Spanish Beekeeping Season Begins

My initial walk around the home apiary now I am back in Spain reveals that only nine of the 22 colonies I left in April have survived.  To be fair, most of them were populated by swarms (15) so poor mating and virgins being taken by bee eaters may have contributed to the losses. I am sure though that the majority of the losses were down to the long hot dearth which I am told was particularly fierce this summer.
I am not too downhearted about it as I now have 9 colonies whereas this time last year I had but 7.
Now begins the horrible job of cleaning out the deadouts and rendering any wax that is salvageable. I have brought my kitchen steamer back with me from Sweden so hopefully it will get a good using in the next couple of weeks. Also scorching out the boxes and boiling the top bars and frames in my huge pan that I set on my gas barbecue. Photos to follow.

Treatment Free Beekeeping for All.

Thinking about my last post and my long term goal to have healthy surviving bees without treatments on an ongoing basis, and the fact that I have adopted a live and let die policy, I have to have a plan B! The ‘what if’s?’ are forever in my mind! So what other strategy could be adopted to absolutely ensure long term healthy colonies without treatments?
I believe that all the very vulnerable genetics have already died out and the ones we have left have some measure of resistance or should I say tolerance to varroa. I have already demonstrated both in Spain and Sweden that bees can now survive for a period without treatments. I have heard it said though  that these bees may possibly crash in their third year. I am about to enter that phase just about now with my Spanish bees so I will see if that is true or not in my case. But, I am more interested in finding a solution to treatment free beekeeping, and that includes the organic acids, for anyone no matter how many or what style of hives they employ. So here is my plan, and feel free to comment and criticise.

Treatment Free Beekeeping for All (example 10 colonies)

Purpose

To allow sustainable beekeeping in production colonies without the need for miticides or organic acids being put into the hives by using only locally adapted bees and queens which should steadily improve over time in both varroa tolerance and other characteristics.

1st Season

Stop all treatments and monitor monthly mite drops and keep records.

2nd Season

Replace any colonies that dies out with own swarms or splits from survivor colonies.
Height of swarm season raise 10 queens from two best colonies.
Make up nucs from all ten colonies by removing one frame of brood and one frame of stores from each and introduce virgin queens.
Place each nuc adjacent to each production colony and allow to build up to 5 or 6 frames and overwinter.

3rd Season

Using records, assess the 5 best & 5 worst colonies with criteria mentioned in the notes and in early spring combine overwintered nucs with 5 worst colonies in the following manner:-

Move original colony to one side and set frames from overwintered nuc in centre of new brood box but first thoroughly dusting them with icing sugar.  Make up with frames with either foundation or starter strips. Add super and cover normally.
Place ramp board and Queen excluder on entrance. Shake all bees from original colony onto ramp board and dust with icing sugar. Take any sealed brood frames and add them to the undisturbed 5 strongest colonies but mark the frames first with drawing pins.
Destroy original queen that is left on the ramp board.

Later, at height of swarm season raise another 10 queens from best two colonies and start another 10 nucs in exactly the same manner.

4th and subsequent seasons

Proceed as in 3rd season using the best colonies for breeding queens and combining overwintered nucs with the 5 colonies that are two year old.



Notes:

The purpose of the first season without treatments is to establish if the genetics you have are still very vulnerable to varroa. A better than 50% survival rate is desired.

10 colonies is used as an example but this should work with any number bearing in mind the lower the number the more difficult it is to prevent inbreeding. Someone with just a few colonies may look to combine with another local beekeeper.

No mention is made of how the queens will be raised as there are so many ways to achieve this, even within the production colonies.

The wax is renewed automatically every two years and with this in mind never use the marked old frames for making up the nucs.

Best colony means lowest mite count as well as other criteria of productiveness, gentleness, non swarming etc. This should be qualitative as well as quantative.

The plan calls for starting 10 nuc’s but utilizing only 5, allowing for duds. Any nuc’s left over can be kept for emergencies, selling/giving away or bolstering a weak hive.

The production colonies are rejuvinated every two years.

The powdered sugar treatment which should remove some of the phoretic mites is to prevent fighting and combining.

The 5 colonies that are not requeened with a nuc have a brood boost and with appropriate honey flow timing may lead to bumper crops.

To circumvent inbreeding, within this example 10 colonies there should always be 4 distinct genetics in the queens. Record keeping of the queen origins in the nuc’s should ensure placement of two distinct lines each year.

