In the spring of 2022, I decided to create this page to pull together various pieces of my relevant blog post writing, from over the many years. Here, I record, in chronological order, my own journey of discovery of a few aspects of the amazing lives that our ‘naturalised/wild/free-living’ (take your pick) local social honey bees, Apis mellifera, enjoy as the exquisitely complex and highly studied social insects that they undoubtedly are. And I discuss my own attempts to ensure that they have a long-term presence in the garden and landscape here.

It was a relatively long time after we acquired Gelli Uchaf (in 1993), perhaps 2010, or 2011, that I became really excited by seeing, for the very first time, a few honey bees visiting flowers in our developing garden here. Eventually, they became occasional but regular visitors to flowers in the garden during the summer months, and gradually I realised that in spite of our very high rainfall and upland elevation, they were indeed capable of surviving in our marginal environment. This led to early experiments with me creating my own simple hollowed out log hive; 3 separate occasions when conventional bee hives were located on site by 2 local beekeepers; 2 of which were unsuccessful for different reasons, before eventually Tony gave me some basic one to one tuition in conventional beekeeping and the chance to acquire this colony, below, after he’d had it on site for several months.

By now I was becoming engrossed in the huge subject of honey bee ecology and physiology, as well as the separate issue of conventional bee keeping methodology. And quickly had to decide how I wanted to “keep” any honeybees here, since considerable money can be spent on physical hives and ancillary equipment, should one follow a conventional route. This decision really hinged on how important harvesting honey from them was going to be for me. In the end I reckoned that provided I could satisfy our own small annual honey consumption needs, it was much more critical for both me, the garden and our meadows, to have honey bees around throughout the year, both to enjoy their presence, observe their behaviours, and also to gain from their pollination services with fruit and seed set, rather than being able to harvest huge amounts of honey from them.

Their value as pollinators seems particularly important with our many very early flowering winter/spring flowers, when no other pollinators are active – usually the third week of February is the very earliest we might expect to see our first emerged bumblebee queens.

By this time I’d also decided that, for many reasons, keeping the bees in a minimal intervention way, with no supplementary feeding, no swarm prevention measures, and almost no ‘hive’ opening, other than occasional honey removal and certainly no chemical treatments of the hive or bees, would allow the bees to manage their existence as they see fit, and indeed in a manner more similar to how they would exist “in the wild”. Much more is now known and written, about how honeybees do survive “in the wild”, and with no human assistance, than when I began this journey, and more “bee-keepers” across the world are indeed keeping bees in a more Darwinian, or apicentric way – which I reference in my most recent posts.

So, let’s begin way back in April 2011.

28/04/2011:

With our apple blossom still looking great over the last week, I thought I’d spend an hour or so with the camera down by the trees, seeing just what was visiting the flowers. Initially there didn’t seem to be huge numbers of insects, but over the longer period a surprising variety were seen, and a number are shown below.

So who needs honeybees in an orchard when you have all these different insects visiting apple blossom in an hour? I started thinking about how many flowers there might be in a little orchard like this. It seems 6 or 7 flowers on average per cluster, perhaps 150 flower clusters per tree on the spirally trained trees, many more on the fewer standard trees, and let’s say 50 trees. Then each flower will have to be visited at least once, but in practice many more times, let’s say for argument’s sake 5 times and since the flowers on an individual tree open in a staggered way, the tree has open blossom for perhaps 21 days maximum. So I make that about a quarter of a million insect to flower visits over the blossom period in this small orchard space (do check the maths here, since I did it on a ‘Post it’ late in the evening). The other interesting thing gleaned from watching individual insects on blooms was how their habits varied. The couple of honeybees I watched were pretty methodical and spent 3 to 4 seconds per flower. Bumblebees were a bit faster and flightier, but the slowest, most methodical, and most obviously covered in pollen were the solitary mining bees, and masonry bee. These spent up to 20 seconds in a single flower before walking into the next flower in a cluster. But if we averaged the visits at 10 seconds for 10 hours a day for 21 days, a single insect would clock up about 75,000 flower visits, so only 4 insects could achieve the total number of insect-flower visits estimated above. Obviously no single insect will work so continuously though the bumblebees will work from almost dawn until dusk (longer than 10 hours at this time of year). What this little exercise seems to show is that with even just the number of different insects photographed here in about an hour, on a few trees, it is entirely feasible to expect very good, almost perfect pollination and fruit set in a year when flying conditions for insects are OK as they have been to date – i.e. dry, warm and not excessively windy.

Some interesting work was carried out on this subject at the now closed Long Ashton research centre. It was shown that from the point of view of pollen transfer, bumblebees and solitary mining bees were much more effective than honeybees, which in turn were more efficient than smoother bodied flies. The other interesting point which I’d already reflected and acted on after reading Joy Larkom’s book on vegetable growing, was that by putting up wind breaks around an orchard, the number of pollinating insects found could increase by as much as 300%. All of this is a bit academic this year. There will be such a good level of pollination, that barring late frost issues, most of the tiny fruit will either be dropped by the natural June ‘Drop’ (maybe this year in May), when the tree naturally sheds excess fruit, or need to be manually thinned to prevent over-cropping. There certainly won’t be a potential shortage. But it does show how nature often has huge spare capacity in a system to ensure success and resilience. None of the paring to the bone, and “Just In Time” mentality of much current business manufacturing policy.

Finally I shall introduce for the first time to the blog the Gelli version of a home-built vertical top bar bee hive. Made from sections of logs which I’ve hollowed out with a chainsaw, it was first erected last April (2010), in the hope of encouraging a swarm of local honeybees to take up residence. The photo below shows a single scout bee, on 24th May 2010, inspecting the Mk1, Gelli home made hive.

Whilst it had visits from scout bees on 2 occasions through the summer, each lasting for 3 or 4 days, permanent residence wasn’t taken up, and I felt a huge sense of rejection!

Thinking about it a bit more, I decided that perhaps the bees had not been allowed to swarm by a diligent beekeeper removing queen cells; or maybe they had swarmed and the swarm had been captured before making it to my ‘Des. Res’ hive. However, I read recently that these scout bees have no long-term memory, and don’t locate suitable future hives in advance and store the information for later. Basically they scout just as the hive is about to swarm, or just after swarming, and then will select the most acceptable of the vetted sites within an area – ideally over 250 metres from the base hive. This confirmed my initial thought that my potential hive had been rejected as unsuitable for some reason obvious to the scout bees. So it’s now been upgraded with an extra hollowed out section added, and been relocated from a semi-shaded area to one in full sun, after watching a video clip from America on where to locate a top bar beehive. I’ve also sealed some of the many cracks between the joins of the logs with clay from our stream.

Beautiful it is not. And I would find it very difficult to harvest any honey from it, but if it works, it will be a first step in simple, low-cost beekeeping, and as with saving one’s own seed strain suited to local conditions, I would much prefer a bee strain suited to the rigours of upland Wales. It shouldn’t be too long a wait. Last year the first visits by scout bees were around May 20th.

23/08/2011:

Along with the arrival of the butterflies, there’s also been a noticeable pick up in the number of bumblebees in the garden again. I’ve mentioned this dip in their numbers before, and in trying to find a bit more information on the topic, came across an excellent article from the Natural History Museum on the general decline in bumblebee numbers recently in the UK. It made the point which I’d never thought about before, that bumblebees are mainly insects of the temperate northern hemisphere, and their life-cycle is designed to cope with this environment. They survive through the hibernation of single mated queens to survive the harsh winters, followed by rapid new colony development and build up in spring. But always limited to a relatively small number of adults within a colony (a few hundred maximum).

In contrast, the honey bee life cycle requires the maintenance of the complete colony, throughout the winter. Although within the hive the number of bees reduces to just a few thousand, maintaining a core temperature of about 34 degrees C to sustain this nucleus of bees is clearly a big challenge. Honey bees and other bee species of this type are therefore more common throughout the tropical and Mediterranean climate zones of the planet. Indeed although we’ve had a few honeybee workers visiting both white and blue borage flowers recently, there have been no signs of scout bees around the hollowed out tree trunk at all this year. Perhaps I’ll give it one more season, and then decide whether to abandon the plan of having honeybees up here, or bite the bullet and shell out for a nucleus of bees to try to populate the homebuilt hive with.

The return of significant numbers of bumblebees after the July dip always seems to coincide with the flowering of Common Knapweed in the garden, and this is a magnet for many species, as well as hoverflies, moths and butterflies.

I spotted what I think was a new (for Gelli) species of solitary bee feeding on Knapweed flowers, striking not just because of its pale ventral abdomen, but also the way it aggressively plunged near vertically into the base of the flower in a very determined feeding style.

15/03/2012:

Finally after delivering the MK6 version of our “Botany Of Desire” talk/film on the appeal of different garden flower types to our native insects (to a large and appreciative audience of gardeners from West Wales on Saturday), this Monday suddenly turned into a manic one just after lunchtime. The morning mist had dissipated, there was little wind and the temperatures rose into high double figures. Suddenly the Hellebores and Pulmonaria to the West of our barn were buzzing.

Honey bees, for the first time this year, and so many bumblebees that they were impossible to count (I guess over 40) – four or five at a time on a single clump of Pulmonaria. In addition they were visiting flowers which I’ve never seen them on before, such as primrose. I wonder if the nectar production, release or aroma which will almost certainly rise with higher temperatures, only begins to flow with some of these flowers above a certain temperature? And since the first bumblebees only emerged on February 24th, I must assume that all these bumblebees were different overwintered queens each in the process of establishing their own new colonies. Because firstly the nest and honeypot of nectar has to be made by the queen bee, then eggs laid and the larvae to hatch from these eggs, undergo several moults, pupate, and then emerge as additional worker bumblebees which will help in the colony management. I reckon from what I’ve been able to glean that at least 5 to 6 weeks are required for all of this to happen.

Anyway, this bee blitz lasted for under a couple of hours, and made me wonder whether the Royal Horticultural Society strategy of apparently allowing just 5 observational periods PER YEAR, in their Bug Friendly Plant Project, is really adequate to make informed judgements about which flowers and plants are most friendly to our native insects. On the same Monday a glance through a mailshot gardening catalogue alerted me to “Beepol”….and the chance to “Discover the Value of Bees”. But a more in-depth discussion of this will have to wait until next week.

 

31/05/2012:

It’s also been our best ever year for visits to the garden by honeybees. We reckon the nearest ‘managed’ hive is about a mile away. There seem to be a variety of colours of visiting bees, the majority being a dark or even black bodied form. Are these native or wild bees? Or a hybrid form with the more yellow bodied European or Italian bees?

I’d already seen lots and photographed them on many flowers in the garden which they’ve never visited before – probably just a reflection of previously low visitor numbers. So there was only mild surprise when I opened the greenhouse up the other morning first thing and heard, and then saw, a honeybee inside. I started watering the tomato plants and then was halted by the sound and feel of said bee landing in my left ear.

Right by the ear canal.

I’m not usually phased by insect encounters, but I had enough time to think about the possibility of it exploring this dark, wax lined hole, and possibly stinging me there.

‘Remember that bees rarely sting unless provoked, so don’t panic’, I told myself.

And waited.

But after a minute of standing still, with no sign of the bee flying off, and amplified rasping noises in the ear, I reckoned another tack was called for. So I left the greenhouse to stand outside where there was a brisk southerly wind blowing.

That should shift it!

Well, it didn’t, so I moved round to the front of the house into the sun, and close to some flowers, and then with the bee moving away from the ear canal, but still very much exploring the ear, I glanced in the kitchen window to confirm that it was indeed a bee. There it was, and at this point I realised a photo opportunity was presenting itself, so shouted to Fiona, who predictably responded speedily to (she’s well used to such sudden  requests, by now):

“I’ve got a bee in my ear. Can you come and take a photo”.

The problem was, that as she pressed the camera shutter, a ping alerted her to the fact that the flash card was still in the computer upstairs. Eventually the camera was set up, she homed in and at the very last second, after I guess a good 5 minutes, the bee flew off. So, sadly no nice image of bee in ear to include, so I’ll add a few of bees in flowers instead:.

Honeybee in Rosa rugosa.

Honeybee falling from Geranium himalayense flower. Not as popular with the bees as G. phaeum or G. macrorrhizum, but still visited this year. It’s easy to miss a perfect bee shot.

G. phaeum is really popular with honeybees and smaller bumblebees.

A classic example of flower preferences. For the first time this year, after 3 years of looking, I’ve seen insects – honeybees, visiting the blue flowers of Brunnera macrophylla ‘Mayenne Blue’. But they seem to ignore the similarly sized pink flowers of native Geranium lucidum.

I did wonder later, given the very warm weather and the fact that the bee was in our western redwood cedar greenhouse, a timber often used for beehive construction, and that it seemed attracted to my waxy lughole, that perhaps it was a scout bee out on a pre swarm reconnaissance mission, and that shortly it would be back with company…

07/08/2012:

Visitors to London 2012 may have been interested to read that perhaps too many of the city’s residents concerned by the global decline in honeybee numbers might have jumped into bee keeping as a hobby/interest. A recent report which I read in the wildlife gardening forum’s latest newsletter, suggested that there may now be just too many bee colonies in central London to be supported by the foraging material available.

A square kilometre of foraging habitat will support just 5 colonies apparently (although precisely what is meant by this ‘foraging habitat’ is not defined). There are now areas of central London with over 150 registered hives per square kilometre! So, it seems pretty certain that as with us humans, there just ain’t going to be enough food to go around. Back here at Gelli, regular readers will know that we still don’t have a beehive, but have flirted with attracting honeybees to take up residence in a hollowed-out tree trunk – so far with no success. In this desperately poor summer, one of the real bright spots has been noticing that for the first year ever, we now have honeybees visiting some of the garden’s flowers every day, when the rain abates.

This has never happened in previous years. And just before a visit from the grandchildren, a tidy of their room revealed half a dozen honeybees which had sadly perished inside the bedroom window, presumably after entering through a small gap at the top of the frame, exploring the old house as a potential new home.

So, perhaps in our long term aim of making the garden more insect friendly we are indeed making steady progress. Below is a sequence showing the different pollen colours (cream, blue, orange)  collected by honeybees from 3 different garden flowers in a  rare sunny hour. Native Cornflower (Centaurea cyanus), Echium ‘Blue Bedder‘ and Francoa sonchifolia. All growing in single tyres and so presenting sufficient massed flowers to attract concentrated bee pollen harvesting which reveal these rich colour differences. Interestingly, our local National Botanic Garden of Wales is currently using its globally unique complete database of native plant species DNA codes, to establish from pollen collected from honeybee bodies, exactly which flowers they have been visiting. A different take on direct observation I guess.

18/09/2012:

An earlier than anticipated return home after aborting a trip to the coast on the previous sunny Saturday meant witnessing a temporary invasion of honeybees into the garden. Not a real swarm, simply huge numbers being drawn into the garden by the opening flowers on the many clumps of Sedum spectabile ‘Autumn Joy’ which I’ve gradually bulked up over the years. But we’ve never before witnessed such swarm like numbers of honeybees in the garden at the same time. We grow a few other forms of Sedum, many of which look lovely, but none attract insects to the same degree as ‘Autumn Joy’. And editing my spelling of spectabile, I’ve discovered that this is another AGM plant, although under the disguise of the synonym of Sedum ‘Herbstfreude’. It looks like there’s a foreign, and unplanned, flavour to the featured plants in this post. And for all the years since we first acquired this from Fiona’s parents’ garden, we’ve known it as ‘Autumn Joy’. Which, frankly, it is when grown en masse.

It always attracts lots of flies, bumblebees, moths and butterflies, and a week earlier there’d been hundreds of these all busy on the flowers and just a single honeybee.

But this particular late mid September afternoon, there were hundreds of honeybees on the flowers. The whole ‘event’ lasted perhaps a couple of hours, and as the light failed the bees started to take off with an orientating couple of circuits before flying roughly South West, in the general direction of the closest known hive over a mile away. Interestingly they were flying home almost directly into the wind, so any scent hadn’t been blowing in the direction of the hive. But presumably scout bees made it back to the hive earlier in the day and were sufficiently impressed with the quality or quantity of the Sedum nectar supply to call their friends over. Also, none of these bees were collecting pollen, whereas in another part of the garden there were other worker honeybees, though in ten’s and not hundreds, which were working the Hydrangea flowers for pollen. Do hives shift worker activities to predominantly nectar collection later in the year, with winter approaching? If so, is growing lots of Sedum spectabile ‘Autumn Joy’ a good idea for bee keepers after poor summers?

Sunday saw cooler temperatures and the return of rain, and on a misty, cool Monday morning, there were no active insects around at all, but a couple of bedraggled and ailing worker bees left on the closed wet flowers, which I guess never made it back to the hive.

10/10/2012:

The last swallows have finally fled, the sun hasn’t showed for the last 3 days, the forecast shows more of the same and the nights have really drawn in, so I thought it might be appropriate to explore a topic which is unlikely to surface for the next few months – “Insect friendly flowers“. 

Last week in the garden. Rose ‘Frau Dagmar Hartopp’.

Some regular readers may have explored an expanding separate section on my blog under the title ‘The Real Botany of Desire’, but a lot has happened over the last few weeks to make me want to review this issue in a blog post.

Firstly, I should say, since I don’t seem to have done elsewhere on the blog, that the reason we hit on ‘The Garden Impressionists’ as a title for our ventures is a play on the inspiration we gained from a visit years ago to Monet’s garden at Giverny in late May. In particular I noticed the huge numbers of insects of all kinds in the formal part of the garden, amongst more intermingled flowers than I’d ever seen in a British garden. Obviously, it’s a very labour intensive garden, in a different climate, with many annuals, and only open to the public for half the year, but it stimulated us to try to develop our garden in such a way that it would become equally alive with industrious insect diversity, and perhaps therefore support a greater wildlife diversity, across the animal kingdom.

