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Requeening day

This morning we picked up a post bag containing 15 Italian queens from our local post office. They came in the little queen cages which are about the size of a matchbox and contain a young queen and about a half dozen workers as attendants.
We immediately went to our home bee yard and started searching for the old queens we wished to replace. The first few hives were swarms which were collected in the past few weeks and had good brood in the middle frames. The frames consisted of newly drawn out foundation and so were clean and white and the queens were relatively easy to spot and remove so that the new queen cage could be placed on top of the frames.
The next few hives were more populous and had many dark bees and dark queens which can be difficult to see against the masses of workers. We got lucky and did pretty well and had to leave about four hives overall because we simply couldn’t find the queen after a certain amount of time.We always order less queens than the number of hives present in a yard so that we can move on to the next hive if necessary.
We can always go back to those later on and eventually win out and find the queen but occasionally we give up on some because the queen is really good at hiding. We could find her if we were desperate by forcing all the bees through a queen excluder, but usually we just admit defeat.
Anyway the new queens are all in and we won’t disturb the hive in any way for at least 11 days so that the bees don’t kill the new queens and accept them.

Conditions, conditions, conditions.

There is a perception among beekeepers that commercially bred queen bees are essential to achieve very populous colonies and therefore large yields of honey. This is not necessarily always the case because local bees which are endemic to an area for several generations can also be very successful.
Colonies which have been hived from swarms from tree trunks and cavities within buildings are known as feral bees.
These bees are adapted to their local conditions and react differently to commercially bred colonies. I have found in the past that colonies with a bought queen will build up their numbers very quickly when the weather warms up after the winter and if there is a nectar flow will exploit it efficiently. However, when conditions deteriorate, these colonies can build up too quickly and starve during a cold spring,whereas the local queens will lay less at the start of spring and only reach full capacity when conditions are suitable.
Last season I took 20 newly hived feral swarms collected from Melbourne suburbs to a forest site in West Gippsland and left them to forage on a Messmate Stringybark flow followed by Silverleaf Stringybark and Mountain Grey Gum in the autumn. All of these Eucalyptus species produce excellent pollen and copious nectar when conditions are favorable. The colonies built up into very populous hives and produced as much honey as commercially bred bees would have.
I am not suggesting here that beekeepers do not use well bred queens, indeed I prefer to use them for several reasons including the fact that they have a lovely calm temperament and are a pleasure to work with. The feral bees can be more feisty and would be difficult to handle by inexperienced apiarists.
The main point I am making is that what determines success in harvesting a crop of honey is conditions,conditions, conditions.

Honey to feed the people

Yesterday I read an article in the Melbourne Age that gave me optimism about the future survival of the honeybee. Jaqueline McGlade, executive director of the European Environmental Agency says that our cities have the potential to become a major supplier of honey. “City honey is cleaner than country honey because there are fewer pesticides”, she said. This really makes sense to me because crops on farms in the countryside are essentially monocultures and therefore, the variety of pollens available to the bees is limited, and the chemicals sprayed on the crops can contaminate the honey.

More and more people in Europe are keeping bees in their backyards and on their roofs and this trend is also occurring in Melbourne. As I have previously stated, the conditions for pollen and nectar are conducive to success in producing a healthy food source close to home in the city.

A gathering of chefs and scientists recently in Copenhagen tried to solve the world’s food problems in a weekend. The basic conclusion that they came to is that food needs to be sourced close to home and that that there are many food sources that are not being used because people, in general, prefer convenience over actively seeking out food.

The trend towards utilizing the massive resources available to the honeybee in our cities is a great portent for our future.

Melbourne’s super bees

A few years ago, I was having a conversation with a Victorian regional apiary inspector who referred to “those super Melbourne bees.” At the time, I didn’t pay much attention to his words but subsequent experiences made me realise that there was a lot in what he said.

Migratory beekeepers may not all be aware of the unique problems faced by their urban counterparts. These “problems” are ones that bigger beekeepers sometimes wish they had, particularly when pollen availability and variety are scarce.

I have, for over 25 years, collected swarms from most of the Melbourne metropolitan area. I have realized over time that the more people who buy a single hive to keep in their backyard, the more swarms I will collect.