2009 Swedish beekeeping season ends

With nothing more to do beekeeping wise here in my last couple of weeks before I depart for my winter in Spain, I can reflect on what has been achieved this year and what I want to achieve in forthcoming years.

I started the season finding out one of my two kenyan colonies had died out. It had a mouse take up residence. Well at least one of them survived without any treatments (I did one sugar dusting in 2008). A first year 50% survival rate is OK for my long term goals. The main decision I have made for Sweden is, because of my lifestyle choice of being absent for 6 months, and because I wish to keep bees as naturally as possible, I realized the best option would be to convert to warré hives. My barn, although providing great protection to the hives and peace of mind whilst I am absent, isn’t in good condition, so the warré beehouse took shape in my mind and quickly became a reality. The swarm I captured in my Svea bait hive and subsequently onto warré boxes has become the first occupant of the bee house. The kenyan still in the barn when I return in 2010 will be progressively walked over to the warré bee house (about 50m) and when sat in front of it, will be split into two in my mini kenyan/warré conversion hives. These will be put directly into the beehouse. I am looking forward to testing my lifting equipment in the bee house (it works perfectly in my head). I have left a full box of honey and more for them to overwinter on and with any luck it should still be there to harvest next year.

Thinking about my long term goals as well as short and medium term ones, I suppose the only long term goal is to have healthy surviving bees without treatments on an ongoing basis. I have already demonstrated in Spain that by utilizing swarms and splits, any non surviving colonies can be made up for quite easily. Therefore I am utterly convinced that a no treatment low intervention regime is not only possible but is easily achievable. I have had bad tempered bees and swarmy bees but my first consideration has been surviveabilty. I have put up with these negative factors and will continue to do so as the seasons progress to cull out the genetic lines that don’t have what it takes to survive. I know it is fairly easy to select out these bad traits and I will eventually do so. Now is not yet the time but when I feel I have a good surviving base, I want to start a queen rearing program with not only the survivability factors but my own selection criteria. These would be in this order, gentleness, non swarming and productiveness.

Cider - Honey press first trial

Pressed 50 litres of apple juice on this home made press. Next year I hope to use it in exactly the same way for honey. I know the flow rate will be much less but it should work in the same fashion.

http://img29.imageshack.us/my.php?image=mvi0123.mp4

In this video, the very first trial, I used only 4 'cheeses' later I used 6 and the flow rate was much more.

Lifting Strop & Minimum IPM

I finally got around to making up my warré lifting strop, a 4 arm string strop which attaches to the bottom warré box where I have screwed 4 eye bolts in each corner. I used a SS boating shackle for the the lifting eye to attach to my hand winch and just tied on 4 one meter lengths of polypropylene string with 'S' hooks tied to the ends. This is the last part of the system I have devised so hopefully next Spring when I will be putting new boxes underneath I will have everything to hand. Seems like a long time to wait until then but hey ho we will have the Spanish season in between! 

At last we are having some good dry and even sunny weather, I was worried I may have to feed my bees in the kenyan again what with the last few weeks of rain. It is amazing how quickly a colony can deplete itself of stores at this time of year with lots of mouths to feed and active bees! As we are forecast good weather now for awhile, I will hold off the feeding because there is plenty of forage still. Clover, heather, golden rod & the last of the fireweed.

Beekeeping in two countries with two different season means I am actively beekeeping all year round! Doing so has quickly focused my mind on my thoughts concerning varroa and other bee problems. The main conclusion I have come to is that left to themselves, in a good enough environment, the less I do the better off the bees will be. Last year I was all for small cell, open mesh floors, drone culling and sugar dusting as a natural integrated pest management system. I have now decided to adopt the 'Live and let Die' policy. Basically for two reasons:-

First I have always felt that beekeepers interfere too much in the lives of the bees and that anything we do in the end is counter productive. The Live and let Die thing really struck a chord with me and I think that perhaps bees have it within themselves to overcome any and all problems they may face if they are just left to get on with it. Look at surviving feral colonies for example. I know that is not very scientific and perhaps people may think that this is a case of hope rather than reality but I do believe it. There are now many reports of bees being kept untreated for several years in various parts of the world. I know I am going to have losses and I am prepared for them but with swarms and splits these can be easily made up for.