Did you know that 32 of the 50 most common garden bird species in the UK have insects, at all stages of their life cycle, as the major part of their diet?

As I thought more about the subject, I realised that particularly in temperate zones, flowers have developed over millions of years in an extraordinary and often complex symbiotic relationship with insects – the flowers attract insects to fertilise them and so set seed, and in return the insects are rewarded with food as either nectar or pollen. Much more recently humans – gardeners, plant breeders and nurserymen have muscled in on the scene. To claim flowers as their own, and breed their own cultivars. And select them for largely aesthetic considerations, be that colour, scent or form.

As far as I know there are no, (and probably never have been), nurserymen who are selecting let’s say Aster varieties for their relative appeal to late season insects, yet there are big variations in the relative appeal in our garden of many Aster cultivars to the flies, bees, moths and butterflies which will visit their flowers with potentially valuable pollen and nectar. Come to think of it, wouldn’t it be of value to apiarists to know which cultivars or species of flowers produce the best nectar quality or yields from a given area?

Unknown ( or rather unrecorded!) Aster in the garden last week.

However, awareness of the merits and value of insects in our gardens and landscapes is at last getting a bit more good press, and a couple of weeks ago I watched on line a recent disturbing American documentary on the decline of honeybee numbers and its possible links to large scale agricultural pesticide use (Click here for link). In particular a class of insecticides known as neonicotinoids. I’d encountered two of these, imidaclopramid, and fipronil as pet flea treatments called Advantage and Frontline, in my days as a veterinary surgeon.

Always wary of drug companies’ claims of human safety, I was nevertheless appalled to find their relative toxicity compared to DDT on a weight for weight basis, in a well laid out summary paper pdf by J P van der Sluijs from the Copernicus Institute at the University of Utrecht – 7,297 times as toxic and 6475 times as toxic as DDT to be precise. Click here for more. It’s worth also checking out their maps of groundwater contamination with these pesticides in France and Holland to get a feel for what our insects are up against. Never mind what humans are being exposed to! But never mind, it’s just insect nervous systems that are being disrupted by these chemicals, isn’t it?

This year, in our own pesticide free garden, in a pretty pesticide free part of the UK, in spite of the terrible wet summer insect numbers in early October have, on sunny days, been extraordinary. So perhaps our planting regime with insect friendly flowers is paying dividends after all these years.

Actea ‘Brunette’ last week in the garden.

Is this why some of our garden visitors from even coastal gardens in Wales have commented on our bumper apple crop, compared to their own? Actually it’s way down on last year, with smaller apples and I didn’t need to do much thinning in June. Nevertheless, we still had pretty good pollination and fruit set, given our altitude and rainfall.

Also driving over the mountain last week I spotted a new sign advertising ‘Honey for Sale’. This hasn’t appeared before, and in view of my comments in earlier posts about regular honeybee visits to the garden throughout the year for the first time in 2012, peaking with hundreds of bees on our Sedum spectabile a few weeks ago, I figured I should call in and see what the local honey looks and tastes like.

Interestingly the owner of the hives, Andy Ryan, happens to be the current chairman of the Lampeter and District Bee Keeping Association. I wondered how he came to have honey to sell after such a wet summer? He explained that the bees were able to bring in quite a lot of honey early in the year in the very sunny March and April. But that they’d used most of this up as food, through the wet summer. Then in August/September the bees from one of his 4 hives started to bring in a lot of honey, making a surplus of 55 lbs. I bought a couple of jars figuring some of it was sourced from our Sedum nectar. And like all natural products it has a very distinctive taste and light yellow colour.

The local honey, French comparisons, and Sedum spectabile in the background.

Andy’s comments confirmed my thoughts that particularly in an environment like ours, at relatively high altitude and with 70 inches plus of annual rainfall, there’s a need to try to plan your garden so that there are nectar and pollen source flowers available to bees, and all the other insects around, right the way through their periods of flight activity. Because a bad weather spell may mean an inability to fly for long periods, and stored food will be necessary to keep some of the colony insects going.

Helianthus ‘Lemon Queen’ last week.

But how do the gardening media and big plant retailers fare in promoting insect friendly flowers? Around the time I collected my honey from Andy, our 2 monthly subscription gardening magazines arrived on the same day. ‘The Garden’ magazine, produced by the Royal Horticultural Society, RHS, had an in depth article on Sedum cultivars. The RHS have done much to encourage awareness of beneficial insects with their ‘Perfect For Pollinators’ range of plants, and an ongoing ‘Plants For Bugs’ project.

‘Gardens Illustrated’ magazine had an even more extensive feature on Japanese Anemones. Both Anemones and Sedum are stalwarts in our garden and produce masses of late season flowers. The Sedum spectabile ‘Autumn Joy’ which we grow, is a fantastic flower with honeybee, bumblebee, moth, butterfly and fly appeal. The Japanese Anemone has a more restricted appeal, mostly to a diversity of flies, and occasionally bumblebees and honeybees as a pollen source. It’s difficult to take a photo of either of them without some insect being included in the image.

Sedum spectabile ‘Autumn Joy’ when the honeybees came calling on 9/09/12.

Anemone x hybrida ‘Honourine Joubert’ in the garden last week.

But what caught my eye was that none of the lovely flower images in either of these articles featured a flower with an insect actually on it. So, I broadened the analysis.

Welsh poppy, Meconopsis cambrica, in the garden last week.

• ‘The Garden’ magazine contained just a single insect on flower image in its 98 pages. The last page had an image of Nerine flowers with possibly (!) an out of focus bumblebee on it.
• ‘Gardens Illustrated’ contained 3 small insect on flower images out of about 115 flower images. All were butterflies.
• The extensive wholesale bulb catalogue from J. Parker, including many species of insect friendly Allium cultivars, contained … actually, I gave up looking after 79 pages with about 20 flower photos per page and not a single insect on flower image.
• The 2013 seed catalogue from leading British seed firm Thompson and Morgan features 151 plants to grow from seed which carry the RHS ‘Perfect For Pollinators’ logo. Yet there were only 2 insect on flower images – both were butterflies.

Finally, whilst researching the scientific name for Garlic Chives, Allium tuberosum, which we inherited from another garden and which seems to be a lovely and insect friendly flower for autumn, I came across Sarah Raven’s website. Sarah has also done a huge amount to raise the issue of the decline in wild pollinating insects, and the value of native wild flowers for supporting healthy insect populations. She also has a range of flowers to grow from seed which are attractive to bees and butterflies for sale on her website. Out of 169 plants and images there are just 4 insect on flower images with 3 butterflies and 1 of a bumblebee.

Garlic Chives, Allium tuberosum, in the garden last week.

Errors and omissions excepted, as the saying goes.

So in total, in all these glossy pages stuffed with thousands of flower images which, you will recall from earlier in the article, are largely a life form which has evolved to appeal to insects, there are only 5 butterflies and possibly 2 bumblebees illustrated.

No flies.

No Moths.

No beetles, or ‘Bugs’.

Not even a single honeybee.

It’s difficult to do photographic justice to the hundreds of insects gorging on common wild ivy, Hedera helix, in the garden last week. Over a dozen insects in this small section.

There are lots of possible reasons for this dearth of insect on flower images. Perceived aesthetics, or perhaps detracting from the flower’s clarity or appeal on the page? Lack of suitable images to include? Commercial pressures from pesticide manufacturers and advertisers, to mention a few which spring to mind? But my point is that if this sort of skewed media coverage were applied in the UK to any other minority group, and heck, insects by total numbers, let alone species numbers, are the most numerous and diverse life form on the planet, so hardly a minority group, then there would be an outcry at the huge discrimination in operation.

Is it naive to hope that our gardening media and nurserymen might see that a gradual and progressive shift in the percentage of images selected where insects featured might, over time, help to raise the gardening public’s awareness of these creatures which are essential to the ecology of the planet? And awaken more to the issues surrounding vital pollinator loss.

09/02/2013:

Regular followers will know that we’ve been making the garden more appealing to native insects, and recording the most favoured flowers in this regard elsewhere on this site (click here). For the first time last year we had honeybee visitors regularly through the seasons, and eventually found where we think they were coming from, about a mile and a half away. I’m delighted that Andy Ryan has agreed to site one of his honeybee hives just above the garden at the bottom of our high meadow. So, at dusk a week ago, once the bees had all calmed down and cold weather was forecast, Andy arrived with the hive, a brood chamber and a ‘super’ containing a slab of fondant icing from the bakers in Llanybydder, all tightly bound together with a couple of belt straps. Even in such chilly weather, the bees would be capable of becoming quite irate if aroused.

Carried up into the meadow I’ve temporarily hurdled it off to prevent our inquisitive sheep rubbing against it. So far, so good. A bee has ventured out briefly, but there’s no indication of a sunny day on the horizon to see if the local bees would be interested in all those Caucasian flowers!

22/02/2013:

However the return to freezing ground and bitter Easterlies, has stopped the show for now.

I’m guessing the flocks are choosing to head to warmer conditions near the coast. 3 days ago in this run of dry days, the sun shone, and the wind dropped. It wasn’t really warm, but by 10.30 am the first worker honeybees had decided that it was indeed a suitable day for working. There had been several about the previous slightly windier day, but with brash burning bonfires to start after the recent hedge laying, I opted to leave the distraction of further observation and photography until lunchtime.I’m glad I delayed. Firstly, because it’s an extremely addictive way of passing the day, watching these eager insects beavering away. And you feel slightly guilty afterwards with an always huge list of ‘still-to-do’ jobs. But also, I would probably have given up earlier on in a long photographic stint, and then missed seeing the first 2 bumblebee queens of the year visiting our Crocus flowers. The white tailed bumblebee, Bombus terrestris, and Early bumblebee, Bombus pratorum, (probably) were about a week earlier than last year (here shown on Crocus ‘Cream Beauty’ and C. sieberi ‘Firefly’. The last clump has had flowers for nearly 6 weeks, waiting for a pollinator to turn up).It’s also interesting that in contrast to most early bumblebees last year, neither of these queens appear to be carrying any mites.

As in previous years, their preferred flower in the garden this early in the year is always the Crocus. I speculate this year that this might be because not only is it a potentially good source of both nectar AND pollen (more on this later), but these pretty large and heavy bees can straddle the flowers without them collapsing. So far I’ve never seen a bumblebee visit a snowdrop, Cyclamen coum or Scilla mischtschenkoana, though they will visit Pulmonaria and Hellebore flowers. Observing their early afternoon antics where they were collecting nectar as a food stuff and store for what will be their new colony, and pollen as the foodstuff to sustain the larvae which will form the new colonies’ workers, I realised how vital it is to plant the right sort of Crocus in a part of the garden where it will catch any sunshine that there is, between about 10.30 am and 3 pm.Outside these hours, and the bees are unlikely to be on the wing, since temperatures will be too low. No exposure to sun because of poor siting of the Crocus, and the flowers will remain firmly closed and inaccessible to the bees. Closing the flowers in this way is of course a sensible strategy by the plant to protect stamens and ovaries from weather extremes.The Scilla mischtschenkoana flowers must have a hardier constitution. They remain open, once the buds have matured and opened for the first time.This strategy has the big advantage that any insect which emerges early in the day can still visit the flower. And Andy’s honeybees seem to love them.This is also interesting, since we had no bee visits to them at all last year, and I suspect that the difference is that they are now readily accessible to the hive’s bees without them having to fly long distances to reach them – a strategy which would likely be perilous at this time of the year. My impression is that the honeybees are visiting primarily for the abundant pale pollen that they produce – there may be little nectar on offer? The honeybees also visit our many snowdrops for orange pollen (again hardly ever recorded before the hive was placed on site).As well as the Crocus flowers.But another interesting observation was also made. Although none of these short lived insects will ever have experienced any of these flowers before, firm preferences seem to become established really quickly. A cohort of bees preferred the Crocus ‘Cream Beauty’, where the principle goal was nectar gathering, judging by the upended duck like position adopted by the bees in the Crocus flower, straining to reach the nectaries at the base of the flower with their relatively short tongues. As I noticed last year, these C. ‘Cream Beauty’ are vigorous in our garden and multiply well, but set very little seed, and if you look closely they seem to produce little if any pollen. Interestingly the RHS have given Crocus ‘Cream Beauty’ an Award of Garden Merit, AGM, and list it as a ‘Perfect For Pollinators’ plant. We can concur with its merits as garden worthy and insect friendly, though semantically, is a flower which produces virtually no pollen, “Perfect For Pollinators”?

In marked contrast a different cohort of honeybees will seek out the Crocus tommasinianus flowers which are laden with pollen and any bee, honey or bumble, will emerge with an all over dusting.Trying some time lapse photography with a Camcorder upgrade indeed confirmed this selective feeding by different groups of bees from the same hive.Part of the time lapse trial area. This division of labour is probably a very efficient strategy. As with a bumblebee colony, a honeybee hive needs both carbohydrate rich nectar to feed the colony (and eventually produce honey from any surplus) and oil and protein rich pollen as a food for the larvae which will hatch from eggs that the queen honeybee is probably already laying (she never leaves the hive at this time of the year). The hive’s number of active workers will grow rapidly as spring progresses into summer.

This observation again persuaded me that flower selection, placement and numbers can be a hugely important factor in whether a colony of either bumblebees or honeybees is likely to survive and thrive in your area. I also discovered that (many populations of honeybees’ reluctance to fly in any rain or drizzle, in contrast to the tougher bumblebee, can be compensated for by the ability of the hive to gather nectar in profusion, if the weather and food source are suitable. An American study showed that the weight of a hive could increase by a massive 6 kg in just 24 hours, largely as a result of nectar gathering, given optimum weather and available nectar sources.

The one disappointment after this very successful period of bee watching was that in spite of having hundreds of wonderful and permanently open Cyclamen coum flowers, the bees largely ignored them. So my hand pollination will have to continue to ensure seed production. The image below is the only time I saw a honeybee of Cyclamen coum flowers in nearly an hour of looking, in spite of hundreds of open Cyclamen flowers. Ninety nine out of 100 bees clearly expressed a preference for other flowers!Equally this apparent lack of insect appeal is probably the reason that the Cyclamen coum season lasts for so long in our garden.I’d planned a major snowdrop blog for today, but all this unexpected bee activity pushed it out. So just a couple of photos for now.

22/03/2013:

Within the garden proper, spring is definitely on hold. The bees haven’t been out for days.(March 17th).

Many plants which survived earlier wintry blasts have succumbed after 2 or 3 days of freeze chilling by strong easterlies, in the middle of this month. There’s still no sign on the monthly forecast of when this wintry weather will abate.

17/04/2013:

30/07/2013:

Shortly after my last post we’d begun our tedious manual small scale hay making on our steeply sloping field by strimming off selected areas of our this hay/wild flower meadow. I reckoned strimming around the empty bee hive might be a good idea as well since the developing heatwave might have triggered a swarm nearby. Indeed we’d both seen and heard a mini swarm fly overhead and down our track, a couple of days earlier. So 2 days later I got quite excited when Fiona noticed a few bees exploring the hive entrance at dusk.A day later and the numbers had increased, and another day saw tens of bees around the entrance in the mid day heat, which by now was regularly hitting the high ‘ 20’s degrees C.By dusk, activity seemed to have ceased, and keen to see whether anything was happening inside I carefully lifted the top super off the hive (after first pressing an ear to the flaky paint of the exterior for any sound of significant bee activity. None was detected).To my surprise there were perhaps 50 or 60 bees pressed in between a couple of the combs. But this confirmed my suspicions that all this activity wasn’t real scouting for a new home, but simply exploiting and robbing the residual honey stores left by the previous, long deceased, inhabitants. A later visit from Andy, the bee keeper, confirmed this. Within 2 days the honey had presumably been cleared and no more bees were seen around the hive. I do wonder if bees are capable of sensing death in a hive like this, and perhaps giving it a wide berth as a potential new home? This would be a sensible adaptive trait, in view of the evident vulnerability of the hive’s current position during the unusual freeze drying Easterly winds of the previous spring.

27/10/2013:

Pushed into last place of topics for this post, is a subject I’ve not quite managed to include before, but better had now before it becomes completely inappropriate for the time of year. Two interesting pieces of research on bee visits to flowers have caught my eye this year.The first, is from recent work from Bristol University around February of this year. I normally don’t include text directly from other pieces, but have done below since Ed Yong’s piece is extremely elegantly and succinctly written. You must however read the whole piece and look at the images which are there.Click here to see the fascinating whole piece. Below is a taster:

Dominic Clarke and Heather Whitney from the University of Bristol have shown that bumblebees can sense the electric field that surrounds a flower. They can even learn to distinguish between fields produced by different floral shapes, or use them to work out whether a flower has been recently visited by other bees. Flowers aren’t just visual spectacles and smelly beacons. They’re also electric billboards.

“This is a big finding,” says Daniel Robert, who led the study. “Nobody had postulated the idea that bees could be sensitive to the electric field of a flower.”

Scientists have, however, known about the electric side of pollination since the 1960s, although it is rarely discussed. As bees fly through the air, they bump into charged particles from dust to small molecules. The friction of these microscopic collisions strips electrons from the bee’s surface, and they typically end up with a positive charge.

Flowers, on the other hand, tend to have a negative charge, at least on clear days. The flowers themselves are electrically earthed, but the air around them carries a voltage of around 100 volts for every metre above the ground. The positive charge that accumulates around the flower induces a negative charge in its petals.

When the positively charged bee arrives at the negatively charged flower, sparks don’t fly but pollen does. “We found some videos showing that pollen literally jumps from the flower to the bee, as the bee approaches… even before it has landed,” says Robert. The bee may fly over to the flower but at close quarters, the flower also flies over to the bee.