Why is this?

The reason, of course, is partially because inexperienced beekeepers don’t inspect their hive in the early spring to decrease the likelihood of swarming. However, a lot of the time, the conditions in many suburbs can make it almost impossible to prevent swarming. Unlike the migratory beekeepers who move hives into eucalyptus forests which have prolific flowering of a single species with an abundant pollen supply, the pollen flow is superior in quality in many urban situations.

The variety of pollens from exotic plantings and many different natives from all over Australia is huge. So many species from all over the world which are tended and watered by the population are a paradise for the resultant “super bee”.

We have all read about the levels of amino acids and proteins in the bodies of bees which have access to a wide variety of pollens. The colonies in the suburbs thrive during the winter and in early spring the build up of population is rapid and hives are boiling over with healthy, well nourished bees. Combine that with supers of unextracted honey and honey bound brood chambers and swarming is a formality.

Even the well organized beekeeper can become undone by these urban conditions. Many people do not realize that another consideration is that Melbourne is often the warmest part of the state in the winter.In the box ironbark forests of central Victoria, the minimum temperature in winter is frequently zero degrees or lower whereas Melbourne is 8 degrees or more. Even though the north of the state may have a higher maximum, it takes the bees so long to warm up and leave the cluster that they hardly fly for the whole day. Bees in the city will start flying when the temperature goes above 12 or 13 degrees and haven’t been chilled to the same extent.

Last year, a friend asked me to place a hive in his backyard in a south eastern suburb. This hive began from a small to medium sized swarm and rapidly expanded to produce three full boxes of honey for the season. In late August this year I received a call from my friend to say that there were lots of drones flying around and bees were banked up at the entrance trying to get in. I opened the hive on a warm day and decongested the brood chamber and gave them two frames of foundation in positions 2 and 7 and made sure that there were empty frames above the excluder so the bees would not sense themselves to be honey bound.

It is now mid September and I received a call to say they had swarmed. On further examination, despite cool spring weather, the bees had drawn out the foundation and covered the frames with brood and filled the empty frames above with honey.

Super Melbourne bees indeed!

Preventing swarming

As the daylight hours become shorter in the late autumn, the bees consolidate the brood chamber. The queen lays fewer eggs and the brood is confined to the middle frames. The remaining frames are filled with honey for winter survival.

The queen starts laying again from about mid august onwards and as the new bees hatch out in the next month or so, the hive population increases. In suburban conditions the bees are often able to collect nectar during winter and don’t use up much of the stored honey in the brood nest. If honey has not been extracted in late summer and the super on top of the brood box is also full of honey, the hive can be thought of as ‘honey bound’.

This is the classic scenario for swarming.

So what does the backyard beekeeper do about this?

On a warm mid to late September day the outside honey frames in the brood box are raised above the excluder and replaced by a mix of frames of newly drawn out worker cells and frames of foundation. If there is room in the super the honey frames from below should be placed above the excluder so that there are sufficient stores to ensure that bees don’t starve if there is a sustained cold snap in a classic case of the ‘spring dwindle’.

Giving the queen more room to lay is the result and giving the bees work to do by drawing out foundation gives you a better chance of avoiding a loss of at least half of your worker bees.

My Backyard Bees

During the last Autumn, I placed a small colony of bees which only covered about one frame into a four-frame nucleus box. The bees did not have very long to collect nectar and pollen to complete their winter supplies. I was apprehensive as to whether they would make it through the winter without starving out. Well, here we are in September and those little bees are still flying in and out of that little entrance of that box. Aren’t they so resilient? Amazing bees!

Pollination hives

This week we supplied 6 beehives to a blueberry farm to pollinate the flowers and ensure a crop of berries. Blueberry plants will not produce fruit without honeybees to spread pollen from flower to flower, so the hives are vital. Our bees have helped this farmer to produce large crops of organic blueberries for many years. The bees work on the flowers for about 5 weeks and are then moved to a eucalyptus forest to collect nectar to produce honey.

Collecting a swarm

Today I collected a large bee swarm from a fence in a suburban back yard. It was a large swarm and must have come from a large colony.

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