Cut out in Scrignac, Bretagne.

I had a phone call from a home owner who had returned to her holiday home after a 4 week abscence, only to find this upon her return.

A large, beautiful swarm of bees had established itself behind the shutter, in typical fasion. building comb between the window and the shutter.

Scrignac being 140 kilometers from my house is not usually in my radius for collection, but after looking at the map, almost all of was on motorway. The swarm was in a downstairs window. There was access to right outside the house making it all feesible and a safe bet!

So with my beekeeping buddy Alan, we set off and an hour 20 mins later we arrived at the house. we brought most things except a ladder which was great. the prospect of doing a cut out on a ladder is always much more difficult.

 

The first thing was to try and acertain just where the bees had attached the comb too, and in this case most of it was on the above supporting lintel. I smoked them and then waited for about 2 minutes, then carefully we opened the rear of the inside window.

 

You can see how the bees cleared as i smoked the pure white comb.

 

With the second window open it was possible to really get at the comb. they had built around all the shutter fixings.

I then went out in to garden side of the nest to find the wall covered in bees, and to my good luck and astonishment, there was the queen sitting on the wall above the nest.

So out with my trusty queen clip and in two seconds she was in the cage, safe and undamaged. Job done!

 As the comb was so fresh, but contained some honey at the top i had to cut out the lower 3 quarters of each comb, purely because the weight of the honey was so much, that each each seqment collapsed if i tried to hold the whole piece!

 

Using the elastic band method on bare frames to hold as much of the small amount of comb as possible. The idea being that if i could get as much of the viable comb in the nuc, the bees might follow. After this section was complete i then put in  the queen (stil in the cage) in between the two sections of comb. The bees would smell her there and hopefully start migrating towards her!

Brood comb sections being placed in to the frames by skilled technicians ! LOL

Notice the handsome one in white!!

 

 

If you zoom in on this pic you can see larvae at all stages of development.

 



 

 So with all the comb in to about 3 frames, we carefully cleared off all the remaining wax and i placed the nuc box on the window sill, hoping for the same as last years cut out.

 

 

 I took a dustpan, brushed a load of bees in to it and simply tipped them in to the box and the rest soon started to make their way down the wall in to the box, not too quickly but all fanning , telling the others where to go. Truly remarkable! JP the Beeman would have been Proud of us!!

 

 

 It wasnt long before the vast majority of the bees were in the box. It had rained lightly all afternoon, probably helping us, as most of the bees were at home.


The bees were very gently in nature, possibly because their home was not fully grown and they were still in swarm type mode. So this is always a massive help. If they are at all badly behaved, you will get stung and this was the first cut out i have ever done and not been stung! I will be usig their larvae if they survive the winter for queen production next year. We all love gentle bees!!

This was also a great first cut out for my good mate Alan to see and help with! the best way to learn about bees is do a couple of cut outs. You learn about the nest, the proximit of honey and brood patterns, so important in reation to bees in our hives today!


Very many thanks to the home owner Jacqueline, for making the effort to ring us and ask about possible removal. I wish many more would do the same rather than just getting in pest control and killing the lot!! we did this for free and will try and get some honey to Jacqueline. I consider it a privelige to be able to help!
There is sometimes when this is not possible and you always must be realistic in your approach!


The colony is doing really well. I released the queen that evening back in to the nuc and the next morning i placed them in to a full sized 10 framed hive. To be honest i had underestimated the amount of bees in this swarm and they have since drawn up more comb and are occupying all 10 frames.
A good day was had by all!

Large summer swarm.

With the weather now settling in to something resembling a decent period of weather the swarms are now coming. A little late but never the less and also timed in accordance with the now bountiful food supply.

 
I got a call this afternoon for a swarm in languenan, very close to my village and luckily was ready to go and collect it. The weather was absolutly pefect, sunny and hot with not much wind.
The bees were extremly docile and to be honest i dont think i would have needed my smock, but never should you assume they will always be like that!

