There is no photos in this update, chiefly because we went in after dusk, we could barely see as it was.

We were going in for to rob the honey, so we wanted them as dopey as possible.
We'd already checked out the National hive, they're not making honey this year and I fed them in the last update, roughly 2-3kg of sugar + water syrup. They completely emptied that bucket 10 days later it was all gone. I was hoping to look in to see what they had done with it. Prepared them a new bucket of 5kg sugar + water. That sat waiting while we went robbing the WBC hive of honey.

The top honey box we removed, knowing it had no harvestable honey it, then we took out the lower honey box to check, putting the top honey box back where the lower honey box came from. This kind of home disassembly didn't sit well with the bees and they woke the fuck up pretty good. So then the smoker went out, because that's just what you need. The original lower honey box was placed on top of my Workmate (tm) while we went a relit the smoker.

By time we'd got back they were extremely noisy and pouring out all over the place, didn't know they could get some many bees into one little honey box, so we smoked them and they went back in, we started pulling out the frames one by one to check for harvestable honey, by half way through, they sounded like they were going to attack, so the smoker went out again.
Ok, when we got back this time, they'd assimilated the Workmate (tm) as bees so often do.



Reluctantly we pressed on, simply to find there was no harvestable honey, and we put the box back onto the hive, crushing a few hundred bees in the process, then we put the lid back on crushing another few hundred, Fledge kicked the Workmate (tm) over to get the bees to leave it alone, which didn't work at all.

After we'd ran back up the garden, I decided it was my turn to be pissed off and, like a boss, went back for my Workmate (tm).
Turned out that the bees that had assimilated it were behaving as an actual swarm* and were in no mood for a fight at all. So in the end I just brushed them all off with my hand and they fell to the floor as though they couldn't even fly. Dumb asses. Either they worked that shit out, or they are dead in the lawn where they landed.

Either way, we got no honey. There won't be any chance to get any this year either now. Too few flowering things around. The WBC can eat their own for the time being, I guess when the weather turns cold and they run out I'll hook them up with some sugar.

Mostly I blame myself. I think if I had intensively feasted them when I first got them, they would have got off to a roaring start and I'd be getting honey now. But basically I got them half way through season and I think I basically starved them at a critical time and am now reaping what I sowed, nothing. Still I'll know for spring. Early feed, for a better year.

It was too dark to see what the National had done with their last bucket of food, but holy crap theer was a lot of them... amazing what a bit of food can do, oops. So anyway yeah, fed them another 5kg.

Also, found this lol.
Looking forward to moving my hives when I move house soon.....


*ie, not a single fuck was given that day.... as seen in this video....
http://youtubedoubler.com/?video1=FvjmyOAmP60&start1=0&video2=GgwBdRoq3Vc&start2=0&authorName=2010

looked at pictures before reading post and assumed something had gone horribly wrong.

I've been busy reading about how to move hives and how to prep them for winter, because amusingly I have to do both.
I'm moving house, my year in this excellent bungalow is now over and I have to move to a shitty terrace in a posh town. Also, I'm not allowed to keep bees in the new house, which is a bit of a disappointment, but also could be good.

See, we know this guy who runs an antiques barn and it has some land around it where they breed ducks and chickens and such like, they have a farm shop, the guy that runs it would be more than happy to accomodate the bees in return for first dibs on selling the honey. It's in the middle of the countryside, couldn't really be more ideal.
In the short term this solves a lot of problems, leaving only the medium and long term to worry about...

So anyway, get this, moving hives, if you move them more than 3 feet you must move them more than 3 miles. Apparently if you move a hive 4 feet, you will lose all your bees. Even though the hive is right there, they simply cannot appreciate that it is their hive. You have to move 3 miles to format the bees hard drives and make them work out where it is that they live now. I've bought a bunch of stuff like metal triangles, nails and hinge clasps to make the usually freestanding hive component boxes into rigid structures that will survive a journey. This is basically because I havn't planned ahead. Had I planned ahead I could have arranged that the hives only consist of single boxes and could be moved easily. Still, moving them is going to be hilarious and dangerous, that will be a good update and I hope to get a lot of photos in between the screaming.

Preparing for winter includes quite a lot of stuff, mostly feeding. And I've been reading up, contradictory evidence presents itself at every opportunity. I originally thought I need to get the honey boxes off and fill the brood boxes with sugar, but apparently that won't be enough according to other people.
So, I'm going with the idea that they need at least 2 brood boxes full of food, because that way the most I can waste is a box of sugar. Too little and I lose all the bees.
Time is short though. The cool weather prevents the bees working, and I apparently need to get into each hive at least 20kg of sugar, to the best of my knowledge they can get about 5kg in every week. This does not give me much time. So I'm feeding them like crazy at the moment.

Here's some sugar I made up yesterday.

The bucket has a lid that snaps on airtight and a really tight gauze hole you see on the lid there. Well inverted fully, water cannot come out through the gauze it's too tight to let air through. Bizarre stuff. Anyway on top of the hives are Crown Boards, they are basically just lids, but they have an oval hole or two near the middle. In this hole is usually placed a one-way valve that means bees can enter the hive through it, but not exit. Well, the valve is removed and the bucket placed over the oval hole. The bees can suck sugar through the gauze and go store it. In this way they get a bucketfull of sugar for winter.