This is old news. As far back as the 1970s, botanists suggested that electric forces enhance the attraction between pollen and pollinators. Some even showed that if you sprinkle pollen over an immobilised bee, some of the falling grains will veer off course and stick to the insect.

But Robert is no botanist. He’s a sensory biologist. He studies how animals perceive the world around them. When he came across the electric world of bees and flowers, the first question that sprang to mind was: “Does the bee know anything about this process?” Amazingly, no one had asked the question, much less answered it. “We read all of the papers,” says Robert. “We even had one translated from Russian, but no one had made that intellectual leap.”

To answer the question, Robert teamed up with Clarke (a physicist) and Whitney (a botanist), and created e-flowers—artificial purple-topped blooms with designer electric fields. When bumblebees could choose between charged flowers that carried a sugary liquid, or charge-less flowers that yielded a bitter one, they soon learned to visit the charged ones with 81 percent accuracy. If none of the flowers were charged, the bees lost the ability to pinpoint the sugary rewards.

The second piece of recent bee research I shall try to precis, for 2 reasons. Firstly, I was sent it in an email as a PDF and can’t find a link to the actual research paper, though there is a simple review  which you can access by clicking here. But secondly, the actual paper by Mihail Garbuzov* and Francis L. W. Ratnieks Laboratory of Apiculture & Social Insects, School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, was a mix, at least for me, of incomprehensible complex statistical analysis theory, as well as somewhat poorly explained methodolgy.

But what it did achieve, was to stress that different flowering plants have hugely different appeal to many of our common garden pollinating insects – principally bumblebees, honeybees, flies butterflies and moths – perhaps with a 100 fold difference between the most insect friendly, and the least. A rather strange and limited selection of 32 different flowers were planted in 1 metre square blocks and then were observed on a number of occasions, and actual insect flower visits recorded (though the detail of what constituted these ‘snapshot’ records was a little confusing for me).Some of the information mirrors my own more basic, and not ‘statistically significant‘, observation records on most of the flowers which we grow in our garden. This is detailed in my ‘Real Botany Of Desire’ pages on this blog. It’s more confirmation that if gardeners widely planted more flowers which really are insect friendly, then there would be huge advantages for our native insect fauna.

07/09/2014:

10 days ago, honeybees returned to Gelli Uchaf full time.

They’ve been visiting regularly, but a surprise phone call on Monday heralded our neighbour, Andy, dropping off a hive he’d collected from higher up the mountain, just after teatime. When Andy emerged from his car in full white suited paraphernalia, it was clear a few bees had escaped in transit. A mini cloud milled around the yard. The young swallows became excited overhead, as they do in their pre dusk evening displays.

Using an old wood trolley, we heaved the lower part of the hive up through the field to the location of the ill-fated hive of winter 2013, which survived barely 2 months before succumbing to the freeze-drying Easterlies. No problems with this, but the upper ‘super’ was leaking bees as Andy carried it up later, so I stood a respectful distance behind, sensibly clad (or so I thought!) in my black waterproof trousers and raincoat which I’d used earlier in the days for some vigorous ditch clearing.

As the hive was joined up again, more bees inevitably filled the air, and even this novice bee observer could detect an angry tone to the inevitable buzzing. I started to withdraw, and then had a bee fly full tilt into my face. A little unnerved, I speeded up, and then, about 60 yards from the hive, felt one land on my cheek, and stay there, gyrating. Having always felt that insects will leave you alone, I stood waiting for it to fly off, and it was only after a few seconds I felt the first hint of the sting. Brushing it off, I moved inside after picking up a ribbed plantain leaf to rub onto the stung area – this is a remarkably effective and always to hand analgesic if crushed and rubbed onto horsefly or wasp stings, working within a couple of minutes.36 hours later as I woke to the unpleasant experience of swollen eyelids and tingly lips, and a spreading facial swelling, I thought some better basic bee behavioral and sting anatomy knowledge, was needed.

For beekeepers, there are several clues from the above tale which hint at my almost inevitable fate.

Bees hate disturbance, and so the jolting from the trip in the car would have annoyed them. Once stung, a worker honeybee will die, but in the process the complex mix of chemicals in the sting acts as a pheromone to trigger other worker bees to attack – either by charging (flying into my face), or actually stinging a perceived threat. Andy’s bee suit had a number of stings embedded in it, so would have been a potent source of such fight inducing chemicals. Bees are naturally more likely to attack dark objects (hence my poor clothing choice), since predator species, for example badgers and bears tend to be dark, and bees also dislike the smell of sweat.But what about the actual stinger mechanism?

Rather than being as simple as a tubular hypodermic needle, it consists of 3 separate structures – left and right sided barbed stylets, joined to an un-barbed dorsal stylet. These 3 components lock together in a similar manner to a mini grip resealable plastic bag. This enables the 4 attached skeletal plates and their associated muscles to be able to move the left and right barbed sections independently in reciprocating fashion, to drive the sting deep into the tissue. Before this happens, the bee prepares to sting by flexing its’ abdominal muscles and positioning its’ legs to drive the point of the dorsal stylet in through the skin at close to a 90-degree angle.The really clever bit is the effective action of the barbed stylets.

Very recent work by Chinese scientists, (and the brilliant electron micrograph image above is from their open-source paper “Barbs Facilitate the Helical Penetration of Honeybee (Apis mellifera ligustica) Stingers” by Jianing Wu, Shaoze Yan, Jieliang Zhao, Yuying Ye”) have shown that the barbs are slightly offset in a helical fashion, so that as they are forced deeper into the tissue, they cause the sting to rotate in a clockwise fashion. All this means that the sting becomes very firmly embedded, and since it’s then ripped out of the abdomen with attendant damage to other structures, the bee will not survive. But this also means that the sting is less easy to dislodge. Attached to the sting is a venom sac, and a couple of umbrella valves on the 2 side stylets ensure bee venom is rhythmically pulsed down the central sting canal into the tissue of the victim. Some venom will escape at the surface and act as the pheromonal cue to other bees to move into attack mode.

This venom injection can continue for minutes, even if the sting and venom sac have separated from the bee. The interlocking structure of the 3 sting stylets allows the venom to diffuse out at varying depths of the tissue, to provide more impact than if a single hypodermic needle type structure was employed.  An impressive design, which can be appreciated more clearly with the images available if you click here.

From a practical view point, this means that if you get a bee sting, one of the best things to do is immediately remove the sting using something like a credit card to scrape it from the skin surface. This will limit the potential for further venom injection. And only then maybe rub on the plantain leaf! Fortunately, 48 hours saw maximal swelling, which then gradually dispersed over a few days.

After all this bee inspired activity, rather appropriately, last Sunday saw a lovely group from the Aberystwyth Beekeepers visit the garden, and one of them explained to me that if you watch a bee stinging, (which most people won’t do for understandable reasons!) it will rotate on the spot – presumably being driven round by the forces created by the spiral motion of the sting as it is driven through the skin.Equally appropriately for a group of beekeepers, tea on the terrace on a perfect warm and sunny afternoon was enlivened by a swarm of ants. It was when tidying up, that we got an inkling of just how many ants had been around – the remaining milk in the jug had to be tipped away.But I also managed to see the frantic efforts of several winged males trying to mate with a virgin queen on the table top, which is of course the whole purpose of the ant’s nest annual sudden release of huge numbers of winged offspring, carefully nurtured within the nest by unwinged workers, in just such suitable conditions.I also suffered an ant sting, from an ant which got trapped beneath my tea shirt as I was clearing up, but fortunately not in the same league as the bee’s for physiological impact. I suspect that the ants were the reddish brown species of tree ant Myrmica ruginodis.

21/02/2015:

Returning to the afore mentioned pollinating brush, why do I bother?

After all I have a whole section on the blog about insect friendly flowers, so surely, I should just leave it up to them?

Later in the year, I’m happy to do this, but so far we’ve only had two, very brief, occasions when any honeybees have been flying. February 4th and February 17th, and it’s still too early for any bumblebees to have emerged from hibernation here.So, since I think that these very first flowers of late winter and early spring bulbs (snowdrops/aconites/crocus/cyclamen coum), have huge added therapeutic value, for any winter-tired gardener, they’re the ones to concentrate on trying to bulk up.

But if they never get pollinated this is unlikely to happen!

And they’re mainly derived from source material grown in an artificial Dutch bulb field environment, not a wet Welsh hillside.And given goodness knows what fertiliser and or pesticide treatments.

Home germinated and grown has to be best, in gradually moving populations to forms which are adapted to the conditions local to our garden. 

It’s also really therapeutic and interesting, on a glorious sunny morning, to gently drift between flowers, Crocs on feet and brush in hand. You can spot subtle colour variations between Crocus tommasinianus forms, and even favour pollen collection from those flowers with stronger or more unusual petal hues.

You also begin to see the benefits of your efforts within a few short years – only Crocus chrysanthus ‘Cream Beauty’ corms were planted on the slope below – the other colour variants are the result of scattering saved crocus seed on the surface, 3-4 years ago. How simple is that?

I also did a double take as I was flitting between the masses of purple goblets, and discovered a perfect opened flower, but instead of the usual 6 petals, (actually 3 sepals and 3 petals) there were 8.

And if you look closely there are 4 stamens and also 4 filamentous orange branches off the style, instead of the usual 3. From searching on line, this doesn’t seem particularly common in crocus – I only found one in all the thousands of flowers I’d moved across. But it led me to discover that crocus is one of those more unusual genus groups of plants in that they have a wide range of chromosome numbers. Click here for a comparison with other organisms, and here for variations in chromosome numbers in a single crocus species, Crocus biflorus. No one seems quite sure why, but it may be an aid to, or consequence of, species diversification. Whether or not my 8 petalled form has a different chromosome count to its neighbours, I guess I’ll never know.

But I also discovered that most floral symmetry, across all flower types, is controlled by a single gene, known as the CYCLOIDEA (CYC) gene. Click here for more, about how this gene is expressed within a flower, or even parts of a flower, and how this expression controls the way the flower looks.

The default, or evolutionary base, design is in flowers like the daisies, or indeed Crocus, which have multiple radial symmetries of 3 or more planes. Such basic variations on star shapes, are known botanically as actinomorphic flowers.

A variation in some flowers involves a simpler symmetry, so that like a human face, a mirror image of the flower is created down its centre, in just one position. Such bilateral symmetry is known as zygomorphic, and orchids and members of the pea family are examples of this floral type. Several variants of zygomorphic flowers seem to have evolved independently, and in the pea family, Leguminosae, the 3 sets of petals which make up the distinctive winged type of flower common to the group – standard, wings and keels – all develop into their very different forms because of different levels of expression of the CYC gene. This gene is more strongly expressed at the top of the forming flower bud, and not expressed at the bottom of the bud, producing flowers specifically designed to attract certain types of pollinating insects.

Finally, there are a few flowers which lack any floral symmetry, like valerian, Valeriana officinalis. Interestingly, some plants like snapdragons which are normally zygomorphic, have produced radially symmetrical flowers as an aberration. Such flowers are known as peloric, and whilst it can simply be a developmental error, breeders have exploited its potential to create larger flowers, though again in such cases the change in flower type all comes back to changes in the expression of the CYC gene.

I hope that the above detour into a bit of science doesn’t detract from the aesthetic essence of these wonderful crocus flowers, which whether open or closed, light up the generally still chilly garden scene.

12/04/2015:

We’re in the middle of the Pieris season. And since I was intrigued by the origin of the genus name, I thought I should explore a little.

Pieris, being evergreen shrubs, have year round value in the garden, but I increasingly appreciate them for their early season flowers, and the huge benefits that they provide as nectar sources for honeybees and early season bumblebee queens. I’m not sure about how much pollen they produce, but given an interlude from the prolonged colder weather, there’s an audible buzz near them, as the bees flock to the masses of flowers.

And under the midday sun, stand close to a bush in flower, and you can breathe in a really rich, honey like scent.

When the flowers are over, many of the cultivars then delight with the fantastic colours of the new season’s growth, which are picked up in some of their names, like P. ‘Forest Flame’ and, P. ‘Bonfire’. In most years here, they explode in late March with drooping pannicles of lily of the valley type flowers, which appeared in bud form, the previous autumn, to heighten expectations of when they’ll fill and open.

Quite why Pieris was chosen for the genus, I’m not sure, but it seems to be a link to Greek mythology and the 9 muses who were thought to be influential in most creative endeavours. I stupidly knew nothing about these goddesses of inspiration, obviously a failing for anyone attempting to write a regular blog, and sometimes struggling to gain motivation to sit and hit the keyboard, but they were purportedly the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. Click here for more about their major significance in Greek and later artistic works, throughout the ages. In some records, the muses are represented as water nymphs associated with the springs of Helicon, and Pieris, or Pieria, which is a small region of North Eastern Greece.

But perhaps we have had a tenuous and previously unrecognised garden link to the muses for a few years, since we grow Narcissus ‘Thalia’, which is beginning to flower right now, and is named after one of these Grecian deities. Many thanks are due to a close friend Anne, for recommending this form to us. Multi-headed and a reliable flowering form, its lovely white flowers complement almost any other plant in the garden at this vibrant time of the year. Shown below with orange centred Narcissus ‘Actaea’.

Pieris are a small genus of shrubs within the Ericaceae, which includes all our heathers, which are equal bee flower favourites, with 7 species members native to Eastern Asia, and the USA.  A popular spring white flowering heather, below, shows the similarity in flower form, to the Pieris.

Most of the Pieris we grow are cultivars of P. japonica, and they seem to thrive in the semi-shaded slopes beneath our mature larch trees, where they’re slowly growing – some are more dwarfing forms, but others like P. ‘Forest Flame’ can eventually reach several metres in height, at which point, I’m guessing they’ll keep an army of bees happy for a week or two.

It’s given me a real buzz (sorry), to hear Andy (the chairman of the local bee keeping association) report on his latest visit to inspect his hive in the garden. To his great surprise, the bees had only consumed half of a block of pollen fondant that he’d left to sustain them earlier in the spring. He’d been expecting to have to supplement it, as he has with his other half a dozen hives. Not only that, but they’ve already been laying down honey (by early April). So, all our efforts in planting a garden filled with insect friendly flowers, from early January onwards, seems to be paying off. I’m trying to persuade him to add an extra hive, since the local honey is delicious, and the bees do sterling work in pollinating many of our flowers, and so help proliferate the beneficial ones.

Unfortunately daffodils, Welsh or otherwise, are pretty useless on this front, but they do cheer the spirits, particularly in the fabulous sunshine we’ve been enjoying of late. Along with other tasks, I’ve managed to photograph a few more of my ‘Welsh daffodil sunrises’, which I’m also loading onto a new separate Welsh daffodils page, with more details about each one. I shall use more of these pictures to leaven the rather ‘dry’ section below – if you’d like to find cultivar names, then check out the new page. 

The radio natter drones on as I make the morning cuppa. Then from the dark, outside the back door, a clear song strikes up. Quickly I move and switch off ‘Today’. (I wrote this section in italics in mid-January, but have only belatedly included it below)

Tomorrow perhaps, or later, the radio might win, but for now the robin delights me, and sets the tone for the slow frosty grey dawn. We’re still in winter’s depths, but the birds sense spring. I stand still on the terrace in light barely adequate for filming. The lightest of cold zephyrs on my southerly cheek hints at some air movement and I manage a good three and a half minutes of recording before the first ‘rush’ hour car breaks the spell at 7.45 am. Across the valley, a cow lows deeply. (Mooing seems such a lightweight word, for such a deep resonant sound which enriches the mood, and hangs long in the air). Tits, wrens, robins, blackbirds are all on the move though. Are they trying to grab my attention and encourage me to count them for the annual RSPB garden bird watch, I wonder?

26/04/2015:

Whether because we have a viable honey bee hive in the garden in April for the first time, or whether a single bee had an unusual appreciation of tulip pollen smell or consistency, I’ve never before seen a honeybee carefully sitting astride a tulip stamen, and stroking off the black pollen into fat balls on its hind legs, and then visiting more tulips. Normally the tulip visual feast for a weary gardener’s eyes, are an insect free zone.

Unlike the Skimmia japonica ‘Kew Green’. This is always reliably buzzing with a mass of honeybees, as the early Pieris flowers finish. If you grow just one male Pieris, this is the one I would recommend. The honeyed scent from the open flowers fills the air around the plant even on a chilly day. I do worry that well known gardening authors (the most recent being the otherwise excellent Mark Diacono), suggest plants for pollinators that very rarely get insect visits from the bees (bumble or honey), in our garden – the latest being Mark’s suggestion in the Saturday Telegraph of primroses and daffodils for spring pollinator appeal.

Do any other gardeners find these flowers buzzing with bees on a sunny day?

Eventually this year, with all our thousands of daffodil flowers, I managed a single photo of a solitary bee collecting pollen from Narcissus ‘Thalia’. With us, primroses (and cowslips) are usually the private domain of the pretty Dark-edged Bee fly, Bombylius major. Our bees give the primroses a wide berth. So presumably our other flower options are more highly regarded.

30/05/2015:

How big is a bee’s brain?

Clearly much smaller than ‘pea-brained’ size, as in my ‘Pea-brained!’ derogatory insult sometimes hurled at siblings in the battles of teenage youth. Although it seems from quite recent archaeological discoveries, that one of our ancestor primates, Aegyptopithecus zeuxis, from 29 million years ago, whilst possessing the larger eye sockets, and developing visual cortex indicative of a move to vision becoming the dominant sense, had a brain little bigger than a pea, inside a cat sized body.

From which paleontologists deduce that the much bigger brains typical of all higher apes developed considerably later on in evolutionary terms, than was previously thought. Click here for more. (I have few relevant images to accompany much of the text, so please bear with photos from the garden over the last 2 weeks to break up the tedium, and stop you seeing lots of white bands).