I shook the bees in to the top of the nuc, which fortunatelycontainey a frame of honey from an artificial swarm that hadnt made a queen this spring s they were straight on to that and happy to go straight in!


Once I saw they had started fanning i left the lid off for a while, then moved them slightly swat and put the nuc on the lid of the box to elevate the hive a little.

You can see they are really puoring in in this last short clip. I actually went back home and collected aother 10 framed hive as the swarm was big and they can take the karger hive straight away. On one week they will have drawn up all remaining 9 frames. Swarms are monster comb builders so i will feed them a little too, eventhough there is loads of food around at the moment. It gives them something to do at night!

 I just love being  a beekeeper when the weather is like this!

Swarm arrives at trap on beautiful sunny morning

Well, you may have seen my last post , showing a cat guarding my swarm trap.

 

 

 

So about 2 weeks later, this happened one sunny fine beautiful morning.!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Loads of Scout bees for the two days  before, so many i fact that I thought there was already a swarm in the trap, so upon inspection the evening before i realised there was nothing in the trap so i just withdrew and added a little more lemon grass oil to the front of the trap.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This was a very good sized swarm, the best this year. they all have been small so far due to the terrible early spring weather, so thats why we are only seeing some beter sized swarms now.

 

 

 

 

 

If you watch all three short videos you will see how quickly they entered the swarm trap.

Incidentially, this one had lemon grass oil inside, but it wasnt that strongly baited and only recently did it have lemon grass on the front (about 2 weeks previously) and no, if its fresh it dosent seem t put them off. ( that questioned worried me)

 

I was pretty sure a swarm was coming so i was interested to see if there was any other activity at the trap of a fellow beekeepers, some 5oo meters away. There was a couple of bees at the trap, checking it out, but nothing like the 20 or 30 that were around mine, so this time luckily, mine was the mst favoured. I think also that the trap was the best proximity to the nest of bees. Ie it was their prefered distance to swarm to.

 

 

Moving the swarm.

 

 

So this is the big question, how long after the bees have swarmed, is it still safe to move the bees back to your apiary, if its less than 3 miles away?

 

Well my thoughts on this are mixed. Personally I think if you move the swarm the minute all the bees are inside and just a few fanning on the front then it will be fine, but in this case, it was less than a mile to my apiary and the bees had been coming and going from this trap for a few days and i felt they had built up a good map in their heads of the positions of their nest (the source of the swarm) and the place they swarmed too.

They arrived fairly early in the morning, and had been checking out the area all afternoon, which in my book, means getting used to their new surroundings so, it was going to have to moved to the three mile or more to ensure they didnt know where they were.

I will bring them back to my apiary after 3 days have passed and that will ensure they have forgot where they are.

Its a big swarm, they emptied the first feeder overnight after moving them and they are already on their second load of sugar. When I bring them back i will put them straight in  to a new  10 framed hive. I also put out another trap in the same place because this was evidently a prime swarm and with the weather due to stay fine for the nexw week or too theres every chance of a cast swarm!

 

This was a lovely experience, One i may not see again, so i am glad i managed to get some video, even if i nearly broke my leg after shinning up the drain pipe adjacent to the swarm, as my ladder wasnt handy but it was worth it! Hope you liked it.

 

 

 

 

 

Spring in the apiary.

Well spring has sprung and apologies for not posting but it's been a very busy period.

Nice Jucy swarm Cells!

I had a few early swarms from my own bees but the weather was poor and again the nuc hives struggled to requeen due to the continuous cold temperatures.
Overall it's a positive note and it's nice to say the bees have shown how dynamic they are in the face of adversity.

How Ironic, a swarm on the back of a warning sign saying "beware bees"

So far to date I have caught 4 swarms in four swarm traps. I am hoping for a few more in the next few weeks as the bees here should still be capable of swarming in until the end of July.
The forecast is good and up until very recently we have had little or no sunshine, so it could still be a good honey harvest.
Conditions are good. The chestnut trees are coming in to flower ( three weeks late) and if the forecast does live up to its predicted trend then we should have  the potential for a lot if honey.