Now I have a large bucket that fits inside a honey box for the ugly hive, no problem at all, but the pretty hive has two honeyboxes on already and no where to fit any bucket under the lid, but I did but a smaller bucket.

So how to fit a bucket where there is no room for one.
Enter Necessity, the Mother Of Invention.

(Love the image name here smug1.jpg)
Yes I have these cargo straps for when I come to move the hives, so here's me strapping the lid to hive, minmatar fashion. Today it's stormy, sunny and showery. This weather really pisses the bees off, ever since I started feeding them, they are aggressive, violent and quick to anger, with time against me in between thunder showers I ran out unprotected to mackle this affair together. Didn't get stung either, but I was proper shitting myself. The very second I popped out the valves from the crownboards, the bees launched through the new hole in their home straight into my face of horror.

Here's a closer view

Just this side of the bucket you can see the 2nd bee valve in the crown board there. I don't know why some crownboards have two valves instead of just one, but there you go, just some do. The bucket is covering the hole left where the central valve has been plucked out.
Also, I didn't know how to use cargo straps until this morning. I now know that spending about $3 on a cargo strap and ratchet is a great way to get frustrated and damaged fingers.

When the bees calm down, I'll go back out there and square up the cargo strap, I know it's on the wobble, I have eyes, I just don't have a good time doing it with an audience that is basically looking for a reason to try and kill me.

Final almost irrelevant image

My pear tree is shedding pears. I was hoping to harvest these, but again, time is against me, I'm moving house in about two weeks time and I don't have the time to get the pears ripened, but here they are doing me a great service.
Wasps at this time of year are hungry and they will happily invade bee hives to rob honey, apparently those fights can be a treat to watch, while not particularly dangerous to the colony, there will be blood. Hornet attacks on the other hand are lethal to the bees.
Anyway, I've seen the wasps sniffing round the hives a few times, they're often in my kitchen as well, not surprising they live in the loft, I keep killing them, but there seems to be room for plenty more. Anyway, these rotting pears are feeding the wasps lovely, you don't have to go far to see more wasps muching on pear goo, so this probably is keeping them from messing with the bees.

There is more winter preparation to be done, Varrao treatment and removing the queen excluders, will probably cover that later since I won't be doing those things till the hives are at their new home.

the hive looks like wall-E


also if the hives do get attacked by wasps you need to youtube that

And voiceover it in your best attenborough impersonation

This thread is fucking amazing

So, what's at the end of your rainbow?

It's been a long time....
... how have you been?

I've been moving house. That means my bees have been moving house. I was hoping to get plenty of photos of that, but there was a hitch, I enlisted the help of Fledge's father. He installs Aga's for a living and knows a thing or two about moving heavy things that were never designed to be moved much. Also, he's a no nonsense kinda guy, so you won't be taking any photos until this militarily precise operation is completed.

Main Problems in moving hives.
1. The hives are made of components and those components are not stuck together and can fall apart from each freely
2. The hives are full of sugar water and weigh about 30-50kg per component.
3. The hives are full of bees.

Problem 1 was a doddle to solve, I used a load of copper staples about 2 inches wide and them bound the hives with cargo strapping. You saw my cargo ratchets in a previous episode.

Problem 2 was a doddle to solve because you just get 2 guys to lift them.

Problem 3 was easy to solve on the National (ugly) hive, because you just close the door. That doesn't work on the pretty hive because it has no door. We jammed a load of shredded cardboard in it's exit aperture and then brown taped it. To stop them suffocating I replaced the crown board with an open mesh travelling screen, similar to the open mesh bottom of the ugly hive.

I had a tail lift truck to move the hives from Nottingham to... Right Here.

Anyway, the operation started ass crack early in Stratford to get there in Nottingham before 8am so we'd get to the hives before the bees woke up. When we closed the hives we didn't want the bees out foraging, we wanted to get to them while they were still asleep. That bit worked a treat. To lift the hives off the ground we used two metal pipe placed under them, like a stretcher, to carry them away. Up the tail lift, tied inside the truck, we were back on the road by 8:30am.
Fucking mint.

Now see I was moving house, and I still had tons of stuff to move, so the ol' man being ever resourceful said we should move a load of house gear while we had this massive truck with just 2 tiny beehives in it, but I was insistant, we're moving just the hives, because yes, I agree, this bit went real smooth, but by time we reach Stratford these buggers are going to be angry and the last thing we will need is trying to pick our way around my bikes to get the hives out.

On the drive back it occured to us, if the bees escape in transit, we're double fucked, because the bee suits are in the back of the truck with the bees. Already we seem not so clever after all.

Back in stratford it's a hot sunny day, 10am, the bees are awake, hot and bothered yet mercifully still trapped, we hoist them out and it's really less fun this time, because now the hives are audibly angry, and we know we have to open these bitches yet.