But where has this move to the dominance of visual acuity got us as a species?

And what about the bee’s brain?

I started to think about this with the annual morning buzz, which filled the air outside the front door, very suddenly, on the first day that the tiny Cotoneaster horizontalis flowers began to open. All it needed was a little warmth, and within 15 minutes, the flowers were covered in wasps, bumble and honeybees, with their probing tongues desperate to find a way into the tiny, still tightly furled, flowers.But none of these insignificant flowers had any obvious scent as far as I could detect. And none of these insects would ever have experienced any of these flowers before in their short lives.

So what was going on?It turns out that the attraction trigger for most flowers is not the nectar, as I’d assumed, but rather distinct volatile organic floral scents, released by specialised cells often closely located near the flower’s nectaries. (If you want a more complete explanation of what I’ll now try to précis, then do click here for a brilliant in depth, scientific, though thoroughly readable chapter by Judith Reinhard and Mandyam V. Srinivasan, titled “The Role of Scents in Honey Bee Foraging and Recruitment”.)The majority of floral odorants are chemicals called terpenoids, but there are also large numbers of alcohols, aldehydes, ketones, and esters. Among theses are twelve odorants that occur in over 50% of all floral bouquets analyzed and are hence regarded as typical floral odorants. Different flower species obviously have different scents. The difference in fragrance can be due to a difference in the mix of these floral chemical constituents, but also in their intensity. A floral bouquet can also vary within a species, depending on the environmental conditions, such as the location of an individual flower, time of day, pollination status, nectar content, and age of the flower.

Honeybees are also exposed to numerous scents within the hive – both complex pheromones produced by the bees within the hive, but also exposure to the scents of pollen, nectar and those lingering on the bodies of the bees returning from foraging. It’s obviously pretty dark within a hive, so these scents are critical cues for much bee behaviour, including the amazing progression of roles that the typical honey bee has in its short 6 weeks or so existence.

Did you know that they can move through a range of tasks before they ever make it outside? I didn’t. Cell cleaning, nurse bee, wax production, honey sealing, drone feeding, Queen attendants, honeycomb building, pollen packing, propolizing, mortuary bees (a critical role in removing dead bees or larvae well away from the hive), fanning bees (to regulate the hive’s internal temperature in hot weather), water carrying bees (partly to help supply water for cooling to the fanning bees using a specialised water carrying stomach), guard bees.

And then.

Phew!

For the last 3 weeks or so of their short lives, actually foraging for food – nectar and pollen. (Click here for more on worker bee tasks).

How they actually detect scents led me to the answer to the question I posed at the beginning. A honeybee brain is a mere 1mm cube size. Yet this, together with the neurological system for scent detection, places it as one of the most accomplished of scent detectors in the animal kingdom, being able to pick up traces of chemical down to one part in a trillion – equivalent to a grain of salt in an Olympic sized swimming pool. And their ability to track a scent plume down by flying upwind and in and out of the plume’s edge in a defined pattern means that they can quickly and easily track miniscule quantities of scent down to an origin source well over a hundred metres or more away.

Moreover their bee brains, and detection systems are very ‘plastic’ and intuitive, and a new scent can be learned within as little as 5 minutes, and then retained for their lifetime. This has led to some interest in their role as potential detectors of drugs, explosives or even in medical work, since they seem capable of being trained to detect scent cues released in people’s breath linked to certain types of cancer, diabetes and tuberculosis. Click here for pictures of an interesting glass chamber developed by a Portugese scientist, Susana Soares, which utilises the bees’ sniffer skills. They’re also very sensitive to the smells released from animal’s apocrine or sweat glands.

The medical bee training process is typically Pavlovian.

Expose them to a new scent, and when they respond to it appropriately, reward them with a drop of sugar solution. Within 5 minutes, they will have ‘learned’ the new scent and will stick out their tongue whenever they experience the scent in future, expecting their treat.

Their superb olfactory acuity is determined by their scent processing anatomy. Their antennae are covered with specialised sensory pore plates linked to 48,000 olfactory nerve cells. Within the pore plates are about 160 different ‘receptor’ proteins, which will bind to a scent molecule which drifts in through the open pore. As a result of this ‘binding’, a chemical/ionic reaction triggers the linking sensory nerves to fire off impulses, through a system of processing centres – all the different nerve fibres processing a particular receptor protein pore’s, reactions, converge on a single centre or ganglion, and eventually to the olfactory centres within that tiny bee brain. Some receptors are specific to single individual bee pheromone chemicals, whereas with floral scents, the sensor receptors are more generalised.

But it now became a little clearer to me that the Cotoneaster flowers, whilst having their own mix of chemical attractant cues, will no doubt be using a blend of chemicals which the bees will already have ‘learned’ from their earlier few days of spring flower foraging, as indicating a good food source.

It seems that with the exception of the occasional individual like Roja Dove, (who I only discovered this week, Click here for more, a British parfumier who claims to be able to detect 800 scents blindfold – and then blends them into perfumes starting at £275 a bottle), our particular line of higher apes has really regressed, when it comes to olfactory perception over the humble honeybee, with its miniscule brain.

And I haven’t even ventured into the role of olfactory cues released by plants in their battle against herbivores, which some think floods the world with a range of chemical scent cues, which vastly outnumber even those produced by plants in their quest to attract pollinators.(Click here for an interesting insight).

As a ‘higher’ species, how is it that we’re now so divorced from all these olfactory stimuli which are hugely influential in how the natural world that surrounds us goes about its daily life?

Do smells really only have a value to us when bought in a crystal encrusted bottle?

Is this evolutionary loss of olfactory appreciation now beginning to come home to roost, with a more general disconnect of our species from our place within the vastly complex ecosystems on our planet? 

But all this revelation, for me, in the role of olfactory cues, came after the event of having to ask our bee keeper to come and remove his hive of honey bees from one corner of our hay meadow. Why?

Well I’d begun to notice that later on in the day of Andy’s roughly weekly visit, clad in protective gear, to check the single hive, I was being ‘charged’ by guard bees.

Even some distance from the hive.

I’d mentioned this to Andy on his penultimate visit and was then, as if on cue, chased into the house and stung on the neck by an irate bee.

Two days later whilst filming bumblebees on the flowers in the high meadow I had to abandon the camcorder after being ‘buzzed’. It’s difficult to describe just how unsettling it is to have a guard, or should it be ‘attack’ bee, approach like this. It’s fast, sounds really angry, and often hits you in the face, close to the eyes, in an instant, at speed.

Bang.

Or rather.

BZZZZZZZZ.

I started to become conscious of the subtlety of different buzzing sounds, in a way I’ve never experienced before.

Is it a friendly bumble? Just doing a couple of close circuits to check me out. As they seem to. Usually deeper in pitch, and a more variable sound.

Is it a solitary bee?

Or a fly?

A similar sound to my ear, but not as menacing or persistent.

And then.

No facial hit.

Is it just a worker bee, intent on collecting food, and which have never bothered me, over all the years we’ve been here, even when I’ve got really close with my wide-angle lens to get a good photo?

In the end, whether the bees were really a ‘cranky’ hive, or not (it seems that ‘cranky’ is a euphemistic term amongst bee keepers to describe such aggressive bees), I felt that they had to go. We still have visiting honeybees in the garden, but I can relax, when outside. I really don’t blame the bees. It was yet another demonstration of their supreme abilities – in this case warding off a much bigger potential predator – from proximity to the hive, extremely effectively.

I now realise that such impressive hive defence almost certainly came down to olfactory cues (from my sweat, or possibly a leather hat) that placed me in the same category of Andy with his leather gloves on, who on his weekly visits would regularly end up, with his best endeavours, squashing a few bees during his inspections, and coming away with a few stings in his suit. And consequently, all those ‘ATTACK’ pheromones being released by the dying bees, with ripped out stings leaking yet more of these potent pheromones.

What perhaps made it worse was that he always visited us after first checking out his other hives elsewhere, so his suit was probably really suffused with anger inducing chemicals by the time he got to our hive!

Or maybe I was just wearing the wrong clothing?

Bee keepers recognise that hives are unsettled for several hours after being opened, and with regular garden work, and hay making shortly, there were genuine safety concerns for me and other garden visitors. So very sadly, and with great irony for someone who has worked for years to create a garden full of insect friendly flowers, it was bye bye bees.

Actually, the garden still has numerous worker honeybees in it, flying in from further afield. Perhaps in time I might feel inclined to put out a bait hive, to try to attract a colony, so that we have honeybees around early in the spring, when it’s just too cold for them to reach the garden from a distance. (Click here for a fascinating insight from Amelia on “A French Garden” on how this process of attracting in a swarm can work in practice.)

 

31/07/2018:

With little water available at root level, most plants have struggled to flower well, or sustain flowers for any length of time. The impact for many invertebrates on availability of pollen and nectar must be significant, so it was a delight that a visit by Clare Flynn from Bumblebee Conservation Trust (BCT) to survey our bumblebees was so successful.

She managed to find many bumblebees, of 7 different species, including a Cuckoo bumblebee, Bombus vestalis, which I’d never seen before (above), and Clare was particularly pleased to confirm this, once she’d temporarily popped into a pot to examine more closely.Convinced by the day’s results that we do have vibrant bumblebee populations here, I felt I should try to record these insects in a more meaningful way and so have set up a transect walk using BCT’s Beewalk programme. Click here.

This is an impressive attempt by the charity to get amateur observers involved. However, the site loads really slowly on our sluggish satellite internet, and after spending over an hour inputting data from my first walk (actually taking longer than doing the walk), I was aghast to see that after clicking the “save” data button a page popped up telling me that for an unfathomable reason my data hadn’t been saved and was indeed lost.

“Why?”

I shall resort now to a simple home designed spreadsheet (thanks to Fiona) which will be quicker and hopefully more resilient, if not as shareable. However, the very helpful staff at BCT have now offered to input my data if I can get it to them on such an Excel based spreadsheet. Well done indeed to them.My initial walk around the garden and 2 of our meadows, of about 1300 metres length, and recorded in bee walk fashion – noting any bees seen 2 metres either side of the route, and 4 metres ahead – recorded 101 bumblebees and 6 honeybees.

What will be very interesting to monitor, if I can manage to repeat this often enough, is the range of flowers the bees visit through the year. In part, this obviously reflects the number of available flowers in the garden and meadows at a particular time, and which are close to my route, but is also obviously influenced by the bees’ preferences.

An initial glance at my figures suggests that over 60 % of the bees on this first walk were found on just 3 flower species – Common knapweed, Centaurea nigra, Marjoram, Origanum vulgare, and Greater Birds-foot-trefoil, Lotus pedunculatus. All native species in peak flower during the last week of July.

Buddleja and Stachys officinalis flowers accounted for another 15% of their flower visits.

So, a very narrow selection given all the different flowers still available in the garden and meadows. I wonder to what extent these are the species in this year of extreme drought conditions which have coped best and continued to flower well, and still produce a good nectar and pollen resource for the bees?

The Trefoil flowers are growing in our wet meadow and so haven’t been as affected by water shortage, but the Knapweed, Marjoram and Buddleja certainly seem to have coped better than many other plants in very poor dry soils.

A recent piece of research attempted to assess the impact of (artificially created) drought on flower and nectar production. Droughts are widely expected to become more common even in temperate regions as a result of climate “change”. Click here for a very readable and interesting study paper,

Drought reduces floral resources for pollinators

by Phillips,Shaw,Holland, Fry, Bardgett, Bullock and Osbourne

Using trials based on common calcareous grassland species in the UK, an ecosystem type which is naturally held to be quite drought resistant anyway, they found that flower abundance, flowers actually containing any nectar, and nectar quantity per flower, were all reduced significantly by drought conditions. Clearly this would likely impact on pollinator behaviour, and populations as well.

In spite of this concern about pollinators, Gelli Uchaf has recently once more had a hive of honeybees installed thanks to the kind efforts of Tony, Elaine and Sandy from Lampeter beekeepers.

I just hope they’re still here!The second day after they arrived, lots of honeybees were obvious around the garden, collecting pollen, but 5 days later a very hot day saw a lot of bee “milling-around” activity outside the hive, and now there seem far fewer bees entering and leaving. Might some of them have swarmed?Tony will fill me in on his next visit to check them. (They are still there!) I love to see honeybees working in the garden, but have long felt that I simply don’t have time to manage a hive, so Tony’s offer to place a hive on site and manage it was too good to decline.

10/10/2018:

The third event which was of piffling significance by comparison was the spring meeting of the Carmarthenshire Meadows Group held about 2 weeks ago in the very rural, musty village hall at Pumsaint in North Carmarthenshire. A couple of excellent speakers – one, Laura Jones, gave a resume of her work on using DNA analysis of pollen samples in honey to monitor foraging preferences of honeybees on the extensive estate at the National Botanic Garden of Wales.

Regular readers will know that for years now I’ve been really interested in what I call “insect friendly flowers”, and have a separate web page on this subject – though it’s long overdue for an update. Indeed, for many years, our garden and meadows have been moved towards creating an environment as rich as possible in flowers which appeal across the whole range of insects.

Laura’s PhD thesis, when completed, will give some fascinating quantitative data insight into honeybees’ foraging choices throughout the season, beginning apparently with predominantly Salix and Acers, then moving on through Cratageus and Malus before other less woody plants like bramble, Rubus fruticosus, play more of a role.

The combination of now having a honeybee hive on site, and a formal transect walk for counting (mainly) bumble bee numbers should yield some interesting data of my own on preferred flowers through the seasons to update my previous anecdotal observations.Although an early idea is that it’s tricky to work out whether it’s the sheer numbers of a particular flower which makes it a hit with the bees, or the particular flower type. Since the flowers we’ve planted, or allowed to grow en masse, have tended to be those which, years ago, I assessed as getting frequent visits from many insects.

So this week, the real stars have been Persicaria vaccinifolia, Anemone japonica, as a simple unnamed thuggish pink form, Clematis tangutica, Gernaium procurrens, and in the meadow, Fox-and-Cubs, Pilosella aurantiaca. As a simple thought to leave you with, the thug like Geranium procurrens, which thrives and has spread along the large bank behind the house, stabilising the shale surface on the process, begins blooming in early August most years and continues until the first frosts – sometimes into November.

A quick estimate of current flowers on this patch which originated from perhaps just 3 plants many years ago, came out with a figure of about 5,000 blooms open at any one time. Though an individual flower is fairly short lived, each of the multiple stems has around 10 spent flowers on it. Thus this native of the Himalayas, which would probably be a thug in good soil, is a tremendous resource, for a diverse range of insects, on a difficult to manage site. Perhaps even exceeding a modest suitable tree, in providing nectar and pollen in quantity over a prolonged period. And at the fag end of the season, an obviously easy to locate beacon for those bees to reach, when weather conditions are suitable.

09/01/2019:

For much of the last two weeks, we’ve been under the weather. Or the cloud.A brief and glorious day on December 22nd saw a spell of warm sunshine which warmed the bee hive, and brought many of its occupants rushing outside for fresh air and to stretch wings and legs.Then the grey returned.

22/01/2019:

I’ve been very surprised to find how many times the honey bees have been out and about already this month. I’ve yet to find any returning to the hive with obvious pollen  loads, but they are flying purposefully now, given half a chance, so whether they’re just scouting potential flower sources, or actually collecting nectar, I don’t know.

It’s wonderful in mid-January to have the sometimes very loud sound of buzzing bees, as a background noise on often still, cold mornings – just 5.5 degrees C the other morning outside our back door at 10.20 when the bees emerged. Some even seem determined to inspect us more closely. One inquisitive lass landed on my garish yellow and orange woven fabric and rubberised glove and then began exploring. I actually felt the bee’s tongue probing through the fabric and touch my skin, before presumably working out that the yellow coloured object wasn’t an early nectar source.

There are plenty of flowers now “open” in the garden with bee appeal (Hellebores, Pulmonaria, Scilla, Snowdrops, Cyclamen coum), but apart from a single observation of a bee visiting an open snowdrop flower in early January, as yet, no more confirmed intimate contacts between flowers and insects.

So, choosing one of those fleeting moments when the bees opted to fly, the sun shone, and the northerly wind hadn’t picked up strength, I did what I often do at this time of the year: picked up my small paintbrush and, for half an hour or so, visited the massed Cyclamen coum in David and Valentine’s bed.

 

05/02/2019:

There was no bee activity at all on February 3rd, with ice around in most other areas and the ground still frozen hard, yet the early white Crocus chrysanthus ‘Ard Schenk’, were indeed wide open in these benign pockets of warmer air, with obvious loose pollen inside a few flowers. A few Crocus tommasinianus grown from seed scattered along the cobbles at the very front of the house were the only other Crocus which could manage to open, anywhere else in the garden.

On the 4th, having checked the morning weather forecasts, I was ready to have a look at the hive once the sun broke through the clouds, just before 12.30 pm. Masses of milling bees, but no sign of any actually moving away from the hive, and visiting flowers in the garden.

However, by 1.45 pm, it was a different story. At last I found a couple of honeybees inside a snowdrop, above the croquet lawn, with collected pollen – interestingly this was a local form of G. nivalis.Then another one, inside a rather sad looking Hellebore, hit by those earlier very low temperatures.Finally, I headed down past the massed Cyclamen coum and into the lower copse.The bees had very quickly discovered that this was where the real action was, and this small area of the garden was audibly buzzing with hundreds of bees collecting pollen and nectar from all the plants I knew would be visited, given benign weather. With great delight I also discovered, for the first time, masses were visiting the exquisitely scented flowers of Daphne bholua ‘Jacqueline Postill, which we’re now very fortunate to have growing in a few thickets.

This was such a memorable moment, and will sustain me, and hopefully the bees, for many more days. Might we even get some Daphne berries this year?

