August 2024
Summer at Last and Some Honey in the Supers - Newsletter from Alan Riach
After just about giving up on getting a proper harvest this year, I was pleasantly surprised to see full supers in the last week of July. The bees were enthusiastically on the Himalayan balsam (Impatiens glandulifera) – lots of ghosties in the hive – HB smears the back of the bees with its sticky white pollen. The Rosebay willowherb (Chamaenerion angustifolium) was also being worked, and of course, good old Meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria), a much-underrated bee plant. Honey extraction showed that the bees had been on the Lime trees (Tilia sp) with frames full of that lovely light green honey, tasting of our childhood limeade pop. Quite a few EMBA members have taken bees to the heather this year, so let us hope the weather holds and the heather yields.
We have a guide document for taking bees to the heather, which majors on hives boiling over with bees and plenty of space and ventilation during transport – at least one empty super and a mesh travel screen with varroa tray out and roof off during transport. This is especially important with Poly hives, which have very close roofs.
Although there were not many early summer swarms this year, we have seen quite a few lately. Many of these are casts (secondary) swarms and will need lots of feeding if they are to survive winter. Swarms which have installed themselves in the structure of buildings are always a problem, a good reason for avoiding having your bees swarm. Matthew Richardson advises that the official options for bee removals from buildings are UKBR or BBRA, both of which are brokers for beekeepers offering this service - neither is cheap. We have one member, Kevin Gay, who is a builder with the necessary skills and insurance cover to tackle removals which may require structure removal, but Kevin will be limited as to how many problems he can tackle, and householders should be prepared to pay for such removals.
Most of the new queens should now have started laying, but keep an eye on the brood. Some queens may have struggled to get mated properly in the poor weather conditions earlier in the year. As mentioned previously, new queens in very populous colonies can take weeks before they start laying (5 or 6 weeks is not unusual). However, now that the flows have started again, eggs should now be appearing. If eggs don’t appear, remember the classic test for queenlessness – from a queenright colony, insert a frame that has eggs or up to two-day-old larvae (just beginning to show segmentation). Remember to shake it free of bees (especially free of the queen). If the colony is truly queenless, they will create queen cells on the inserted frame.
Time to start thinking about harvesting honey and preparing the bees for winter. The bees often have honey spread about the supers, some sealed, some not. It is risky to extract unsealed honey, although if it doesn’t come out of the cells with a good horizontal shake, it is probably ok. Check with your refractometer anyway. It should ideally be below 19% water content (20% max for selling) (23% for Heather). If there is lots of uncapped “wet” honey when you are clearing the supers, consider “double extraction”. Place frames in the extractor without uncapping the sealed cells and run the extractor briefly (and not too vigorously). The unripe honey will fly out quickly. This process is very quick as you simply load the extractor, run and remove the frames. Drain the unripe honey from the extractor and feed it back to the bees as winter feed. Keep track of which apiary the honey came from and don’t risk spread of disease by returning honey (or wet supers) to different apiaries; ideally, return to the same hives from which it originated. Now uncap the frames as usual and extract the sealed honey, which will be well under 19%.
