circulate amongst you. FRANK'S SEASONAL NOTES FOR AUGUST Preparations for Winter I think we can be agreed that it has been a fantastic year. The season, forage and colonies have constantly been ahead, with beekeepers struggling to keep up and running out of hives, supers and equipment. It just shows what can happen if you get warm weather at the right time. Main honey crops produced a flow early, with clover, blackberry, rosebay willowherb and Himalayan Balsam all on stream in the hot June and July. At this stage the job s only half done, hopefully you ll soon harvest your honey, then varroa control and winter preparation will complete the process. Unless you have hives on heather or gathering a late Himalayan balsam crop, l favour taking the main honey crop as early as possible in August. A small crop can be taken by simply shaking the bees off the frames, otherwise use a rapid clearer board. If you use a clearer board with porter bee escapes, make sure that the escapes are clear, the board is put on the right way up and the hive is well sealed. Whichever method you use, clearing the bees should be a quick overnight process. The frames of honey should be mostly sealed which will ensure that the honey is ripe i.e. below 18.5% water content. Frames which emit liquid nectar when shaken are not suitable for extraction. Extracting is best done as soon as possible while conditions are warm and the honey nice and liquid. Supers of extracted frames put back on the hive over the crown board will be cleaned up quickly by bees passing through the open feed hole. They can then be stored dry, stacked by apiary for the winter and secure against mice and waxmoth. I don t intend to use any treatment against waxmoth which I don t find a problem, so long as the supers go out every year. When that s done and the supers are safely stored, you can get on with your varroa control. Mid to late August is the ideal time for the most crucial varroa treatment of the year. This is when varroa levels are at their highest and brood rearing is naturally tailing off. Those combined circumstances allow for more widespread and more multiple infestations of pupae, putting them at far greater risk of virus infections, immune suppression, growth retardation and shortened lifespans. And these pupae are the winter bees which must be present in sufficient quantity and be of sufficient quality to last through the winter until their replacements are bred the following spring. It will also allow you time in which to ensure your winter feeding is complete by early October and give the bees time enough to drive off excess moisture and cap over the sugar syrup to stop it fermenting. It may be that less feeding will be required this year if the good weather continues into the autumn and you take your honey off in good time, allowing hives to restock. Remember to heft and leave enough stores on, or feed syrup beforehand, to prevent starvation during thymol treatment, which needs to be done while ambient temperatures are high enough to make it effective. Bees will often ignore syrup when thymol is used and hang on the front of the hive, and the queen may go off lay.
Treatment of licensed products, Apiguard, Apilife Var, Thymovar during August/early September will allow the brood of your future winter bees to be reared in a low varroa, and hence low virus infested, environment. Make sure you follow the manufacturer s guidance carefully, adjust the dose according to colony size and make a note of the treatment in your Veterinary Medicine Administration Record. Wasps, as is usual this time of year, are also becoming a threat. Remember that your own stronger colonies may rob out weaker ones with the possibility of spreading disease. To reduce the potential for robbing, feed your bees and remove honey supers in late evening when the bees are in the hive. You should also watch the hive entrances carefully, monitoring comings and goings and keeping an eye out for any wax capping remains that have been ripped off. Fill any hive leaks with sponge or similar. You may need to reduce entrances down to one beespace by fitting a mouseguard and taping it over to leave a single hole. A pane of glass placed in front of the entrance can also confuse wasps. If all else fails and you have the option, the threatened hive could be moved to another apiary, bearing in mind the three mile rule. Bearing in mind that after a very productive year, many beekeepers will have increased colony numbers to a greater extent than they would like for next season, now is the time to unite those smaller colonies and go into the winter with strong ones. I prefer to go into the winter with strong colonies and some spare hives in the barn ready for next season, rather than having to clean out small, dead colonies in the spring and being short of ready hives. At the end of the varroa treatment period, I intend to use to my advantage the contraction in colony size caused by reduced queen laying, less forage and the inhibiting thymol treatment. In each apiary I will go through all colonies carefully and unite any that are not up to strength, selecting those queens which I would like to keep. They will generally be the younger, more prolific ones but also those which do not produce much chalkbrood. Everyone should check that their hives are queen right and disease free before going into winter because it s pointless leaving those that aren t and expecting them to survive. Once I ve rationalised the frames and boxes of colonies, united as necessary, I ll be round feeding those that need