When will the next B-Day, or more correctly B-Hour, arrive in our upland garden?

Within an hour the bees had all returned to base, pollen bags in orange and cream to be packed away, nectar regurgitated, leaving the garden a quieter and less exciting place.

The one regret is that there weren’t any bee visits to the many Cyclamen coum, so I’m afraid the paintbrush will still be needed for these.

But it does highlight the benefit of growing many of these early flowering spring bulbs, and also that where they’re sited is really important. All our more “special” snowdrops in their East facing, slightly more exposed location, simply never got warm enough to attract any bee visitors. Galanthus ‘Imbolc’, below, first found in the garden of the galanthophile extraordinaire, Primrose Warburg.

G. “Primrose Warburg”, below.

03/03/2019:

In my last post, I mentioned how honeybees had started to become active in our garden in early February, during occasional sunny moments. As Valentine’s day dawned, the weather had changed.A high pressure system built, and sucked in warm air from the Azores. Thursday and Friday, the 14th and 15th, were warm and sunny all day. The garden came alive in a way we’d never witnessed before. All the years of planting bulbs and other flowers with appeal to early pollinators had paid off.We’ve never witnessed such intense bee activity in any garden before at any time of the year. For example there are at least 6 honey bees in the image above. Word clearly got spread back to the hive, and by lunchtime on both days, hundreds if not thousands of bees were actively harvesting pollen and nectar from the hundreds of thousands of open flowers. It was intensely exciting, almost emotionally so, to witness this. Piet Oudolf et al, eat your hearts out – grasses and dead perennial foliage may be lovely with frosts on, but I wish I could share the wonderful total flower, scent, movement, and sound experience that a late winter garden can be, if massed bulb flowers are incorporated into planting schemes.

Alive, not dead.

Vibrant, not dormant.

We also recorded the first bumblebee of the year on Valentine’s day, an emergent Bombus lucorum queen, as well as a nectaring Peacock, Aglais io, and Red admiral, Vanessa atalanta, butterfly. I’ll finish this post with just how different our garden experience was, compared with the flower-free desert, that is typical of much of West Wales’ agricultural landscape at this time of the year.

But as the weather became a little cloudier over the weekend, I suddenly wondered whether our bees could run out of storage space so early in the year, and if so, what would happen. After all, huge quantities of pollen and nectar must have been harvested by this constant activity, from before 9.00 am until nearly 4 pm each day.

Tony, our beekeeper, after having similar thoughts, felt it sensible to arrange a quick inspection, and the photos below, show his approach to this. Conventional beekeeping wisdom would counter against ever opening a hive at this time of the year, since there is a risk that chilling of the bees could cause significant fatalities of bees, and more particularly developing brood (bee larvae), so these photos may represent an unusual insight into what is going on in a beehive in mid-February, when the weather is unseasonably warm, and the bees have access to abundant nectar and pollen sources. (there are simply NO flowers open in the wider landscape around here yet, except on a few distant gorse bushes).

Below: lighting the smoker – my job was to keep the bellows working and puff smoke onto the bees when requested, to drive them down and into the hive.

Lifting the top off the hive and revealing the store of candy supplement, beneath an insulating foam mat, supplied to the bees as back up feed in early January – largely untouched over the last few weeks.

Freeing up the stuck down top board over the combs, then quickly replacing the board with an unrolled cloth to keep the bees warm and still largely in the dark.

Freeing up some outer frames of comb and eventually lifting a couple out for inspection.

Tony pointed out the brown capped cells which house recently laid eggs which have and developed into bee larvae, which having been fed to maturity are now entombed for the pupation and metamorphosis phase. The queen reduces egg laying in late autumn/winter, but will begin again when food – pollen and nectar – begin to be brought into the hive by worker bees in spring.

There are also paler capped cells to the right edge of the frame which contain stored honey, as well as some empty cells. Apparently bees always leave a few empty cells within the comb and these can then be occupied by special “heater bees”, which enter the empty cells head first and by uncoupling their flight muscles and effectively shivering, can maintain an average thoracic temperature of around 43 degrees C and as a result are capable of warming larvae in adjacent cells. These heater bees use a huge amount of honey to generate their higher body temperatures – perhaps 10 degrees C higher than other “normal” bees in the colony – but play a critical role in aiding bee larva development particularly early in the year. Click here for more details on this amazing process. 

Tony’s verdict was that the bees seemed fine, and that there was still sufficient space for them to expand their numbers in readiness for the year ahead, so that no further frames, or action, were needed. The whole inspection was completed very smoothly, and quickly and it was particularly interesting for me, as my first glimpse inside the bee colony.

I’ve recently wondered about the significance of the bees bringing in so much pollen and nectar from snowdrops, which is probably laden with some of the vast range of alkaloids like galantamine found in different snowdrop species. Many of these chemicals have actions on our own brain’s neurotransmitter chemicals. Indeed, one of these compounds, galantamine, is currently one of the most popular drugs used in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

What effect might these alkaloids have on bee brain function? Or indeed bee larval neuro chemistry, and development? Might it even have been significant in a co- evolutionary development allowing some of the very complex social and organisational strategies and behaviour which characterise honeybee ecology. The Western honey bee, Apis mellifera, (the most common of the dozen or so honeybee species worldwide), and Galanthus (snowdrop) species seem to have quite similar indigenous ranges. Who knows, but a final thought is what function are these complex alkaloid chemicals actually providing to the snowdrop plant? Click here for more insight into just how diverse this range of chemicals is.

These floral – insect interactions, in spite of modest cool breezes within the garden during these special days, represented to me an almost spiritual sense of idyllic calm, natural harmony and interaction, in spite of the near constant buzzing which filled the garden.

They have also been part of a perfect storm for seed production this year, and probably seedling germination, given that our slug population is still extraordinarily low after last year’s freezing spring and dry summer. In addition, our amphibian and reptile populations seem really healthy. Most torch lit, night time forays, now highlight as many frogs, toads and newts, as slugs.

17/04/2019:

The other B-benefit, at least for me, stems from the bee hive, shown wrapped up for a few days this week, courtesy of horrendous chilling South Easterlies, which brought down huge amounts of debris onto the croquet lawn.In what’s (generally) been a fairly benign end to winter and early spring, it’s been a revelation to see how quickly levels of honeybee activity have built up, in spite of the first three weeks of March which saw rain every day, generally cool temperatures, and gusty winds. Our bees are frequently out and about at temperatures around 6 to 7 degrees C, even in strong winds. Most texts say bees need 10 degrees C or higher to forage. This shows the huge advantage of having a strain adapted to local conditions.

But things really went into overdrive around March 23rd, when the numbers of bees around the hive entrance rocketed in sunshine, with huge numbers returning laden with yellow pollen.

Although we have a number of excellent Skimmias in the garden, which have the most fabulous honey scent in flower right now, and get lots of bee visits, this clearly wasn’t the source of the yellow pollen – there simply were insufficient bees on the bushes, and the pollen is more of an orange/buff colour.So I was intrigued to discover where the bees were sourcing this bright yellow dust from. A glance around the landscape showed the very first Pussy willow, Salix caprea, blossoms opening down near the stream, about 300 yards away.Walking down to these confirmed that this was indeed the origin.Large numbers of honeybees (and bumbles) were busy collecting the vast quantities of pollen from the often enormous, examples of Salix caprea, which are found throughout the landscape of our valley and hedgerows.

Sitting at our terrace table later I could see the bees flying overhead and back to the hive with remarkable frequency. What I didn’t realise before researching whether willows provide both pollen and nectar (which they do) was that willows are dioeicious trees, so different trees produce exclusively male and female flowers. The wonderful golden tassles being the showy male flowers – the female flowers are a much less impressive green form.

Suddenly a light bulb moment occurred to me. All the years I’ve spent observing insects in the garden and detecting apparent sudden declines in numbers and wondered why this might be, probably simply reflects the fact that there are sometimes many more plants in the wider landscape outside our garden which are of greater bee appeal. Or at least in greater numbers to divert the bees away from whatever we grow.

In this regard, we are truly fortunate living in this part of the world, since we have many areas with hedgerows which are unflailed, and copses of mature and varied trees. In particular masses of the early spring flowering Goat willows.

At this point I’ll bring in the fantastic research which scientists at our local National Botanic Garden of Wales have been carrying out into bee foraging habits.

Headed up by Dr. Natasha de Vere, who was behind the garden team which DNA barcoded the whole of Wales’ native flora, (the first country in the world to do this) a detailed study has been conducted to see which flowers have been visited by bees from some of the Garden’s hives, by using an analysis of what plant species’ pollen has been found in honey samples. Click here for the full paper, (“Using DNA metabarcoding to investigate honey bee foraging reveals limited flower use despite high floral availability”) from Nature magazine, which is well worth reading, perhaps skipping some of the methodology.

In brief summary, some of the important findings from their study conducted during the critical early season foraging months of April and May were that:

1. During this period, in the study area of around 1 km from the hives, a total of 437 different genera of plants were found to be actually flowering at some point, by a group of knowledgeable volunteer plant spotters. Being a National Botanic Garden, the site actually holds over 8,000 different flowering plants on site, so has a nearly unique and vast diverse potential range of food sources available to their bees.
2. However traces of pollen from only 11% of these species were actually found in the honey samples analysed, which were taken from 3 different hives in the garden’s apiary.
3. And pollen from only 10 of these flower types (identified to taxa level, not always down to individual species) was found at more than 1% in the honey samples.
4. In April the only plants found at greater than the 1% level were in order of decreasing significance: Willow (Salix spp)., followed by Prunus spp., ( probably mainly blackthorn and cherry), Ulex europaeus, (Gorse) Helleborus/Caltha, (Marsh Marigolds?), Fraxinus spp., (Ash), Taraxacum officinale (Dandelion), and the Crataegus/Malus/Cotoneaster (Hawthorn and Apple) group.
5. In May, the only plants featuring above the 1% level were: Crataegus/Malus/Cotoneaster,(Hawthorn, Apple, Cotoneaster) followed by Acer spp., (Maples/Sycamore), Ilex aquifolium,(Holly), Quercus spp., (Oak), Salix spp., (Willow), Taraxacum officinale, (Dandelion), Prunus spp., (Blackthorn and cherry), Hyacinthoides non-scripta (Bluebell), and Ulex europaeus (Gorse).
6. Each hive had different mixes of some of the less frequently visited flowers
7. The pollens detected didn’t represent the closest flowers to the hives, simply those that the bees presumably preferred to collect – there are excellent images of maps in the paper showing where the plant species tended to be located within the environs of the apiary to help asses this.
8. The major pollen sources tended to be both native and woody trees or shrubs with the exception of bluebells, dandelions, and Hellebore/Caltha. This may reflect the fact that there is simply a much greater biomass of these particular plants in the environs, or an actual preference for their nectar and pollen, or indeed a mix of both.  It’s known for example that Acers and Dandelions have particularly high sugar content in their nectar, whereas bluebells don’t.
9. Pollen also varies considerably in its protein and major amino acid composition, and other research work has suggested that bees prefer a mix of diverse pollen with high protein features.
10. Pollen also provides the major lipid source for bees, and again levels vary hugely between different pollens.

 

As an adjunct to this research, and indeed my own observations of insect friendly flowers, click here, I’m also going to include a link to the most useful assessment I’ve yet found of the relative bee popularity of several widely available garden flowers. Collated from 5 years of observations, it’s only based on which plants the nursery owner actually grows, but her methodology of ranking the merits of each flower in an easily accessible visual display is an interesting and probably worthwhile concept to use. Click here for Rosybees research data.

Linked to an intensive course of instruction from my brilliant bee mentor and local beekeeper; a struggle to grasp and settle on which of the numerous potential hive options to choose; and undertaking to construct a couple of these along with ancillary bits of kit, has meant a quite exhausting period of physical and mental activity here. Probably a familiar story for any of the 0.07% of the British population who have ever ventured into the science, art and myth of the apiarist.

Fiona has sensibly commented that she hopes I become a little less intense on the subject of bees, or she’ll regret me ever getting them. She has a point. And certainly for blog readers, this little bee related piece is (nearly) already long enough. I’d hate to become a bee bore!

30/04/2019:

Was it the full moon?

Or the sudden warming in temperatures last week? Or impending Easter – which won’t fall this late in April again until 2030? Or the threat of predators? At that stage unseen.We’ll never know, but after a full beehive inspection last week, when every frame was lifted out and examined – and still the queen bee wasn’t spotted among the increasing numbers of workers covering most of the frames, the bees became stroppy. For the first time since this hive has been on site. They obviously felt that my mentor’s comment, rating their behaviour as just 3 out 10 on a scale of potential aggression during the inspection, needed some adjustment.

Our subsequent tea on the terrace was aborted after we got buzzed in warning fashion by a bee.

The following day, it was warmer still, and Fiona and I both got “head” buzzed in a similar way – not the direct in your face smack that I’d experienced years earlier, but still unnerving. Later in the afternoon the alert level ratcheted up a notch, when our weekly garden helper got stung beside the eye. After appropriate short term first aid William left early to recuperate, whilst we pondered the way ahead, with 5 insect averse grandchildren due to arrive about 4 hours later, and our planned first ever “pop up” garden open day just 2 days later.

After much discussion, garden visitors were emailed and warned about the situation and we decided that with the grandchildren, we’d better get them down to the stream whenever we could, and hold the annual garden Easter egg hunt after supper, when the temperatures were falling. Interestingly, nearly all of our garden visitors still wanted to come…

Fortunately, the bees behaved up to a point – late afternoon, around tea time, one or two bees decided to do some slightly aggressive head circling and buzzing, but visitors sensibly withdrew inside and the day ended with an after-supper Easter egg hunt for the grandchildren skillfully laid by Fiona, once the temperatures had dropped a little.

Thinking that was the end of the excitement for the weekend, we were proved wrong, as on Sunday morning, our oldest grandchild remarked on the very big wasp inside our high ceiling living room, next to a Velux window. Fiona quickly spotted it wasn’t a wasp, but a queen hornet, so once more our guests decamped to the stream whilst I figured out how we could tackle this large insect. Hornets will certainly catch and eat honeybees, though we’ve never seen one at Gelli before, and perhaps this had contributed to the bees’ grumpiness.

Eventually, with patience, my bee suit, a butterfly net, and an old can of Vapona, we removed the potentially troublesome insect. It certainly has a fearsome set of jaws, but it was a relief to see, up close, that it was a European hornet, Vespa crabro, and not an Asian one, which are currently viewed as a huge potential threat to British bees, should it ever become established in the UK. There is a very good Natural History Museum ID guide to Asian hornets which I found, after this event. Click here. Recently updated, it hints that Asian hornets may already have become established in a couple of parts of the UK, so vigilance is called for. A quick guide to their differences is that the Asian hornets have an orange face, yellow legs, and a blacker body than the native European one. Although European hornets will take honeybees on the wing, Asian hornets lie in wait by the beehive and grab worker bees as they return to the hive, chopping them up, and feeding the thorax to their own larvae. Since there can be up to 1,000 hornets in their colony, the significance of this threat becomes clear.

For now, with cooler weather, the hornet removed and the moon having waned, the bees are once more, calm (see later!), though we’re still avoiding those areas closest to the beehive until the cool of the evening.

29/05/2019:

It’s also a great regret that I can’t phone Margaret and tell her about the uses we’re making of the unnamed willow which we now grow extensively here. Margaret had many clumps of a variety of coloured stemmed Salix and Cornus, which she kept pollarded around her mill at Cellan, and every year she took armfuls of cuttings into the local garden centre for them to sell.I think that this is a form of osier willow, Salix viminalis, and hence potentially of value for basket making. We’d always noticed how if left uncut, it produces fabulous long, arching, yellow catkins in mid spring, (shown below after all the pollen has been stripped away by bees).However, it’s only since my recent interest in honeybees developed more seriously, that I’ve realised it’s an extremely useful plant to grow to extend the willow pollen season beyond the masses of Goat willows, Salix caprea, which seem to kick off the spring bee pollen fest. And not just for bumblebees, but honeybees as well.

And with this I’ll segway into a major section on how the bees have been over the last month, which is the main reason I’ve not managed a post recently.

In summary I’ve had to try to get up to speed on bee ecology and management in just under 2 months, since I was given the chance to acquire the hive and its resident bees, which a local beekeeper, Tony, and now long-suffering friend and advisor, had installed on site, last summer.This has proved to be a gargantuan task – and one that has nearly exhausted me and tried Fiona’s patience to breaking point. Not only does one have to try to understand how a honeybee colony functions at an individual and social scale, but there then comes the decision about how one wants to keep them – in a more conventional, interventionist way where maximising the potential honey harvest is one of the primary aims; or with a more “natural” bee centred approach, where opening the hive and honey removal is done in a very limited way. It intrigues me that whilst one can take university courses in the UK on surfing, politics, sporting injuries or multitudes of “media ” based options, there isn’t a single university attempting to encompass the social life, ecology, biology and management of bees. Perhaps there should be, and our world would indeed be the better for it?

The critical decision about how one decides to try to “keep” bees can only really be made after one starts to develop an idea of the pros and cons of each approach, and this has huge implications for a novice beekeeper, because it will determine what equipment, and in particular which hive and frame designs, one decides to use. And most aren’t easily compatible.

Suffice to say, I decided to go the more natural route and settled eventually on a hive design based around one developed by a French abbot called Émile Warré, in the mid-twentieth century. Click here for an article which I found to be very persuasive by a Welsh beekeeper, David Heaf, who has used Warré hives for a number of years.