Heres some of the spring honey I took from two of my hives.

I will be artificially swarming all my strong hives in the latter part of July, and moving honey supers with the mother hive, so they can continue to dry and cap it all, ready for the harvest around the last week of August but that's a long way off yet.
Typically two of my strong hives have become queen less at the wrong time so they are our of production for this year. I doubt they will requeen in time!

Natural Hive rqueening can result in this problem when using  an open mesh flooring. In this case the recently mated (i hope) queen has returned to the hive, can smell it, and thinks she is back in. So the best way to deal with this is , with two of you., have another base handy. Unclip the base and lift off the hive. Your assistant then carefully lifts up the base with the swarm hanging underneath and then replaces it with the spare one. The hive is then put back on top and the swarm can then be lowered on to the top of the frames and hopefully the queen will resume her role within the hive.

Had a swarm from one of my nucs that I was feeding. It had a queen cell in it, or at least i think it was a single cell? but when I came past the other week they had swarmed on to a nearby tree and i didnt know which it had come from so I went back home to get my swarm catching box only to find on my return they had all gone back in to this Nuc. So it was a queen obviously couldnt decide if she was swarming or on a mating flight.  You can see in the pic they have all just returned with loads fanning on the front of ther hive. Lovely to see when I was there. The air was heavily scented with Nasanov.

Cracking picture of one of my queens. I mark them all with  yellow. I find it is easier to see and is supposed to last longer in the hive.


Next year I want to raise a batch of queens to try and get around this problem and by using small mating boxes I am hoping to be able to have a few, ready mated queens on standby to be inserted in to poorly laying  or queenless hives if need be. But that will be next spring before any of that will be considered. Its going to take a lot of work but it looks like a great project for next year. I will need to have a started hive packed full of bees, with the existing queen not present and then a finishing hive to finish and incubate the queen larvae if i have any! I will be posting how i do this. Theres still qite a few things i need to get sorted out prior to next spring.
I will be making my own queen cups and the grafting in to these quees cups so I will have a go at doing sme grafting before that, just to get used to using the tools. I have purchased the chinese and stainless steel grafting tools. I see they both are reccomended but everyone has a preference.

Bought some frame hangers to try. Only £7 from the uk. I think they will make life easier at the apiary. I am always having to lean frames up against the hive, on the floor and this should now get rid of that problem. They are a universal fit.

Finally , do you think this cat is waiting for a swarm too, or just being a typical cat and having an afternoon snooze in front of my swarm trap. Never a dull moment!



Prime and cast swarms. Artificial swarms and making a new home for a colony in my barn wall.

Holiday Swarm

Well just got back from a 2 week break and typically one of my hives had swarmed while i was away. Fortunately its not all bad news. I caught the swarm in one of my swarm traps. So that was the first swarm!
The second was a typical "cast swarm". much smaller in size,a few days later, and with a vigin queen!
I recorded a few seconds of film . I shook this one on to a while and very slowly they crawled in to the hive. It had been raining a little  and was cold so They werent very happy, but still very well tempered.

 

So once i had instaled that swarm in to a Nuc, then i went on to check my other hives.

Principally i have put three honey supers on three of my stongest hives and thought that as the weather had been so poor up until now, the chances of swarming would be small but, in beekeeping , expect the unexpected! It was obvious that it was one of these three that had swarmed,

Hardly any honey in the honey super, and a lot less bees and also the swarm directly in front of  suspected hive.

So then I checked my 4 hives and 3 of then had closed queencells on brood frames so i had to perform artificial swarms on these 3 , after dashing back to the house to find some spare nucs!

So, all those were artificially swarmed, but not in ideal conditions and not as many bees as i would have liked in the colony but, really not with much choice over the matter, or face losing your bees and a weak colony for a little while longer. At least if i act now then things should recover by the time of the summer honey starts to flow, well thats the theory!!!