it. Ideally, each should have 40lb of stores available for the winter. The hive should feel like it is nailed to the floor and you should struggle to lift it. I feed inverted syrup, which the bees seem to do very well on, using miller feeders in the main and contact feeders for those not requiring too much. But, with my colonies on brood + half, I am hoping to keep supplementary feeding to a minimum. Any honey that the bees collect during the autumn will also boost their winter stores. The nectar flow from Himalayan Balsam has been late starting but is finally underway. And, if we get a good spell of weather in September/October, the ivy should give a final boost of pollen and nectar to produce plentiful brood, with minimal varroa, and those all important winter bees. Frank Land Available for Hives Myddfai contact Hywel Morgan 07970 902299 Trap (with open access) contact Sharon 07989 194668 sharon@deafk9.com Trap contact Veronica Russell 01269 850362 veronica.russell2@btinternet.com
ECBKA HONEY SHOW With a bumper honey crop this year you are going to have to be inventive with your excuses not to enter our honey show, as always to be held at the Cilycwm Show on August Bank Holiday Monday. I am assured that the schedules will be out imminently and the honey classes will be published on the website as soon as a schedule is seen. There will be classes for light/medium honey, dark honey and soft set/naturally crystallised honey. Whatever honey class you enter you will need two 1lb jars (unlabelled). There is a special class for novices. There are also classes for wax (the details will be in the schedule), a frame for extraction, honey cake (set recipe) and honey fudge. It was only 20p per class to enter last year and even if you can't make it to the show you can ask someone to take your entries for you. Even without our big hitters, Frank, Alan & Nikki last year, there were a good number of entries. Let's make it even better this year. WASPS I am fortunate never to have had a colony overrun by wasps but after losing my entire plum crop to them a couple of years ago I tried to find out more about their life cycle in the hope that it would help me protect my fruit (& my bees). What I discovered was truly fascinating & gave me a new found respect for them. I take no credit for the following information, it has been gleaned from various sources but I hope some of it will be useful. Before you reach for the spray can of 'Wasp Destroyer' please consider this: An average wasp nest will eradicate 4 5 tonnes of insect pests in a season. Sounds impossible doesn't it but: 16 hours flying per day 100 flights per day per wasp 5000 wasps each collecting 0.5 0.8g per flight = up to 40 kg per day As you can see, wasps are important predators. The prey is fed to their developing larvae as a protein source and when a larva receives food it secretes a sweet, sugary substance to 'reward' the forager. While the nest is producing and rearing brood the
wasps cause no bother to our bees and barbecues. As the season moves on the brood produced includes drones and new queens and once these have emerged the queen stops laying. When there are no longer any larvae in the nest the foragers need to find a new source of sugary food you know the rest. If you feel you do need to destroy a wasps' nest some thought needs to be given to the process. If you destroy a nest while the foragers are still in the hunting phase of the life cycle you will prematurely create nuisance wasps as they no longer have larvae to feed. Also, foraging wasps will not re enter their nest without receiving permission from the guard wasps. If the guard wasps are killed then you are denying foraging wasps entry to the nest so they will turn to other sources of sugar. If you do treat a nest it is best to do this at the crack of dawn while the foragers are at home to minimise the number of nuisance wasps that escape. So, you've destroyed the nest in your garage and all's well with the world. Unfortunately not, as wasps will travel several kilometres to a source of food and there could be dozens of nests in that radius. Out comes the 'pop bottle trap' which works brilliantly because it's always filled with hundreds of wasps. Actually, it doesn't. Wasps, like bees, send out scouts to look for the best sources of food. When a scout finds your hive, or plum tree it will return to the nest with the message & come back with followers. If your trap allows just one scout to escape, the message will be out there & for every wasp that manages to get out of your trap dozens more will arrive on the scene. Armed with this information, last year I kept my compost bin, which is well away from my hives & plum tree, uncovered and kept a steady supply of fruit peelings & over ripe fruit on the surface. It attracted hundreds, if not thousands of wasps, happily feeding on rotting fruit until well into the autumn. With such an easy source of food on tap they did not need to go looking elsewhere, my plums were undamaged and my hives unbothered. It may have been just luck, but it worked & I will try it again this year. One excellent source of information I found was the Waspbane website. They are a commercial seller of wasp traps but have a section on their site specially for beekeepers with a lot of useful advice. This is not an endorsement of their product I have never used a wasp trap of any sort. Margaret 2014 Committee Margaret Watson chair Geoff Saunders secretary Huw Jones treasurer Frank Gellatly Jen Dancey Paul Smith Stephen Smith
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