The plan was that starting from the initial hive we acquired, which was housed in an existing conventional, and larger “National” hive, and which had grown by mid-April to look as above, I’d hoped to gradually establish 3 or 4 more colonies to give my little set up more resilience, using Warré style hives which I’d constructed. Plans for making such a hive are freely available on line, click here, and I reckoned it gave me a good chance to recycle many of the bits of left over wood and assorted building materials from decades of projects here, which were languishing and cluttering our barn.

However, the trouble with beekeeping is that the bees don’t directly communicate their own plans with you, their potential landlord.

So whilst I was making good progress with constructing the several boxes necessary for a single Warré hive, the initial colony threw a swarm on the last day of April, which by a pure fluke, I’d managed to photograph on my trail camera which I’d set up simply to try to record the varying numbers of bees obvious outside the hive, throughout the day.

 

Since we’d been working on a potential site for another bee hive in the morning, I only came across the swarm cluster just after lunch, as I was halfway through a bumblebee count walk, around the garden.

Apologies to any experienced beekeepers who read this and are mortified or amused by the following tale – it’s simply how things happened and I don’t have space to go into many of the reasons why I’m going a more natural route, though some of the most helpful pieces of intelligent writing about bee management I’ve found can be read here, and here, and here. For a concise and clear insight into the complex issues of a more “natural” versus more mainstream and interventionist approach to beekeeping, I’d urge anyone interested either in eating honey, or the long term viability of honeybees, to have a look at the introductory page on the Oxford Natural Beekeeping Group’s web page which you can read here. I’m guessing many readers, like myself before this year, really have little idea about how most bees are kept and managed.

By coincidence, there have been two relevant BBC Radio 4 pieces on honeybees recently as well – click here for Tim Harford’s well produced short piece on the significance of the design of the Langstroth hive in industrialising bee keeping – one of the items he’s chosen for his series on “50 Things that made the modern economy”; and here for a piece on Saturday Live involving a discussion with Sarah Wyndham Lewis, a honey sommelier. Will you ever taste honey in the same way after listening to this? (The section on honey begins 30 minutes into the programme)

The experience of discovering and capturing this first swarm can best be described as akin to my fraught first weekend on call as a young vet. With no back up, no trained nurse (just dear Fiona who as a geography teacher was expected, as part of me taking on the job, to muck in and be my unpaid anaesthetist), I was presented with an emergency Caesarean section to perform on a cat. My previous total personal hands on surgical experience had involved completing a single incredibly lengthy cat spay, in the university operating theatre.

No back up was available. I just had to get on with it. Times have changed since I qualified. Fortunately!

At least the cat survived, though sadly not the single kitten.

But the advantage this sort of previous stressful exposure in a veterinary career, particularly with surgery where a life was usually at stake, and just how a living body handles and reacts, is that I knew that never mind this swarm was a completely novel experience – I just had to get on with dealing with it as quickly as possible. It had settled reassuringly low down on a conifer branch barely 15 yards from the source hive, and I needed to move it into some sort of container, before they all flew off to a new home that scout bees would have been searching for, even as I stood, secateurs in hand, camera round my neck, and visibly shaking.The only thing to hand, which I deemed appropriate to use for an initial capture, was an old German butter churn, which I’d been toying with turning into a basis of a hive since the internal dimensions of the cavity approximate to a typical natural bee colony in the hollowed out centre of a tree – about 60 litres, in fact.

A spare frame with bee’s wax was quickly dropped in, on an angle to make it fit, and to try to make the musty butter churn smell more hive-like, and to try to avoid them deciding to leaving in disgust a.s.a.p. The branch was clipped off the tree with secateurs. The majority of bees still clinging to the branch dropped in, I removed the bung from the base of the churn and gradually placed the lid on top. The bees sat on the lid and all round about, abdomens raised, pumping out swarm pheromones telling all the remaining bees milling around – “this is where we are”.

The plan was to leave the churn where it was for a few hours to allow most of the bees to settle inside, and indeed to be certain that the vital queen bee was inside the churn, and not left outside. Later in the day the captured swarm could be moved to its eventual new home, which even whilst this was all happening was being prepared for just such an eventuality – but not quite finished!

It was remarkable to watch the all the bees left outside gradually find their way in, through the small hole at the base. I should add that at this stage the butter churn had no fixed bottom to it, so I’d had to rig up a temporary cardboard and thin ply base held in place with Duck tape.

I felt hugely elated at what I’d witnessed and achieved, until safely back inside, I pondered the problems I’d now created for myself.

The bees would settle on the lid of the butter churn and begin to build their comb there which would then be impossible to remove. The eventual weight of the butter churn with comb, bees and eventually honey, would make it really difficult to lift or move, and of most immediate concern I still had a cut branch and the dropped-in-frame, which would completely wreck any chance of the bees building any sort of ordered comb.

Later in the day, the bung was inserted into the base hole and the whole structure which had at least been previously fitted with an (only white primed) base plate, with a central cut out allowing it to eventually sit on top of one of my Warré boxes, was wheeled down to the now nearly finished site.Located beneath a few large trees, and with its own roof, this again is not the typical approach. Most apiaries consist of hive boxes really close together and out in the open, which obviously makes for a much more efficient management process if one’s going to open the hives or do any intervention on a regular basis.

But if you’re not? I figure that in our wet environment, having most of the rain kept off the hive will be hugely beneficial from an energy conservation point of view, and also having hives separated may be helpful for reducing potential disease transmission and even pheromonal chemical communication. This is hugely important for bee behaviour. Click here for an extensive and quite up to date review of the complexity of pheromones in the ecology of honeybee hives, and in particular the importance of alarm pheromones in initiating aggressive/defensive bee behaviour, (when viewed from a human/bee perspective) and their stimulus for kamikaze stinging. And click here and here for some of Derek Mitchell’s thoughts on the importance of good insulation for not just winter colony survival, but also reducing energy expenditure during the vital process of turning nectar into honey, within the hive.

Later in the evening I returned to attempt to remove the branch and frame. I lifted the lid carefully, but there was an extraordinary and quite unique thumppp whoooshh sound, as the balled mass of thousands of bees which had been clustering beneath the lid, fell to the base of the churn.

A tiny piece of green foliage poked out from this disturbed mass of Apis mellifera.

I bottled out.

Although in my protective bee suit, and with gauntlets on, I just couldn’t force myself to plunge my hand into this seething cauldron of aggrieved bees. I retreated and slept on it rather fitfully.

In the morning I’d resolved the issue – I’d use our long-handled barbecue tongs. So once more suited up, I returned to the hive, lifted the lid again, heard the same extraordinary sound of thousands of bees collapsing in a heap, but this time carefully fished out the conifer branch and shook most of the bees back in the churn, and then returned into the seething pit with the tongs, to retrieve the frame with wax.

On close inspection of this frame, with its pre-pressed hexagonal wax foundation, you can make out the effect of a weight of warm bees resting on it for just a few hours, and causing it to buckle and warp.In addition, you can see the faint white outline of where the bees were already beginning to make new beeswax comb, building on the template provided. Probably hundreds of bees making wax crystals out of nectar, or honey taken before they left the original hive, and carefully chewed and manipulated in their mandibles, before being placed so speedily onto the outline cells. No hanging around after the thrill of the swarming event, and with none of these insects ever having done this before, amazing innate behaviour, for them to get on with new home renovations, as quickly as possible.

How I assess what is going on with this “hive” or colony will clearly be limited, but by the following day I’d lifted the churn onto two of the by then part finished, but incompletely painted, Warré hive boxes, which I’d already managed to make. The hive also had a proper base with access board, though there probably aren’t too many beehives with reclaimed Victorian mahogany table top base plates.

The natural beekeeper can always just sit and watch, and listen, and there’s a much quoted book by a German apiarist “At The Hive Entrance”, which provides useful guidelines from observing the bees, their numbers, behavior and amount of pollen carrying, as clues to how things are inside the hive. Click here for the pdf. I’ve yet to delve into it, though I had already experimented with using my stethoscope on the hive wall, as a refinement to simply placing my ear there. There’s a pleasing distinctive low regular machinery hum of an active hive, which I noticed changed once the first swarm had left the mother hive, into a more variable, almost wailing, sound. But could one record this?

This led me to exploring digital stethoscopes, but with high costs, and poor reviews was quickly abandoned as a sensible option. So googling cameras that can see round corners, I was amazed to discover the British designed EazyView digital inspection camera system. Click here for more. Reminiscent of the sort of endoscope technology that we dabbled with in my latter days of small animal practice I was so impressed by the website and demo You Tube video, and its excellent value for money, that I bought one within an hour, and eagerly awaited its arrival. Although I should add that the technology uses a tiny camera and LED light on the tip of the long, but only 8.5 mm diameter, flexible bendable access tube, rather than the much more fragile and expensive fibreoptics of endoscopes.  Apparently, all British Gas engineers now carry one of these, and it gets rave reviews from plumbers and electricians but I couldn’t find any examples (yet!) of one being used to look into bee hives.

Within 2 hours of reading the manual, and waiting until dark, I was back down at the butter churn, removing the butter churn bung and carefully inserting the LED light and probe for a glimpse of what the bees were up to.

The camera can take still images, and short video clips onto an on-board memory store, zoom in, adjust LED brightness, and upload images to a computer really easily. The video format is a small AVI file which I’ve found I need to convert to an MP4 file to upload directly into a blog.You can add an additional flash card if required too. Obviously controlling the position of the tip takes a little bit of practice, and I reckon the bees are aware of the light, and slight warmth which would limit regular or long term use.

But for a quick peek into a “natural” hive like mine, with some sort of access point, or even through the main entrance, it’s a fascinating insight into how active they all are, even well after dark. In the clip above they’re starting the critical task of building new wax comb so that the queen can begin to lay eggs once more, to re-establish a viable working colony, since during the summer months most of the working bees which have flown out with the swarm will only have a relatively short 3 or 4 more weeks of life ahead of them. The clip below is from swarm 2 hive where I retro-drilled a narrow, pluggable hole in the side of one of the boxes, though I may find that this gets permanently sealed in place by the bees quite quickly.  .IMAG0010

My sense is that if done occasionally, on a cooler night and not around the time of a full moon for a quick look, although some bees will resent the LED light and its warmth, the potential disruption is far less than that involved in taking the hive apart and inspecting frames – though obviously of much more limited “practical” or “interventionist” use.

IMAG0021 a

Having had one swarm which had used up my still unfinished hive component parts, I was really surprised to exit the house 2 weeks later to hear the air full of noisy bees. There had been a lot of activity on the Sycamore tree above the original hive, so I thought I’d take the camera up to have a look. Over the next half an hour, another huge swarm had emerged from the original hive, and very gradually drifted across the garden before very gradually settling as a cluster on the arched Clematis montana ‘Broughton Star’.  Once more it was chopped off and into a holding container, again on the very same day that we had finished creating an additional potential hive site.And relocated later in the day.

The experience of being beneath so many flying insects with huge potential for causing personal harm, but instead entirely focused on relocation, was a very special one indeed.

I was now very short of boxes, and had needed to swap boxes with the butter churn base hive to enable me to finish painting them. So I was shocked to find Fiona telling me as she mowed the upper hay meadow path just 3 days after swarm number 2, that the hive was swarming again.

Indeed they had, though this time with a much smaller cluster, which has been temporarily housed in my final set of boxes, in another location in our lower wet meadow, again beneath trees.

Whether all these new colonies are large enough to be viable, remains to be seen, but with my minimal intervention approach I’ll wait and hope that since they’ve all emerged early in the year, they at last have a fighting chance. This is now the critical phase for them – apart from the bees left in the original hive, obviously none of them have any honey stores to draw upon. They have to make new honeycomb from scratch not just to allow storage of surplus foraged nectar and pollen brought in by worker activity, but also to provide a hopefully mated and viable queen somewhere to begin to lay eggs in.

Apart from the first swarm, which would have been centred around the original “old” queen who left from the national hive, the new queens, if present, would have had to take off at some point on a mating flight as virgin queens. If all went well, they could then begin to lay fertilised eggs which would develop after a period of just over 2 weeks into more potential female workers to continue the new colony’s establishment. If the queen has died, or not been mated, or not returned to the swarmed hive base, then that colony will gradually peter out, as existing workers die off, and there are no new worker bees to replace them.

Yesterday, just 2 weeks after the final swarm was caught, and on a day when all 4 colonies were extremely (worryingly?) quiet, as assessed by bees flying in and out of the hives, the EazyView camera used at dusk, again proved really helpful. The clip below shows just how quickly this last swarm has built out some brand new wax comb inside the inner frames of its hive.   IMAG0047

There’s still quite a lot of blossom around for them in what has been a stunning year, and one of the most interesting aspect of this whole saga has been discovering that most of the time so far, the honeybees aren’t present in the garden in huge numbers, preferring instead the mature trees, so have progressed through the different willows, onto the apples and other Malus, and hollies.Lately, they’ve have been focused on the sycamores and other maples – just as expected from the scientific paper from the NBGW on honeybee foraging activity, mentioned in my earlier post.

Have you ever stood beneath a mature sycamore on a sunny May day when the drooping flower panicles are rich with nectar, and heard the noise of working bees, both honey and bumbles?

It’s amazing. As indeed is the sugar hit you can get if you suck on the flowers.

A whole second phase of Warré box and frame construction has begun, and I’ve finally tweaked my own design for frames to use in these boxes, based on bent willow wands and wire.How will the bees enjoy working on these? Only time will tell, but my initial impressions after this burst of activity is that the huge advantage we have in this part of the world, to offset the possible weather challenges for honeybees, is the vast amount of early season, mature tree, pollen and nectar. And hopefully the garden, meadows and abundant brambles will pick up the slack as we move past peak tree flowering season. Quality of accommodation probably comes a fair way down the list of factors in likely survival. Fingers crossed.

25/06/2019:

The other corollary of June’s mixed weather is that the honeybees have had limited chances to forage. A consequence of this for the 3 recently swarmed and rehoused hives, is an inevitable shortage of food, which manifested in one of the hives robbing the last to swarm, and weakest hive, during the last week.I’d spotted the tell-tale signs of a different type of flight by some bees outside the hive entrance, as well as obvious aggression by guard bees towards these would be scavengers, and taken the advised precaution of reducing the hive entrance (though probably not by enough, and probably too late). Two and a half consecutive wet days meant no opportunities to fly at all, and after haymaking on the third day, when I popped down to check around tea time, the hive was clearly being overwhelmed with invaders, with evidence of some freshly broken comb at the entrance. They’d even started to lever off my simple entrance restriction. How did they do that? Pulling or Pushing?

Although this third small swarm had only been in situ for about 4 weeks, it had clearly built-up sufficient stores for the robber bees to find this source of stored nectar easy pickings, compared to flying to lots of flowers.

The robbers were almost certainly from the first swarm hive located about 100 yards away, since there was a similar burst of frenetic activity outside this one – though with bees returning heavily laden (first image below).Within just 24 hours the small swarm hive had clearly been trashed (above). The landing board littered with wax debris from plundered honeycomb.

A savage lesson for me about vicious Apis mellifera asset redistribution. And another aspect of the learning curve that comes with any new set of experiences.

27/07/2019:

Just before we left on holiday, much to my surprise, I noticed a sudden big increase in bee activity around the swarm 3 hive, which had been savagely robbed to destruction about a month earlier, and since then seemed completely quiet and unoccupied.

When we returned from our break, this hive was still really active, so I’m assuming that a swarm from elsewhere had checked out the hive, considered it up to scratch, and moved in. This was really very satisfying given that the “hive” still hadn’t been finished, and that I’d had to knock it up in a hurry with the swarm flurry in May, from old floorboards and a vintage mahogany table top we’d bought years ago. With some leftover bubble-wrap insulation from The Hut’s construction, added as a late addition.

But a couple of days ago, I suited up and put a proper Warré style quilt box and protective vented lid onto it.There was minimal disturbance involved in this, and fortunately the bees seemed as benign as all the other swarmed hives this year. I’m hoping that this will be all that’s needed for this hive in 2019. So, after starting the year with just one colony in a traditional National beehive, in spite of my low intervention approach, we now still have four separate colonies, moving into August.With the weakest colony of all being in the original “conventional” hive, which of course started off at the end of April with the advantage of masses of frames of honey, built out comb, and larval bees.

Meanwhile the first swarm, in the German butter churn ‘hive’ above, looks to be becoming very active and strong. Fingers crossed that it hasn’t done so well that it won’t be thinking of swarming again this year.

29/08/2019:

Meanwhile wasps have reached plague proportions here. Normally wasps are the dominant insect around our terrace Nectaroscordum flowers in late May into early June. This year there were none.The bumbles had the flowers to themselves, yet as the year’s progressed, more wasp nests have appeared under the eaves, in the hay shed, and most worryingly beneath tyre rims in the re-tyred matrix garden – easy to inadvertently kick and then suffer the consequences as a wasp storm appears.

Normally I’d have been more relaxed, but with honeybee hives obvious targets for plundering, I’ve set up several wasp traps, which have collected hundreds.In spite of such a significant haul, it was depressing to watch over a few days the second swarm hive be attacked, to destruction, in spite of my best efforts to reduce the entrance, to help the bees protect themselves.Within 2 days of August 24th, when both the early swarmed colonies seemed to perform the annual brutal kick out of drones, wasps were entering the hive with impunity. Note the larger eyes below, and fatter bodies of the sting less male drones clustered in the first image, compared with the smaller worker bees in the last image. Even after reducing the entrance to as small an opening as possible with the pipe fitting, which another beekeeper recommended as a means of deterring wasps. This trick failed miserably – the wasps got the hang of it faster than the bees and no remaining bees are now obvious. There may well have been an additional issue with this hive which weakened and the wasps were then able to exploit.

With my conscious minimalist intervention approach, I’ll wait until wasp activity dissipates before opening the hive up to survey the scene.

12/12/2019:

Here, as often towards the turn of the year, there’s blood in the heavens when the clouds occasionally part, and most of the effort out there is on survival. Which brings me on to bees.