The second reason is more mundane and is because of my chosen lifestyle of spending half my time in different parts of Europe. Leaving bees for 6 months at a time in both Spain and Sweden necessitates a different approach. I have to leave a full set of top bars allowing the bees to expand and contract their brood nest as they require without me constricting them with divider boards. My 35mm top bars throughout the hive will be used both for brood and honey storage so allowing them sufficient space means they can move honey stores accordingly.

Will it all work out in the long run? I hope so and so far I am having some success, keeping bees without treatments, not opening the hives but a few times in the year, yet getting some honey and wax. As long as I have bees without buying in new stock and get some kind of return, I think I can call it a success!

Rendering old comb in kitchen steamer

I used the old kitchen steamer today to render down this lot of old comb. Not much but it was just to try it out. It worked really well. I put the tray in the bottom compartment, fitted the second compartment over it and laid some netting in the second tray. I squeezed together lumps of the comb and filled the container, folded over the net, put the lid on and switched on. 10 minutes later I had a couple of ounces of rendered beeswax which I poured into a tray to set. The net I used was too coarse and it let through some bits of detritus so I will render this wax again with the next batch through a finer mesh.

Visit to the Straw Museum

I visited a Straw museum yesterday. They had some old skeps, some with their hackles. The hackles were made out of birch bark made into a cone. Each skep was quite small with wooden floor and a central hole at the top about 2 inches diameter with a wooden plug closing the hole.

Steam wax melter

My wife said to me the other day that the steam cooker that we cook our fish and veggies in had developed a fault, it still worked but the timer which clicked it off had become useless. I am sure with a mind to the fact that I usually spill wax on the cooker when I am melting it in a double boiler (tin can in a pan), she suggested I may be able to use it for melting beeswax. Anyway she bought a super duper new steamer and today I trialed the old one to melt a couple of ounces of beeswax. It worked a treat! Within a few minutes the wax blocks were completely melted. I took the opportunity to wax glue some old comb into the top of an ali-baba basket to use as a swarm catching skep/bait hive. I stuck the small piece of comb in and then poured the rest of the molten wax directly into the lid to give it that beeswax smell.

What Natural Beekeeping means to me

Whichever type of hive you keep bees in, there are some essential elements of natural beekeeping that are common to all. Established beekeepers may already be following most of this but new beekeepers or those converting to natural beekeeping may have to adjust step by step as and when they can.

The five main elements are -

1 Minimum Interference.

2 Only increase from untreated survivors.

3 Do not use synthetic chemicals in the hive.

4 Feed sugar only when absolutely necessary.

5 Do not use foundation.



1 Minimum Interference. Every time you open your hive it causes stress to the bees. The queen can go off laying for several hours and the whole balance of the hive may be upset. Nest scent (and heat) is lost, and the pheromones that control everything that goes on within the hive have to be re-established.

2 Only increase from untreated survivors - once you have your required number of stocks, don't buy queens, as you may add potential genetic weaknesses. Unless some bees are established that will survive untreated, you cannot fully develop natural sustainable bee-keeping. By only increasing from survivor stocks, this mimics what happens in nature.(Survival of the fittest) Allowing for dead outs because they will happen, baiting feral survivors and splitting of surviving colonies is the way forward.


3 Do not use synthetic chemical varroa treatments in the hive, to which mites are likely to develop immunity and which prolong the bee/mite co-adaption process. At first, bees may not survive without doing something (bio technical IPM), but the less you do, the better in the long run. This may have to be a gradual process.

4 Avoid feeding sugar unless there is a danger of starvation. By allowing bees to keep enough of their own stores for them to survive the periods of dearth (winter in northern climes and summer in hot countries), their health is not compromised, as they would by feeding refined sugar. This view is supported by a number of studies.


5. Avoid using foundation, as it prevents bees from building as they choose. Typically, bees build cells of between about 4.7 and 5.7 mm diameter. Cells can vary in size through the season and between different strains of bee. Allowing bees to build their own comb puts them in charge of how, where and when it is built - and they know what they are doing better than we do.

For more information see here and here.

Click to enlarge

I saw this today. A black wasp with a long tail depositing it's eggs in the occupied mason bee holes in my solitary bee house. When I first saw it, I thought I wouldn't have time to get my camera, attach the macro lens and get a shot in but I needn't have worried, this lady took her time and spent several minutes at this. Anyone know the species of wasp, I think it may be a ichneumon wasp but would appreciate knowing for sure.