 

 

Creating a nich in the wall of my barn for a swarm! 

 

 After I did a cut out last year at Callac in exactly the same window niche,  a thought occured to me that i have exactly the same blocked up window in my old storage shed. So i have been dying to knock the rubbe out of the blocked up window and today i got on with it.

Luckily it was of very old  lime mortasr so it came away pretty easily.

 

 

The finished exposed window, how it would have looked all those years ago!

 

the next job will be to build a frame inside the rear of the widow(inside the shed) and some how incorporate a glass viewing strip, including a  door for access and then to build a front landing tray and incorporate a winter mouse guard and closing  entrance door to shut them in if needed. Ie, work on the barn or oxyalic acid treatment.

So thats my plan and i hopefuly can have it completd in the next few weeks so I can get a swarm established this year. Its lot of work  but i think i can get it finished in time.

 

I am going to fit in a timber roof with lines of wax melted in to the wood at the correct distance in the hope that the build nice vertical combs so i can see whats going on all the tme. Should be great fun if it works out.

 

 

 

 

 

With the help of my son Thoma,s we soon had the front carefully knocked out!

 

 

Swarm traps, queen Marking and Honey Supers

Swarm Traps deployed.

 

In all I have 34 traps out this year. I finished putting them all out last week. 30 of them have the feromone nasanov in and 4 of them just have lemon grass oil in. I tried to remember to take a picture of each swarm trap after it was deployed. This is a great help in remembering which hive went where.

The season is about 3 to 4 weeks late this year and to be honest the chances of trapping many swarms are not good.

Firstly the seasons of 2000 and 2001 were very dry in their summers and last year with the terrible weather we had from mid April to mid July lead to problems with requeening motherhives or requeening weak queens in general.(suprsedure). The cool temperatures, low numbers of males and  just  generally poor weather has lead to a decline in wild colonies by perhaps 30%.

Saying all of that ,i am still optimistic. Bees are very dynamic. and as long as i can catch a few swarms I will be delighted. If i get any where the 30 % success rate of last year then i will be very pleased!

All my traps contained at least 2 old smelly frames this year, due to last years losses, so you lose on one side but gain massively on the other and i also managd to rotate my nucs last summer and almost all my nucs,  that are now swarm traps have been used at least once before. I have made another swarm trap for tree deployment, that is just pinned up. all different things to try test out different ideas.

 

 

Most traps are about waist to head height, in sheltered corner, face south west to west and  are in areas where i have caught swarms before or i just cant resist the area due to its topography, position in relation to old trees and its sheltered positions.

Swarm traps are a really great way of introducing the general publec to beekeeping.
Very often i will make contact with a landowner that happends to be near to where i have been working and i ask them if they would mind if i put a swarm trap on their property or land.
Mostly the general public are quite negative about bees but the tide is turning thanks to education and the internet.

So when I arrive with one of my traps in the spring, put it up and explain to the property owner what will happen when a swarm arrives they are usually mortified or quite aprehensive as to what probems these bees might cause when they come. The truth of it is that they sometimes dont even notive a swarm ariving or it arives when they are out and all they notice is a few bees starting to come and go with pollen on their legs.

Once this has happened most people realise and enjoy the experience and sometimes peoply have asked me to leave recently arived swarms in situ, so they can watch them develop. Generally though its a good idea to remove a swarm within a week . When that queen starts to lay and the bees become a little more protective, its time to move the colony to the apiary.

Some of the typical wilow pollen that came out in early April this year three weeks alter than usual.

 

Queen Marking

 

I took the opportuity to mark a few of my queens during early April. The colonies were still on the small side and the queens are easier to find. I generally dont like to rip the colonies apart just for this purpose, but it if i see a queen, and am ready with the marking cup, she gets a yellow dot on her thorax.

