It's a bad news and good news situation now.

Firstly the good news, the queens are out. Went in on Friday and they weren't in the cages.


The queen is actually in this picture. Since you don't know what to look for, it might as well be a plate of baked beans.

Where in this picture?


More good news


They've start construction on board the brand new frames that I put in. You can see the old mucky frames at the bottom and my shiny new ones at the top. So that kind of implies they are expanding in number, the five frames they came on are no longer sufficient so they are branching out.
See the bees making that bridge? They don't seem to fly within the hive I guess it is dangerous to do so. When they find a gap like the one here (did I mention I have so far royally sucked at getting frame spacing right?) they don't fly across it, they make a bee bridge out of bees and walk across the bridge.

And I think my job sucks.
I've closed this gap btw. In fact I think I'm done with the frame spacing, it's not perfect, but it's the brood box and effectively has nothing to do with me, it's their home and they will fill it in as they see fit, since I don't use it for anything it's really not up to me to make them do it as I say, though the more things they do the way I want it done, the easier it is for me to inspect the hive for problems.

Ok, about those problems. Sheeeyit. I'd heard some rumours about the guy I bought my bees from, like he's banned from the British Bee Keepers Association and all events etc, that's not a good start. Shame bee keepers don't pillory each other on forums then his google footprint might have shown up the kind of shit the guy gets up to. Apparently I'm lucky I even got any bees out of him, and caged queens like I received it apparently not any normal way to supply bees, anyway I have them, what could go wrong?



Here's a picture of a piece of old comb that the bees came on.
The sections in the corners labelled "1" are light golden coloured, that's honey store. On the brood frames they store honey in the top corner sections for local use. Inside the 1 sections you may notice large bulbous cups with holes in, that's ok, those are queen cups. (There's 3 in the lefthand section, and 1 in the right) The queen cups as I undestand are where they would ideally raise a new queen if they have the requirement or opportunity, though it's not an exclusive deal they can convert any cell into a queen cup if need be.

The section labelled "2" is uncapped larvae. This is between 4 and 8 days old. So the queen has been out for at least 4 days and possibly 8, though I checked last Friday and she wasn't, so it's either 4 or 6.9999 days.

The section labelled "3" is an emerging new bee, likely from the previous queen when they were back at the supplier, 21 days old.

The bee in section 4 is a big fucking problem. In the enlarged section you can see the red lump that is a Varroa Destructor mite.


For those who have heard about bee's woes over the last 5 years may have heard about some bug that is killing bees, well this is it. There's actually about 6 bees with Varroa attached on this photo but you can't really pick them out in the shrunk view I posted here.

I've had the varroa inspection board in place for 10 days so I whipped it out and started counted Varroa, it's a hard job counting things you can barely see, but I got to about 30 and gave up bored. I've bought bees with a Varroa problem.

So bee keeping community, Mike Robert of Easybee Products supplies bees with Varroa on board, I know google picks up this section of litheye, consider the warnings I never received and get your bees from Maisemore Apiaries instead. I've met the chief guy there at the beekeeping convention in spring and he's a straight talking no bullshit in, no bullshit out kinda guy, get your bees from him, because he told me what Mike Roberts was going to give me (if anything) and he wasn't even a little bit wrong.

What do I do about Varroa?
Dunno yet. I need to do more reading, the way I read it so far, there's no cure, I can limit, curtail, control and try, but eventually Varroa will reduce my colony to a pointless shack. Might take a couple of years of bad honey production and me spending on medicines and food, but in the end this colony is doomed.

On Friday I'll go in again and check the other colony for Varroa. It doesn't have a varroa inspection board, but I'll see about fashioning one that fits inside that hive out of white cardboard maybe.

They're not easy to spot, bees don't hold still, but taking photos of the frames and analysing the pictures is a really big help, I'll try to mark 1 frame and photograph it each week to see how it develops, that might be interesting. It might also be a big waste of time... we'll see.

thread too good for pubbie bazaar tbh

interesting stuff...

keep us updated

hope the mites are not in the other colony...how easily are the mites transferred?

This is really interesting stuff.

Very interesting, although getting sold bees with mites really sucks dude, can only hope the other colony doesn't have them

very good thread, keep us updated

Just reading defences against those mites, this one sounds complex as fuck. Definitely be sure to let us know your plan of action

mayb u should just gas chamber the lot of them and start again???

It's an option. The Varroa mite isn't going anywhere soon, I was expecting to see Varroa, but perhaps not for 3 years. So it's an issue I will need to address at some point to be successful long term, at the moment the problem has a compounding issue, my hives are weak. They are split hives sold with caged queens. This time of year an established hive should be around 30,000 to 50,000 bees, mine I guess are more like 5000.
This means I have a lot less bee I can willingly sacrifice for the greater good. (the greater good)

They are busy in the brood chambers trying to get their numbers up, until they have completed that they won't try and store any honey in the supers. Which means I'll be getting no harvest but I'm ok with that as long as they get their numbers up for next year.

Once they have proper numbers up I can start experimenting with queen rearing and splitting off new colonies which I can ensure are varroa free. Manually. Literally selecting bees to attend the queen and manually ripping off any mites on them and then placing them in clean comb in a queen rearing chamber and feeding them manually.
This is all theoretical mind, I read about queen rearing and I presume this sort of thing is possible for anybody with tweezers and patience. It's the sort of skills I'm going to need in the future if it turns out I want to make a career out of it.

So with my weakened hives and the potential yet to get some honey out of them this year I can't really medicate the hives. It's discouraged / forbidden to medicate hives where human consumption of honey can occur. Never mind that farmers spray crops with whatever Big Pharma are selling this year.
Since the medicines also don't cure Varroa, merely reduce their numbers I'm not in any hurry to medicate anyway.
There are behavioural techniques I can employ, sprinkling them with icing sugar can help. The mites live on the back of the head because the bees cannot remove them there, but sprinkle them with icing sugar and they start grooming it off, and when they are done they start grooming the backs of other bee's heads knocking off the mites. Or so the story goes. It's all anecdotal evidence, scientific studies aren't being done in this area to enough of a degree.

Then as Chunky mentioned I can use drone trapping techniques, while wikipedia is prepared to ignore the [citation required] around the 80% success rate figure, I've read a few things that suggest drone trapping doesn't actually do anything measurable.

So it's all a crap shoot really. I can't do the comb cage trapping thing because I simply don't have any drone comb and it will be a long time before I can have the bees make some due to their low numbers right now. The best I can do is sugar sprinkle them weekly for now. When we get to October there's going to be no chance for any more honey and I can medicate. In itself it's a pretty horrible thing to do.



Notice how they don't go near the medicine. There's a damm good reason for that, it's basically an insecticide. And what are bees? Insects. The idea is that the strips give off insectide (Thymol) vapours which fills the hive with a low dosage of insecticide, enough to kill many varroa but not enough to kill many bees.
But the area around the strips, the bees do not want to enter, they will not walk near it and they will remove any honey or brood in the cells directly below the strips laid on the frame tops.

I guess it would be akin to having a little machine give out small quantities of chlorine gas in your living room, enough to kill wolves and hyenas but not enough to kill you. You'd feel a bit squiffy and maybe your grandma might die from it, but you'd be more safe from the chance of being eaten by a wolf or hyena.