December 2014 - The Bees

We first started keeping bees about seven years ago when the local farmer offered to sell a piece of land to everyone in the road where we lived. We weren't that keen gardeners so didn't really know what to do with it but to my surprise it turned out Sue, my wife, had an interest in bees since she was very little and although he had read a lot about them ,had never actually kept bees.
So we bought a hive [a WBC], joined the Bedfordshire Beekeepers Association and did their starters course. The Association had a system where you could join their Swarm List where swarms reported to and collected by the Association, would be given out for free.
One memorable Sunday after we had finished one of the training sessions, we were told there was a swarm to be collected from Turvey. Peter , a Association member took us there, still in our full  kit, and when we arrived a neighbour was in the front garden cutting the grass. You could almost hear his jaw hit the ground as the car doors opened and we emerged dressed up like something from Ghostbusters.
The swarm was about the size of melon and in a small bush in the back garden. Peter carefully transferred it into a box and we left it to settle. We collected it the following day, transferred it to our shiny new hive and our beekeeping started.
One hive, became two until we got up to 5. For various reasons, not least one of my dogs turned out to be anaphylactic [see Stings in Bee Informed on the website], the hives were moved around until they were settled at the house of Mark and Val who owned a farm produce shop in Roxton.
All was well until the winter 2010/11. When I could finally check the hives in the Spring there was ominously little activity and when they were opened I could see all 5 colonies had died.

To state the obvious bees aren't like dogs or cats where you have some sort of relationship [although I do talk to them a lot], but I was devastated.
The winter had been too cold and too wet for too long and they ran out of food, and the frames were full of dead bees with thousands of them with their heads in cells looking for food.
As a package of bees alone can cost £150, it took a little while to build things up again and eventually  replaced 3 of them at Roxton and the local farmer who owned the farmland around our house in Ravensden agreed to let me keep a couple of hives in a field opposite my house.
However when Mark and Val moved I had to find somewhere to keep the Roxton bees. At the same time I was thinking of possibly getting some more hives because of the markets I had started to go to.
Next thing I know I get an email from the Association saying someone had 3 hives for sale and I got the new colonies from Ed, a fellow Bedfordshire Beekeeper Association member.
The bees were being kept on the Open University campus in Milton Keynes which means they are highly intelligent and when I saw them for the first time I could hear things like 'to bee or not to bee that is the question' and 'I buzz therefore I am' coming from the hives.

Unfortunately Ed found himself caught up in a web of health and safety nonsense which included having to have a University security guard accompany him every time he went to see the bees in case he had an anaphylactic reaction. Whether or not the guard was a trained nurse is unclear.
Anaphylaxis is a serious issue but really.........
I understand the University also intended issuing Ed with hi tec protective headgear to protect himself from being struck by a meteorite and also be issued with a specially designed klaxon to frighten away the herds of buffalo that wander around the Milton Keynes area in a desperate search for honey to which they are addicted..
You just can't be too careful.
Anyway, Ed decided enough was enough and that the bees had to go.

By the time the bees were ready for collection, I had arranged with Scald End Farm in Thurleigh to keep the new bees there and I have a 3 acre field all to myself.
Moving bees, along with eating parsnips, watching Adam Sandler films and listening to the Beach Boys, is one of my least favourite things to do and there have been occasions where bees have escaped when being moved around.
However things didn't go too badly and I drove very slowly from Milton Keynes to Scald End without any problems.

The following day I moved the hives from Roxton to Ravensden and I now have 3 hives in Scald End and eight in Ravensden although one of them may go to Norfolk to be looked after by Mark and Val's son who had started beekeeping with me during the Summer.
This time of year is very quiet and the main thing I do is worry about the bees making it through the winter. Hopefully they have enough honey to last them and I put lumps of fondant in the hive to help them out. During the Spring they can be fed with syrup [1:1 water/sugar mixture] but like us they need to get rid of water which they do by what are known politely as 'cleansing flights' In Winter its too cold for them to leave the hive and if they can't get rid of the water, things get a bit unpleasant in the hive.
Fondant, which is like the icing on birthday cakes, has very little water and so gets over this problem.

At some point in the next week when there is a warm'ish day, I will treat the hives with Oxalic Acid. This is a treatment for the Varroa mite which is one of the biggest threats to honey bees. I will put some info about this nasty little critter on the site soon.
Apart from this there are frames and supers to be cleaned and made ready for the Spring, nuc boxes to get ready, swarm boxes to build, sorting out my garage for an Environmental Health visit in the Spring, woodpecker damage to the hives to be repaired,  etc etc.
Also the biggest provider of beekeeping equipment has its annual sale. 
I need to sell more honey........