Concentrate......science bit

The bee keeping year ends with making sure your bees are as healthy as possible to get them through the winter.  The two main parasites to fend off are Nosema and Varroa, neither is nice to deal with but it needs to be done....

Nosema testing came first.  Sadly the spores of the parasite live in the guts of the bee so the only way to test for it is to obtain a sample of bees. The books suggest that the simplest way to obtain the recommended sample size of 30 bees is to suit up, grab a jam jar and behave like a woodpecker...

 

So having held the jam jar over the hive entrance, and knocked rapidly on the hive -just like a woodpecker would if it was trying to get in there to steal honey, its really easy (!) to get the lid on the jam jar of angry bees that came rushing out to get the woodpecker...

Their day got even worse when I popped them in the freezer to euthanise them - I guess the least said about that the better...except it doesn't really get better - for the bees at least...

 

'Cos after being frozen and defrosted they got their abdomens carefully snipped off...

 

And there's only one thing better than one abdomen ....and that's the full sample size of at least 30...    :(
and as if that wasn't brutal enough they then got pulverised and made into soup with a little sterilised water...

And then a little drip of bee gut soup is examined on a microscope slide and the anxious bee keeper gets to hope they don't see too many of these... those little things that look like rice grains are the bad guys and thankfully there were very few of them in my bees...so no nasty chemical treatment this year - PHEW!

So then it was onto Varroa control.  Varroa is a nasty little mite that piggie-backs the bee and sucks its "blood" (technically its hemolymph), rather like fleas bother dogs, a healthy animal (or bee colony) can cope with some but there's a tipping point where there are just too many open wounds and the bees become more vulnerable to other infections and pretty soon the whole colony is compromised.

So keeping the number of varroa mites in your bee colony to the absolute minimum is key to success.  Thankfully there are a number of effective pyrethroids which when mixed with sugar fondant and eaten by bees cause the mites to fall off the bees.  So its simple enough to put some in the top of the hive, slip a board underneath to catch the bodies and wait and see what you find...

24 hours later....

There's not too much to see....perhaps I should leave it in there for a bit longer, then there'll be a bit more to see...

Lots of bits of beeswax and bits of dead bee weren't really what I was looking for - what I'm after are little red crab looking mites...

  

And suddenly ...no sooner had I seen one than there were loads of them ...   :(

 

You think that looks bad.... look what I found a couple of days later...

So looks like I'll be treating them again in the spring.

And woe is me...look who else I found...

This looked suspiciously like a wax moth grub.  These little grubs live exactly up to their name - they are the grub of a moth specifically adapted to feed on beeswax.  In the wild they are probably really useful for clearing up all the bits of wax that fall from a hive but in a modern hive they can destroy lots of wax by burrowing through it out of the reach of workers, who would sting them and throw them out of the hive.

So the best thing to do is find as many as you can ...

They are grotesquely greasy (well you would be too if all you ate was beeswax) I'm sure there was a Dr Who monster based on them once back in the days when I was young enough to be scared by Dr Who.
I can freeze the frames that the bees will store honey in so that any that have made it there will be killed - there'll be no extra protein in MY honey.
But for now, there is nothing else to do other than scrabble around under the hive and scoop them out of their webs where they are beginning to cocoon themselves ...

 




And apologise to their mother that there are going to be 4 less wax moths in my garden this year...

Sorry Mummy moth.

mmmmm Honey Monster....

Do you remember that feeling when you had butterflies in your tummy because you were so excited but also so nervous about taking something into school, that you were really proud of making but didn't know what your teacher and friends would have to say about it?
Well, that was me on Tuesday night...
It was official tasting night down at the Apiary.
An opportunity for local bee keepers to get together, taste and score (gulp!) each others honeys!

I handed over my unlabelled anonymous jar and it was added to the line up...(I worked hard to keep visions of "The Usual Suspects" out of my mind...)

Can you believe that so many colours and textures are possible?

Honey tasting is serious stuff - we had proper official instructions...

So armed with score cards and straws the tasting commenced...

Perhaps we didn't take it that seriously....there was plenty of gentle conversation on just how little honey there had been to harvest this year...just how much feeding the bees were going to need to get them through the winter...and as the pile of used straws got bigger and bigger...

 

The comments about the honey drifted into the room...."so pale it looks like lemon juice",...."is that black treacle or liquorice I can taste",..."mmmm smell the lime"...
Throughout the evening rumours circulated of a "red herring honey" -apparently a neighbouring apiary had added a Sainsbury's basic to their honey tasting evening and had been horrified when members chose it as the winner..would our committee try the same trick on us? would we fall for it?
Score cards built up and were carefully recorded at mission control...

Soon enough a clear leader became apparent.

Which severely disappointed at least one honorary member who had been waiting patiently all evening for his expert opinion to be called upon for final adjudication...

The overall winner, scoring 335, (Colour 107:  Texture 102;  Taste 126) won on taste, had only been extracted from the frames the previous weekend...

Thankfully no Sainsbury's honey was there - but a £1.89 blended honey from Lidl scored 84 on taste placing it 20th.

The pure oilseed rape honey scored 88 on taste placing it 15th

But despite its caramel (or was it treacle?) smell and thick, sticky texture the forest honey from Malawi didn't appeal to many of us, scoring the lowest at 53 on taste

And what about my entry?... well here it is...

The official score for #23 was 297 (Taste 95: Texture 97: Colour 105) placing it 5th overall on the night

But do you know what, it doesn't really matter...it means more to me that son #2 has declared my honey on toast  to be his favourite breakfast EVER...and all the friends who've tasted it say they can taste the flowers  and the look on Dean's face when he exclaimed "That's nothing like the inside of a locket" was priceless...

So all I need to work out is how I give that feedback to the bees so we can start again next spring...

Wiltshire Wanderings...

The weather forecast for this weekend was for a superbly sunny Saturday followed by a dankly miserable rainy Sunday.  So the mission for the day was to meet up with friends and persuade four children that they wanted to spend the afternoon outside in the real world rather than on-line in a virtual minefield.

I wasn't the only one who felt the need to take maximum advantage of the sunshine...

 




The sunshine and the greenery of Wiltshire beckoned...

 

We hadn't gone far when we found the ridge of an old Fort to ramble over...

We weren't the only ones out enjoying the sunshine, we shared the path with horses and even adopted a Labrador briefly...

 

The hedgerows were stunning...

And if you wander far enough...

 




And if you look hard enough ...

 




You will find treasure!

So then it was all hands on deck to gather the bounty...

And thank heavens for 'im indoors' shoulders - they came in handy for reaching the best berries...

 

And when we'd gathered all the juicy blackberries we could find we strolled home the long way...

Lusting after houses we might treat ourselves to if the right numbers ever come up on the national lottery...

 

And dreaming of just how many more berries there might be next week of only the sun would shine long enough to ripen them...