 

As I have said before, I like to keep my qeen in the mother hive during artificial swarming.  That way I feel my mother hive isnt lost for honey production afterwards and finding the queen quickly is a great help. The yellow I use dosent indicate the year of my queens , its just easier to find the queen, quickly and I have been told that yellow and white paint tends to stay on he best, so thats why i am using yellow.

 

 

 

 

This year we suddenly seem to be getting some near normal weather. The temperatures are slowly rising and for the next two weeks it looks as though we will have perfect spring weather for spring honey production, totally different to last year.

I have put on three honey supers on three on my colonies and will harvest them about a week later this year, but certainly no longer in case of crystalisaton in the frames, now that would be a shame!

Happy beekeeping . The next 4 months are the best of the year, I just love this time of year.

First inspection, Snow and Rebalancing of the seasons

First inspection of my hives was carried out on Sunday 10th March. The weather was not ideal but the bees were in a very relaxed mood.
To my delight, all my hives that were queenright, had successfully made it through to what I thought  was the end of the winter. Inspection of the brood sections revealed suprisingly good brood laying by all my queens, the size of capped brood reflected in the size of workers availible to support the larval stage foraging, feeding and nurserie duties. All of my colonies were fed with half a litre of sugar syrop.
Four of my colonies had brood and eggs on four sides. (of two frames), quite remarkable considering how cold the weather has been.
I am sure that egg laying frequency, like many animals nust be influenced by day length increases and not just food and temperature levels. We have had cold weather, 6 to 8 degrees colder on average than this time last year and i would have expected to see smaller colonies and smaller brood pattern, but generally its all good news.Most hives were still wel stocked too, so last autumn was a good forraging season! Also no sign of any nastiest  that one would perhaps discover after a winters confinement.

So, three days later we had Snow, not just any old snow. This was a full on blizzard with temperatures below freezing for at least 3 days. I managed to get to my hives 3 days after the snow to get this pic , just for the record, but by then a lot of it had already started to melt. we had about 20 cms that drifted in the strong to gale force winds that came from the east.

A thoroughly unpleasant period of weather, but not at all unusual for March. I have memories of the daffodils in the snow as a child and there they were again, full bloom and mostly ruined by the frost!

 

 

One cant help but think that actually this is a bit of a normal season. For the last couple of years at least, I recall we have seen many shrubs comming in to flower at the end of february and I would like to think that this year we are starting  to see the time scale of things begining to be "reset" to the more average time. Flowereing blackcurrant and forsythia are usualy well in flower by early march. This year its really only just begining to open its buds. Blackthorn that seemed to be coming in to flower some 2 weeks ago, has completly halted and masses of buds remain unopened.

Oil seed rape is some 2 weeks behind on last years flowering,  the plants are very stunted after having a very late sowing last autumn, poor growth and germination and then sitting in waterlogged soil all winter. The flower stalks are only 30 cms high at their maximum. but putting all that aside, we still have the potential for a very good season. the ground water tables are at their maximum  so lets keep our fingers crossed. 

 

 

 Some good pollenrich shrubs you can plant for your bees this time of year are this false quince "chaenomeles" Spp

Gorse is really good but dificult to propagate unless you have good gloves!!!

Evergreen clematis are aslo really early to flower. This is a picture from one of my clients gardens. I caught a swarm not 10 meters from this shrub last summer and it was alive with bees again, as these highly scented flowers were begining to open.

 

Honey bee on Clematis

 

Finally, all my swarm traps are ready to be deployed. I have forty "Nucs" but i am going to deploy 30 of them as swarm traps this year. I dont think i will better my percentage catch rate of last year but I will be trying my best to keep searching and improving on my bees gene pool.
They will go out in about 3 weeks, as this years weather is near normal at the moment. I am looking to deploy them all in the second week of Aprill.
Each nuc has at least 2 old frames of old comb inside. This due to my losses last summer, so hopefuly those losses will asist me this year. Its a bit  of give and take in this game!