I’d been planning on writing a follow up piece on my bee experiences over the latter part of the year, after acquiring and reading within 24 hours an excellent book by Thomas D. Seeley, “The Lives of Bees – The Untold story of Honeybees in the wild.”  For anyone with even a little interest in these creatures, science or ecology, I can thoroughly recommend it as a last minute festive present. Click here for more, and some review comments.

In its preface, Seeley mentions that in the U.S.A. alone, over 4,000 different honey bee related books have been published over the last 300 years. Why add to this pile?

Well, with his background of a lifetime of interest and study of these creatures, and many decades spent as Professor of Animal Biology at Cornell University, Seeley melds years of painstaking observation and analysis of honeybees’ behaviour and life cycles together in a very accessible format. Not just a beekeeper, but a scientist who is intrigued by animal behaviour, I’ll include this introductory section from his biography page on the Cornell University Dept. of Neurobiology and Behaviour, to tempt you further.

My scientific work has primarily focused on understanding the phenomenon of swarm intelligence (SI): the solving of cognitive problems by a group of individuals who pool their knowledge and process it through social interactions. It has long been recognized that a group of animals, relative to a solitary individual, can do such things as capture large prey more easily and counter predators more effectively. More recently it has been realized that a group of animals, with the right organization, can also solve cognitive problems with an ability that far exceeds the cognitive ability of any single animal. Thus SI is a means whereby a group can overcome some of the cognitive limitations of its members. SI is a rapidly developing topic that has been investigated mainly in social insects (ants, termites, social wasps, and social bees) but has relevance to other animals, including humans. Wherever there is collective decision-making—for example, in democratic elections, committee meetings, and prediction markets—there is a potential for SI. (sic: my bold)

Click here for more.

Perhaps a little co-operative swarm intelligence is what we could all have done with in recent times.

Has it really been there, hidden beneath the continual bluster and argument?

Or has our intelligence, collective or otherwise, and the apparent ability to debate and argue ad nauseam left this nation in limbo, a vulnerable swarm starving in the open, as it vacillates over where to go next.

Take a cue from the bees. Reach a decision.  ANY decision. Move and get on with it.

Be prepared to live with the consequences.

Somehow, I’m not that optimistic, but perhaps the post election analysis tomorrow would do well to contemplate how bees with individual brains smaller than pinheads, can manage their lives and resources pretty resiliently, when left to their own devices.

Now I must quickly leave the dangerous mire of political thoughts, and return to the mice, or rather single mouse, of the title.

I’d decided to tidy up the various elements of beehives around the property for the winter which are unoccupied, so began with a second continental, (Swedish for anyone interested), butter churn. I’d modified this as a potential bait hive quite late in the season, and had placed it on an upturned plastic dustbin, to raise it well off the ground.Lifting the butter churn, together with a two part base plate similar to a typical Warré style landing board, I headed back up the garden from the lower compost bays where the “hive” had been positioned.

The complete set up, although empty, proved heavier than I’d imagined, given its awkward shape and size, so I paused half way and put it down, releasing the bottom 2 boards and picking up just the butter churn.As I stood up, there in the centre of the base board on top of a pile of dry leaves, and with a surprised, if not terrified stance to find itself so suddenly exposed, was a Wood/Field mouse, Apodemus sylvaticus. Sadly, I didn’t have the camera to catch the mouse, which anyway very quickly scampered off into the undergrowth. I was left to examine the relatively enormous nest of dry leaves and debris, which it had carefully carried up above ground level and stashed in the butter churn base.It had also chomped through a couple of my curved willow stem frames.Click here for more on the Wood Mouse.

Mice are a known problem with honeybee hives, particularly over the winter months when the bees tend to cluster in a ball towards the upper centre of their nest, and becoming less active, aren’t as able to defend their rich honey stores. In this case my guess is that the mouse clambered up the adjacent lopped ash stump, crossed the metal grid frame, and made it in through the narrow “bee” entrance at the front centre of the base. And found the perfect dry secure location for a winter refuge of its own.

One of the points that Seeley makes from his study of the sites which wild honeybees select as nests in the native forests of New York State, is how high above ground level – typically around 4 metres plus – the entrance holes tend to be. One of the principle potential predators in such forests are bears, but it’s probably also an effective strategy for deterring even the keenest tree climbing rodents. Given the choice, “wild” honeybees in the UK seem equally likely to choose high access options for hive entrances. Click here to read (and see photos) in an excellent report by the Oxford Natural Beekeepers Group of between 7 to 10 feral honeybee colonies all found within half a mile of each other in a rural village. And all high up in buildings and a tree. So much for wild honeybees no longer existing in our landscapes.

One of the interesting parts of Seeley’s book (for me, having embarked on a more “natural”, or apicentric beekeeping route) is his discussion of the wild honeybees’ quite speedy development of resistance strategies to Varroa destructor. This parasitic mite caused huge losses in all honeybee colonies, commercial and otherwise, when it switched hosts from exclusively parasitising a specific, distinct Asian honey bee species, and also began to attack European, and eventually American honey bee populations during the last two decades of the previous century.

However after a decade or so of recovery, the wild New York Forest bees currently have very good natural tolerance of Varroa mites, partly through the natural selection of strains of bees that are more efficient at grooming and attacking mites within the hive, and partly through strains of bees which regularly remove the wax capping and then recap the larval brood (where the mites also breed), which seems to disrupt the mite’s breeding cycle.

From studies of shifts in bee DNA genomes, one of Seeleys’ co-workers has confirmed that in these wild bee populations, much of the previous and presumably susceptible genomic mix has been wiped out. Which is what one might expect with any evolutionary adaptation to a new threat to species survival. The naturally smaller nest sizes of wild bee colonies and their different insulation and humidity profiles probably also help Varroa resistance too, though this hasn’t changed significantly over the years.

Varroa treatments are a major ongoing regular therapeutic imperative for most conventional or commercial beekeepers, and the mites can also act as vectors for other deadly or debilitating virus diseases, which probably have more scope for serious damage in the intensive close placing of beehives in typical commercial apiaries. (Seeley’s studied wild bee nests are typically about 0.5 kilometres apart).

Swarm behaviour, nest site selection, and a calculation of the likely viability of any swarm surviving its first year, are other fascinating topics discussed in Seeley’s book, which is reflected in much that I have observed in the small sample of “hives” which haven’t made it through the autumn here, let alone the winter.

My initial swarm which emerged from the original conventional National hive, on April 30th (above,) and which is located in a vintage cylindrical German butter churn, with additional insulation, was still active on a rare dry day on November 27th, below. (I inadvertently refer to it as the “original” colony in the video clip)

This swarm would have consisted of the original queen bee from the National hive, together with around a third of the cohort of worker bees (probably over 10,000), who all abandoned home, leaving queen cells behind to release new queen bees to keep the original hive going.

Seeley calculated from his observations of many wild honey bee swarms that the chances of this, a first and strongest swarm, actually surviving into the following year is only about 0.23. Less than 1 in 4. So very much fingers still crossed for the butter churn hive.

The reasons for this high failure rate, includes the fact that the swarm’s mass of bees has to first find a suitable location to set up a new home (in this case selected, located and positioned by a novice “beekeeper”, and not the real experts – the bees themselves).

Plus, although this swarm starts with an already mated and egg laying queen, which gains it a few weeks in terms of additional worker bee production, they’ve obviously had to leave all their larval bees and eggs behind as well as much already stored honey. And thus start from scratch, creating new wax made combs before egg laying and rearing new workers, before laying down new honey stores for the winter can even begin.On the plus side for the viability of this first swarm is that having got this far, the butter churn size more accurately matches a successful wild colony’s nest size and shape, of about 45 litres and is quite well located and shielded from rain, with additional insulation. (Hopefully)

What of the original hive, shown incredibly active, below, pre swarming, on 17th April?

Seeley again explains, with numerical probability, that a daughter queen would have inherited the original hive after emerging from a specially constructed and larger queen cell, an example is shown below…

Inheriting both the wax combs, stored honey, and eggs and larvae left behind, her survival chances should have been quite high (0.7). However the virgin queen would have needed to make a risky “nuptial” flight at some point, hoping to get mated with multiple male drones from different source colonies, in specially defined aerial drone congregation areas, at some distance away, before returning to a life of laying eggs within the confines of the hive. With no protective retinue to attend her on this flight, she’s quite vulnerable to predation from birds or dragonflies. So she might not even make it back to the hive, or for some other reason die after return, or be infertile.

Meanwhile, as in many of the 87% of Seeley’s studied wild colonies which typically swarm every year, after the initial annual swarming event, our original hive produced 2 follow on after swarms – on May 11th,

and 3 days later on May 14th

These would have taken 2 more virgin queens with them, and additional worker bees. So each would have started with a smaller, and hence weaker colony of workers, and also had the same risk attached to the subsequent nuptial flights for their virgin queens. Seeley puts the survival rates, after 1 year, for such “after swarms” as about 0.12. Merely about a 1 in 8 chance.

The end result of this type of natural colony multiple swarming behaviour is predicted by Seeley to be that for every single colony alive in the spring, one would expect there to be just 1.14 colonies the following spring. Thus on average a very gradual increase in bee population will occur at a wider scale, which is quite a clever strategy for exploiting what will always be finite resources within a particular environment.

In my case, swarm one still survives…

Swarm three failed first, being robbed out, on June 21st …

Swarm two failed later in mid August, again being robbed but principally by wasps, in spite of reducing the entrance, shortly after masses of drones were evident at the hive entrance……

Whilst the original hive, was also robbed out, although after I’d removed some excess honey…

 

On a plus point, the first, and smallest swarmed hive, which was placed into one of my Warre hive type set ups, only to get robbed out, was recolonised by a further swarm, of unknown origin on July 6th.

Although much later in the year and with no honey resources to inherit, since they’d all been removed by the earlier robbers, at least this swarm would have had combs already built, and (? possibly) arrived with an already mated queen.

It’s also quite pleasing that Seeley reckons that a typical swarm will assess an average of 24 different potential nest sites, before opting to travel to a specific one to set up home, so I guess that gives a little endorsement to the design, construction and placement skills of this hive. Many recent followers will probably not be aware that years ago, in 2010 and 2011, I had 2 failed attempts at attracting in a swarm using a hollowed out tree trunk as a bait hive, which got assessed, but rejected by scout bees from an unknown local colony.Click here for more. I don’t feel quite so bad about this now, given how many sites a swarm will actually assess.

Referring to Seeley’s swarm survival figures again, this early July swarm of unknown origin has probably at best a 1 in 4 chance of making it through the winter, and probably more like 1 in 8 if it was itself another “after swarm”.

The now empty or robbed hives have given me the chance to inspect both the comb that the bees had constructed, (given the chance to work from scratch without any prepared bought wax comb “foundation”), as well as some of their multi coloured stored pollen reserves…

… In addition I could count and examine the number of queen cells that were produced in the original hive, many of which were clearly viable, and had their caps removed, though not all.

Seeley also references the fate of virgin queens in an un-managed, or wild colony. The original queen escapes unscathed, as do any after swarm queens ( 2 from my hive).However of the queens that are left, one will eventually dominate, and through fights will kill any remaining emerged, or possibly as yet unhatched queens, until only one remains (usually! – there are occasional records of colonies with 2 viable egg laying queens co-existing)

This process of queen destruction to leave just one viable inheritor can only be imagined from the obvious larger queen cell relics found in the brood chamber of the original national hive.  Elimination of the extra queens occurs either by a recently emerged adult virgin queen destroying the cell containing a developing rival or by direct fights or “duels.” Cell destruction entails a queen chewing a 3–5 mm diameter hole in the side wall of queen cells and then stinging the developing larvae through this (unlike worker bees which die after stinging, the queen’s sting has a smaller barb, so can be withdrawn and reused).

Queens are able to discriminate between cells and target those that contain the oldest larvae, as they represent their biggest threats. If a queen is able to eliminate all her rivals in this manner, pre-emptively, she inherits the colony. Otherwise, she will come in contact with other recently emerged queens and must then duel with them.

The process of queen elimination by duelling can last up to 7 days, with individual duels to the death by stinging lasting up to 60 minutes. Fancy reading more about it? I guess Kari Jackson’s M.A. thesis studying artificially set up virgin queen duels in Petri dishes, contains about as much detail as anyone could wish for… Click here, and reflect that all of this fatal inter-feminine gladatorial aggression takes place, naturally, within the hot and humid dark confines of a (mainly) female filled wooden box, or tree cavity.

In older Scottish research this process of duels averaged out at 5.3 stung and killed virgin queens per hive. Counting the number of opened queen cells on the several frames in my hive which had them, suggests that 12 virgin queens had actually emerged. There were also a number of unopened queen cells.

2 left the hive with the after swarms, one presumably “won” the last fight, and inherited the hive, implying that perhaps as many as 8 others had fought and perished.

Survival of the fittest? Or fastest? Or first to emerge? Or those whose attendant workers vibrated “their” queen cells hardest to prepare the queens for battle?

Designed over millions of years to keep the species well adapted and resilient.

My final thought is that armed with much more knowledge, hive boxes, and already created comb than I began 2019 with, perhaps next year’s bees, wherever they may originate from, will have slightly higher survival chances.

(For those serious apiarists who read this, apologies at my evident incompetence, but I do hope you might enjoy reading more of Seeley’s work, which concludes with some practical suggestions for what he describes as a more Darwinian approach to the management of honeybees, to the advantage of both bees and beekeepers).

11/01/2020:

The phenology of snowdrop cultivar opening is playing out in typically predictable fashion, though still running a little late for many forms. As I write this on January 11th, we’ve about 73 different forms “open”. Though my definition of an “open” flower would differ from a strictly botanical, or indeed insect, viewpoint.  

For the flowers to open their outer segments and so expose the hidden pollen, nectar, stamens and stigma/style ovaries, a temperature of about 10 degrees C is needed, which usually arrives with a burst of warmish, winter sunshine.

However, in this year’s grey, wet but generally mild weather, sunshine has so far been in very short supply. Notwithstanding this, on January 9th, with little wind and a hint of lightening in the grey, temperatures were high enough for many of the early stalwarts to open their flowers properly.

A new variety here, G. “Watlington Greenman” above, and below, acquired in 2019 and flowering for the first time seems very special in this regard, being able to open outer segments wide even in cool drizzly conditions. Looking vigorous as well, it’s one to watch in years to come, having been found and named by Paul Barney of Edulis nursery who now lists a huge number of forms each year. Click here.

What was even better was that my walk to check which new forms had dropped their flowers to horizontal or below overnight (my definition of the flower “opening” and creating significant visual impact), coincided with my first honeybee sighting in months.

Even better, this intrepid early worker bee spent a few minutes refuging inside the barely opened lanterns of “Mrs. Macnamara”. She quickly seemed exhausted and spent a few moments resting before noisily heading off.I guessed that given the very short weather and flying windows which present bees with foraging chances so early in the year, she may have come from one of our hives.

The following day, with cooler temperatures of about 5.5 degrees C, but light winds and full sun, I was ready with the camera at about the same time of 10.20 am.Sure enough a single bee appeared, gathered pollen and nectar for about 5 minutes and headed off.Within a further 10 minutes, a bee re-appeared. Then another, and another.Within half an hour most clumps of snowdrops with properly opened flowers were being visited.As were the first opened flowers of the sublimely scented Daphne bholua ‘Jacqueline Postil’.

What a delight for me to spend an hour or so, after so many weeks of unpromising weather, simply watching the bees, and their ability to comb the pollen onto their hind legs whilst still hanging onto the flower, or even in mid-air.

Yet how much more thrilling must it be for the bees?

Weeks on end, pressed tight in a warm, dark, unventilated space, with, well just other bees.

Their touch, their smells, their noise. Their sole stimulation?

Then suddenly honeyed, perfumed nectars and rich orange pollen to collect.

And light.

And fresh air.

And early birdsong.

Can bees experience ecstasy?

If so, this first flower trip of the year, must be very close to it.

(Try googling ecstasy, to see how word definitions have morphed over time. Click here for a more erudite than most link, to the poem “The Ecstasy” by John Donne; or click here for stunning porcelain figures of this title by Angela Farquharson, an artist member of our gardening club).

Perhaps Apistasy, or Apiphoria would fit the bill:

Apistasy / Apiphoria – noun: the sensory overload and euphoria which honey and bumble bees experience on their first foraging flight after their winter hibernation, or dormancy.  

Sure enough, later in the day, I checked out the 2 remaining hives, and there was a steady trickle of bees purposefully flying in and out from one hive, the first swarm of last year, with some carrying orange pollen.

 

31/01/2020:

Even the bees are out and about infrequently, but in numbers, in the rare drier moments. But frankly things are very sodden, and even with our grass matting on sections of path, are sadly just too wet to allow any visitors at present both from their, and the garden’s, perspective.

12/02/2020:

On the way back up the hill, still frost white and crisp, I paused to check the beehive and (rashly as it turns out) opted to slightly increase the opening width at the entrance. I found a couple of bees, dead at the hive threshold, with orange pollen burdens and reckon they probably didn’t make it back in time, and perished in the cold. However I figured they’d be good props to show our garden visitors to stress the merits of having garden plants with pollen and nectar available this early in the year, for those rare occasions when the bees can fly. The fact that the bees are collecting pollen already also indicates (probably!) that the queen is still alive, and has also (probably) begun to lay eggs again to boost worker numbers ready for spring…

… So back at the house, I put the bees on a plate, took a photo and moved them inside.