Dads are funny things aren't they?
This one has decided he's really enthusiastic about this and stops listening to most things I say, the most important being, "We are not removing that travel screen". Anybody with an ounce of self preservation wouldn't have removed it either, because it was no longer a nice clean mesh, it was a wall of angry bees. So before anybody could say "Kid knows best" he swipes the top off and replaces it with the crown board in one swift move, only then realising he's just rolled about 2000 bees out of the hive, they were already pissed, but nothing pisses a bee off more than rolling it.
Now, we are fucked. But it's no use, we cannot leave, both hive entrances are blocked, I set about releasing the national hive, that was pretty easy, meanwhile father reaches into the pretty hive to scoop out the cardboard.



"Say, why don't you stick your whole face into the entrance of that beehive instead of doing it at arms length like any normal person would?"

"Well I can't see what I'm doing fr..... arrrrrrrggggghhhhhhhh"

:facefullofbees:


Apart from Father in law getting a self inflicted bright red nose from a face full of bees... that went pretty smoothly.
I now live in Stratford, birthplace of one William Shakespeare. You'd think they would find a way to make a few quid out of that.... oh wait...

The hives are in there new home for about a month now, they are this time 90 degrees from each other and much closer together, no real reason for that, there is plenty of space around on this land I am being lent.



I just wanted to try something different for no particular reason really.

So anyway I was there today getting them winter prepped and doing this update.
Anyway, winter starts a lot like this.

Dead bees everywhere. At this time of year they are kicking out the boy bees, because they are only any good for mating and eating, neither of which is handy to the colony in winter.

The main tasks for winter preperation are.

1. Remove the queen excluders.
2. Medicate the hives to kill some Varroa.
3. Pin the lids open a crack to let moisture out.

To do 1 and 2 means disassembling most of the hives, I've not actually done this in months. I'm "supposed" to do it every week, but I figure the less I intervene the better and that most other beekeepers are being cruel to break their home apart so frequently just to be nosey and see, selfishly, that everything is ok.

I've also lost my hive tools, both of them, so I'm doing this with 2 screw drivers to prise everything apart, far from ideal.
When I finally get it all broken apart I find in the WBC (pretty) hive that they've built comb into the queen excluder and filled it with honey. When I pulled the exluder out, I broke that and exposed the honey...


They pounced on it pretty quick and I think started moving it to a safer place.


Here's the WBC hive taken apart, the honey supers are sat on top of the external housing, with the queen excluder say right there, a few desperado bees clutching to it trying to clean the honey off it that they should not have put there in the first place.

Medicine.
It looks like this.

It's a tough plastic strip that contains insecticide. Wait? What? Aren't bees insects? Yes they are. Here's the rub, their medicine will kill some of them, it will hopefully kill a lot more Varroa than it kills bees. Our medicines are usually toxic to us as well, we just hope the dose is low enough to kill more of our illnesses than humans.

The top of the strip unfolds to form a hook, and the strip is lowered in between the frames, 2 per brood box.

Easier than I thought, was expecting shit storm at this point, but nope, and I put this hive back together, using rolled up packaging from the medicine packet as a wedge to hold the lid off a crack.
Cold does not kill bees, damp does. In winter, the bees maintain the hive temperature by walking around beating their wings and so on, in doing so, they cause moisture to form in the hive. A more natural hive would be open to the elements but we beekeepers don't like that because it lets in other pests, so we box them in, but if we don't ventilate, then they will be killed by damp and mildew over winter. Ideally one would use a burnt match, or a coin to wedge the lid off, but I couldn't find my matches and I only had pound coins on me. So rolled up foilpaper it is.

And I set about disassembling the National hive. Whoever invented the National hive deserves a fucking medal, it's so much easier to work with than the pretty WBC hive. It literally takes 1/6th the amount of time to deal with a National hive than a WBC.


The national is apart in no time and here it is disassembled. The queen excluder is a flat green plastic sheet and is rubbish because it has no substance it's difficult to get it to successfully stick to the brood box during maintenance and it flaps about however it feels, regardless of how I feel, I've bought a replacement wood mounted metal mesh like the WBC has. It was however easier to get the bees off the green excluder. One "Rolf Harris Wobble Board" and they couldn't get off it fast enough. Who ordered the cloud of bees?

Medicine goes in, and the National goes back together as quick as it comes apart with it's crownboard wedged for venting and I'm ready to go home.
But the WBC bees haven't finished cleaning their honey off the queen excluder.


I'm a bit hot and sweaty to be giving in to them and I have to confess I was a little brutal here, although, they probably survived their removal....


The people who run the barn here tell me this is where the bees take their water from and the ducks that live here splash the water to kill them. I think that's pretty David Attenborough. There is one lady who goes in after the ducks leave to rescue the bees, which is pretty sweet naive thinking. I've told her not to bother but she says it make her sad to see them drowning. Us city folk just don't understand their country ways....

Did you notice it was a double rainbow today?
Well you can see it slightly more clearer on this one...

+rep awesome post

was actually thinking of your bees recently when i saw this, keep up the goodposting http://inhabitat.com/philips-unveils-se ... ng-gadget/