Bees in the Willows

Bees on the Willows at Embercombe - Spring 2011

What a joy it has been to see the bees out around embercombe. The willows, which are in flower now, are particularly busy, some trees covered in bees of all types, including lots of our honeybees (and I wonder if anyone elses...).
I feel like I've encountered a healthily large number of big beautiful bumble bees this year as the earth is reawakening. They join the honeybees on the beautiful willow trees colecting leg-fulls of pollen.

Honeybees collect pollen by gathering it in 'pollen baskets' on their back legs, which are basically a number of hairs designed to hold the pollen particles. Look closely at a hive entrance and you can watch returning foragers carrying a whole spectrum of orange and yellow pollens.

Welcoming the spring

Last saturday was a balmy sunny day, so Tim and I went and checked the 4 top bar hives.
These were the weakest hives going into the winter, 2 of which were caught swarms from summer 2010, the other 2 being a split hive from spring 2010. We fed heavily in late autumn and on checking were relieved to find 4 colonies alive and seemingly well.

'Light Hive' was full of friendly bees, and with pleasure we noticed capped brood towards the centre of the nest, some of which was hatching before our eyes. Replacing the combs of capped brood and plenty of stores, we quickly closed up this hive. Brood needs to remain at 35degrees C, so we didn't want to leave it out in the open to cool down.

'Dark Hive', although busy with plenty of bees and stores didnt show many signs of brood rearing yet. I dont feel too worried about this as its early days, and again we only briefly checked each comb in order to preserve the colonie's heat and atmosphere.

'Their Hive' (so called because the bees chose to build comb across, perpendicular to, the topbars, making them impossible to separate) seemed healthy, with a good number of bees. We devised a method of picking up all the topbars at once to look from underneath. really quite difficult to see into the hive, but with that comes a level of satisfaction and something quite empowering and trusting about leaving a hive just to the bees... its 'their hive'.

'Our Hive' (situated next to 'their hive' but with straight combs) seems the weakest of the topbar colonies. with few stores and few bees, this is one we will have to watch closely as spring continues. one worry is that during the unpredictable spring weather, bees out foraging may get struck down by sudden drops in temperature as the sun goes behind a cloud, or unforseen showers... thus further reducing colony numbers.
We are considering whether we want to stimulative feed this hive. this would involve feeding liquid sugar syrup to the colony, which encourages the queen to start laying (therefore increasing colony numbers within a few weeks). however, we are trying to manage our bees with as little intervention as possible, so we are reluctant to use this option without consideration.

hopefully I'll get some photos up soon of our apiary.

it feels great once again to have been standing amongst whirling bees and smell their sweet homes, and a relief to find wellness and strength, after a long cold winter.

Embercombe's activist bees....

I wanted to share this. Phill Chandler of Friends of the Bees  has sent the following announcement out... and its an excellently researched, clear and actually quite horrifying read...


OPEN LETTER TO THE BRITISH BEE KEEPERS ASSOCIATION

Since 2001, the British Bee Keepers Association has been receiving in the region of £17,500 per annum from pesticide manufacturers Bayer, Syngenta, BASF and Belchim in return for the BBKA's endorsement of several insecticides as 'bee-friendly'.

The BBKA policy of accepting money from such corporations, taken without consulting the membership, has been condemned by many of its members, other European bee keeping associations and some NGOs as unethical.

While the Executive seem now to have changed their mind again and have dropped the direct endorsement of pesticides, there are still some very important questions that need to be answered.

And - importantly - they have not ruled out accepting money from the pesticide manufacturers under other pretexts.

We call on the BBKA to sever all financial ties to manufacturers, sellers and promoters of any substance known to be or likely to be toxic to bees or other insects.

READ THE FULL TEXT HERE -  http://www.britishbeekeeping.com


IF YOU ARE A BBKA MEMBER - ask your delegate to support the Twickenham motion at the ADM on January 15th. See http://www.britishbeekeeping.com/docs/TwickenhamCanning.pdf for details.

And look out for the story in The Independent!

Please distribute this message to all beekeeping friends.

Phil Chandler
www.naturalbeekeeping.org

Pollen Cells

Here is a cross-section of some very old, darkened wax cells containing a variety of pollens from around the apiary. This pollen is from one of the dadants we purchased from Buckfast Abbey where they were downsizing some of their apiaries. We decided to convert one of the dadants into a topbar hive and were left with a few of these older combs full of pollen... much we left for the bees to rob back, but some we kept and i spent a summer nibbling on little cells of delicious pollen.
Each colour is from a different plant, I'm not sure which flowers are here, and each type tastes totally different too. This pollen is not the same as the pollen grains you can buy. Pollen grains are knocked off the bees legs as they enter the hive, unbeknown to the hardworking pollen foragers.
This pollen in cells is stored pollen, and so has been alchemised into something known as 'bee bread'... using enzymes from the bees, and capped with a sealing of honey to keep it from going off. So i get the impression this cell-bound pollen must be even better for you.

 These beautiful photos were taken by my sister, Milly.

a golden mosaic of pollen and honey

Winter Sun

 

Honeybees warming themselves in the November sunshine in the entrance of Light Hive.

After a noticable drop in temperature there have been a lot fewer flyers from the hives, but a warm afternoon sunshine brings out a few bees to the entrances, a couple fly off while others bring out their dead, a good sign of a colony keeping their home clean.