Just before the first garden visitors had arrived, I noticed that the two “dead” bees had moved further apart on the plate. Close inspection showed them both to be moving. In spite of warming up, and a little sugar solution to try to aid a recovery, they never achieved normal mobility and I returned them to the hive later in the day, more in hope than expectation, where I found another half a dozen similarly collapsed, and pollen laden, below. (By the way, what are the little white mouse type droppings next to the top left bee, and what do they indicate? Has an animal been clearing up bee carcases outside, or even entering the hive and eating some honey/wax?)

Are the dead bees a sign of a significant issue, or merely workers near the end of their lives who’d been making the most of a rare calm spring day? Could they sense that this might have been the last time in a while that they could forage, with Storm Ciara about to bear down, so they’d better stock up? The three photos below are from 2 and 3 days later.

Honey bees can detect barometric pressure changes, and hence probably will be aware of a dramatic change in the weather ahead of it arriving. Click here for more. In addition, it’s been shown (albeit in a different climate and time of year), that honeybees constantly monitor the weather at the hive entrance, and can adjust foraging activity as quickly as within a minute should sunshine and temperature levels change, and will also fly later in the day if clues to an imminent deterioration in the weather is detected. Click here for more.

This perfect early February day ended with no rain and cloudless skies.

I’ve been really excited by reading another book about honeybees recently. “Honeybee Democracy”, by Thomas Seeley. Many thanks to Tony, my local bee mentor for loaning me this. It’s so interesting that I shall buy my own copy to re-read.

Seeley begins one chapter thus:

Anyone who has the immense good fortune of watching a honeybee colony cast a swarm will be treated to many astonishing displays of animal behaviour.

(Or at least you will if you know what to look for! I wish I’d been able to read his book last winter, though frankly the amazing experience of watching, and hearing the swarm leave the hive will remain with me forever).

That I witnessed a swarm last year, in my first full year of “keeping” bees was a huge fluke. (Click here, for my description and other video clips of my swarm experience, and the collection of two others).

I’m including an edited, but very well written review by Phillipine Reimpell from an LSE blog, as a summary of “Honeybee Democracy”. Click here for more.

Before reading this, bear in mind that most conventional beekeepers actively strive to prevent honeybees from swarming, although this is the bees’ natural approach to survival, expansion and colonisation. As with the reviewer, I found Seeley’s comparisons between a swarm’s apparent intelligence and methods of decision making in comparison with how the human brain, or indeed human society, makes decisions to be very thought provoking…

Cornell University Professor Thomas D. Seeley opens Honeybee Democracy with a passionate overview of exactly how inspirationally democratic these insects are. For bees, the quality of their home is linked to their survival, thus they are genetically programmed to recognize nest sites best suited to the swarm’s needs. Prospective homes in the vicinity of the mother colony are surveyed by up to 300 ‘scout bees’, who then perform the famous waggle-dance (on the clustered swarm’s surface: sic) to report the distance, direction and quality of the sites to their fellow workers. Scout bees are programmed to stop dancing after a determined period of time regardless of the quality of their proposal and the level of support, (though by now having interested other scouts to check out “their” site too, and report back independently) ensuring that the best site is chosen and avoiding the equilibrium of support being tipped towards a mediocre choice that entered the race early.

Seeley invites us to think of a swarm of bees as a single organism rather than as tens of thousands of individual bees. He draws an analogy between neurons in the human brain and individual bees, comparing the basic decision-making process in primate brains with that of an entire swarm. Working as a swarm allows the bees to exceed their individual capacity to gather and process a wide range of information.

 

Bees are not infallible however …. and the deliberation process only includes those bees who have been actively involved in the house-hunting process, which is a mere 3% of the swarm population. It is perhaps appropriate to consider the scout bees as a highly informed elite, who have not been democratically elected but who make decisions for the entire swarm. For bees, this may not lead to problems of representation as there really is just one common public good: (finding a good new home quickly and so) not dying and succeeding in passing on genes.

But rather than getting caught up in the details about the analogy between social and natural behaviour one cannot help but be inspired by the beauty of Seeley’s hypothesis-driven experimental work. The book is beautifully presented with illustrations, photographs, charts and anecdotes, and succeeds in making a whole field (of complex investigation and theory) accessible to the non-specialist. 

___

A part of the specific and vital behaviour of honeybees in their swarming period is related to inter-bee physical contact – squeezing (and piping sounds) and also Schwirrlauf  – the German descriptive term used by the first scientist, Martin Lindauer, to describe this behaviour. Or “buzz-running”, (in translation), of excited scouts charging over the swarm surface, and even through its mass, to let all the bees know that the new home has been chosen; they’ll soon have to take flight again to reach it; and so they all need to warm their bodies up to the 35 degrees C necessary to be able to fly, and get ready for synchronised take off. PDQ!

Not really “touching”, but certainly physical contact which conveys a message to those “touched” or physically moved by it. In a pre-programmed way, as far as the bees are concerned.

I’ve long been interested by how touch is a poorly ranked sense in most of human life, so was interested to hear of a new citizen science research project hosted by Goldsmith’s college, BBC radio 4, and the Wellcome Foundation. Click here for the touch test. Designed as a quite lengthy questionnaire, it may interest any readers of this post who are also keen to contribute a little more to what is known about attitudes to touch in contemporary society…

I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I learned to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you.

(Lines of a part verse ex “Hallelujah – Leonard Cohen”).

01/03/2020:

Our own honey bees have, for now, continued to seize any brief weather windows to forage, and I’ve found the temperatures when they’re out and flying are sometimes incredibly low (3 or 4 degrees C, plus an added wind chill).

This ability to fly at way below the oft quoted minimum of 10 degrees C, has even attracted the attention of the great Thomas Seeley, who wrote a recent article in conjunction with a Scottish beekeeper on this very topic of (Northern climate) bees collecting water over the winter at very low temperatures. Click here for more.  (Cold flying foragers: Honey bees in Scotland seek water in winter).And here for a simple diagrammatic appraisal.The bees will need water supplies to be able to access and utilise in hive honey stores which are too concentrated to be digested in their stored form without dilution.

Exploring this a little further led to discovering some interesting work where bees’ body temperatures were recorded using special infra red photography when they made such low temperature flights.

The bees need to maintain temperatures around 35 degrees C for their flight muscles to work effectively. They will leave the warmth of the hive cluster of bees at roughly this temperature, but this will fall rapidly in external conditions which are so chilling. The IR photographs demonstrate that they selectively maintain higher temperatures in the central thorax (where the flight muscles are located), whilst the abdomen is allowed to become cooler.

The head is kept at a slightly warmer intermediate temperature, apparently because the suction apparatus which the bee uses to suck up liquids only functions efficiently at higher temperatures. In addition these studies have shown that bees not only know that they can’t carry full loads back at lower temperatures, but also seem to be lighter than normal when they leave the hive – perhaps as a result of shedding faecal loads before take off. All clever strategies to allow them to fly, forage and return to the hive before hypothermia kicks in, and they’re then simply unable to fly back into the warmth of the hive in time. Click here for much more detail on this.

In part misjudging these foraging trip lengths probably accounts for my occasional findings of dead, pollen laden bees at the hive entrance.

With the last 6 months’ dreadful run of weather stretching back to mid September, should our bees make it through the winter, it’ll be an extraordinary tale of survival against the odds. Fingers crossed.

17/03/2020:

Monday March 16th dawned clear, cold with a light frost, and sunny for a good couple of hours. Thrushes were serenading, small feathers drifted across the yard, as house sparrows and wagtails built nests.

By 9.30 honeybees were visiting the Hellebores around the garden, their current favourite plant and by 11.30, with sun hitting the opened flowers of the earliest of our Skimmia cultivars in bloom, began to home in on this for the first time this year.

The first Chinodoxas are opening in pinks and blues, and more daffodils appear every day.

With honeybees now regularly active in the initial swarmed hive housed in the old butter churn, it was time to dismantle the final hive which had housed the third swarm, which had been robbed out, only to be recolonised by another swarm last summer.The hive was full of dead bees, many with heads in empty cells, and to my great surprise quite a lot of sealed honey along with areas of uncapped honey which was turning mouldy. The late swarm had clearly had a chance to lay all this down before the weather turned at the end of September.

Overall there was evidence of a lot of moisture, and I suspect that in this very wet grey winter, the hive was too large for the bees to be able to maintain an adequate temperature and regulate ventilation and humidity. This honey filled box was the middle one of three – I’m sure that I should have removed the upper box, but the swarm had already moved in, before I’d got round to doing this.

In these challenging times, much enjoyment was taken in removing the worst affected comb and salvaging the capped honey, scraped off into an appropriately large Pooh Bear style pottery storage jar. I’ve no in-process photos of just how messy this was, completed on the kitchen table whilst Fiona was away for a couple of days, but the photo below shows the more benign earlier session working on conventional frames from the original hive in February.

Well worth doing and the honey is completely different to that taken from the bees earlier in the year – sweeter, much runnier and lighter in colour. The empty hives are currently being reworked with cork insulation and will be relocated in time for swarm season in late spring to see whether they appeal to any local scouting bees.

The sideboard is now at least well stocked with natural sweetener as we move into the enforced 12 week self isolation heading our way this weekend.

31/03/2020:

Ironically I can’t recall such a fabulous early spring run of weather without frosts harsh enough to knock everything down, overnight.

Day after day of unbroken sunshine, even if the wind’s been nippy, or downright bone chilling – particularly first thing, when I’m out in my nightshirt and long johns. But I hope you enjoy these merged clips.

It’s such a thrill to find that after so many years of deliberately selecting and planting more and more insect friendly flowers, it’s now (relatively!) easy to film such pieces – so many insects find our garden an oasis of provision this early in the year.

Images that reinforce the message that although we all love our flowers, millions of years of evolution have really developed them for their nutritional value to our insect fauna. And anyone with bumblebee queens a plenty in their gardens in March will be familiar with the distinct impression that when walking round your garden, surveying the delightful floral vistas, one or two of these incredibly tough, and large insects will meet you, and if not exactly greet you, then certainly check you out.

Carefully. Circling you three or four times, before heading off on more urgent duties. Just to let you ponder whether it’s them invading your personal space.

Or vice versa. Truly our flowers’ (human) aesthetic appeal is just a bonus!

You’ll see in the video clip in this order, these wonderful symbiotic pairings, and see how much work is still going on outside, BJ restrictions notwithstanding. And for any unfamiliar with the marvellous vegetarian adult Bee fly, it has a sinister life cycle – its larvae preying on bumblebee larvae.

Chionodoxa “Pink Giant” : Honeybee – Apis mellifera

Scilla bithynica : Honeybee – A. m.

Skimmia “Emerald King” : Honeybee – A. m.

Chionodoxa forbesii blue : Honeybee – A. m.

Primula vulgaris – primrose : Peacock butterfly – Inachis io

Muscari armeniacum: Honeybee – A.m.

Aubrieta : Dark-edged Beefly – Bombylius major

Muscari neglectum : Small Tortoiseshell butterfly – Aglais urticae

Primula vulgaris – primrose : Bumblebee queen – Bombus terrestris

Primula vulgaris – primrose: Dark-edged beefly – Bombylius major

Pieris “Forest Flame” : Bumblebee queen – Bombus leucorum

Narcissus “Brunswick” : Peacock butterfly -Inachis io

 

With the honeybees nearly having notched up a complete year in the old butter churn, and with barely a month left until the date when they swarmed last year, I’ve been tweaking the empty hive designs – adding extra insulation in the form of surplus 50 mm thick cork boarding. (Click here for some of the latest ideas from Derek Mitchell at Leeds University on thermal conductance and smaller entrance size of natural hives and their effects on humidity and Varroa mite control).and also experimenting with a jar system for small scale honey harvesting with minimal intervention .Click here for a little more discussion of this.The plan is to have 4 or 5 such hives set up and ready, dotted around the smallholding, in case they attract in a swarm from elsewhere, or for me to transfer a swarm into in more controlled fashion than last year, should I happen to be around if our own bees do swarm again this year.And since our week away in a Shropshire B&B at the end of April has had to be cancelled, I probably shall be around for all the potential swarming season this year.

10/05/2020:

Whether this is a “good” swarming year like 2019, remains to be seen. Like our Shepherd’s Hut Bird box, they may well sit empty for a year or two before they’re hopefully deemed to be suitably “des-res”.Certainly they now all fulfill 5 of the 6 criteria outlined by Thomas Seeley (in “Honeybee Democracy”, and elsewhere) as being innately appreciated, and assessable, signs of an ideal new home to honeybee scouts :

These parameters, which he found bees consistently prefer, given a choice, are :

• Internal volume between 30 – 40 litres.
• A small entrance opening, around 15 – 20 square centimetres.
• An entrance opening at the base of the hive, not the top.
• The entrance opening facing South East to South West.
• They all contain already drawn out old honey comb, so bees might assume that the site’s been occupied by honey bees before.

The one criterion mine all fail on, for fairly obvious reasons, is height off the ground – in Seeley’s studies, (American) wild honey bees will select, other things being equal, a site 5 metres up, over a site just 1 metre off the ground. Some of my sites do manage to be a little bit higher from ground level than others…

No matter whether they’re quickly occupied or not, I’m in no real rush in this now slowed down world. Having actually got them finished and positioned in part shade, the pressure’s off…

Although watching how quickly scout bees have already discovered all 6 hives, and how they then begin to check them out, and measure them up, both inside and out is fascinating, and a wonderful way to persuade me to stand still for a while and just observe …

 

19/06/2020:

Even those of our fields which aren’t set aside for hay are becoming more floriferous, with a less intensive grazing regime. Our “Cae efail” field, below, which was flower free 10 years ago has, from a single patch of clover at the top of the field where the land drain from the yard exits, now produced a river of flowers from top to bottom…A great resource for honey bees particularly as we hit the potential “June gap” before species like bramble and willow herb begin to bloom.

I’ve also noticed for the first time this year that some honeybees began to visit the many Aquilegia flowers which we have in the garden. Previously they seem to have been the preserve of just the larger bumbles.But this only happened as most of the flowers were finishing.I’m not sure why this was – perhaps other more favoured nectar/pollen sources had finished, or maybe the bumbles had moved on. But on closer inspection I noticed that most of the honeybees were actually robbing by biting holes through the tips of the flower spurs.

Though one clever bee seemed to have decided, or worked out how, to enter the flowers for pollen. As a result I’m leaving all the Aquilegias alone until after all the petals have dropped, and only then will dead head a proportion.

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I’ve been really amazed by some of the video footage I’ve recorded of drones leaving our main butter churn based hive over the last 2 or 3 weeks.

As a quick resume of the complex genetics of honeybee society, drones are the haploid (possessing just one set of chromosomes) male form of honeybees. They are produced from selectively laid eggs which the diploid (two sets of chromosomes) queen bee lays – without fertilising these eggs with sperm which is why they’re haploid – into special large drone cells. These cells are built by the (also diploid) female worker bees, specifically to house these larger bodied drones.

I shan’t try to go into what controls this drone cell production, or how the workers and queen co ordinate this process, other than to say that drones only tend to be produced during the spring time. But there’s a really interesting well written discussion here, of how both workers and queen bee have a role in determining how many drones are produced in a paper titled “The honeybee queen influences the regulation of colony drone production”.

The drones are physically different to the workers being larger bodied, with much of the abdomen being taken up by their genital organs. They also have much bigger eyes. They don’t have a sting, don’t forage to collect nectar for the hive, or bring back pollen, and conventional beekeeping tends to regard them as having no other practical function within the hive other than occasionally helping to circulate air around the hive by fanning their wings. (But I wonder whether all those female bees agree with this view of male redundancy?)

However they are key to the reproductive cycle of the honeybee. But bizarrely, the males don’t mate with queen bees in the hive. Rather as warm weather appears in late spring and early summer, they leave the hive and fly off, sometimes kilometres away to gather in specific areas high up in the air, which are rather appropriately named “drone congregation areas” (DCA).

These DCA’s have been studied over decades, though their existence has been known about for centuries, and they typically measure up to 200 metres long by about 30 to 40 metres wide, are elliptical in shape and occupy a space in mid air between about 10 and 40 metres off the ground. Drones from many (up to 200 plus) colonies will fly into these zones, and then cruise around them for as long as they can manage with the energy they can take on board from a full stomach of honey which they fuel up on before leaving the hive, hoping for a virgin queen to appear. Typically only 20 minutes per flight.

Researchers still don’t fully understand how the drones find these apparently well defined DCA’s, which it’s been recorded can be used year after year for centuries! Or indeed how the virgin queen bees that emerge from their special cells after a primary swarm has left the hive, are drawn towards them. But for the virgin queen to be capable of ever laying any diploid eggs which will eventually hatch into all the female worker bees, or very occasionally new queens, she must make one or sometimes two maiden flights out into these DCA’s to find a mate. She’ll then in these very brief encounters, take on board and store enough sperm to enable her to lay potentially hundreds of thousands of eggs during her lifetime.

Within the DCA’s, the patrolling drones will quickly detect any queen that flies into the area, and the race is then on to catch her and mate with her (though interestingly if she flies just a few metres outside the invisible DCA margin, the queen will be ignored). These high altitude chases appear like a comet of drones chasing behind the queen. The successful drone will grab the queen with all his six legs, evert his large endophallus into the queen’s sting chamber, and then ejaculate, all in mid air, at speed and in a matter of just two to five seconds.

The force of the mating and size of the drone’s endophallus is so great that it is instantly ripped from his body, and the broken bulb tip of the endophallus remains in the queen’s body. Sperm is forced through the sting chamber by the power of the ejaculation and into the oviduct and is then stored in a special organ in the queen, the spermatheca. This organ can keep the millions of drone sperm inseminated during a mating flight, viable for the up to 7 years of productive life of an egg laying queen.

The broken endophallus bulb tip left in the queen is known as “the mating sign”, and by reflecting ultraviolet light acts as a beacon for subsequent drones to mate more easily with the queen. The bulb not being a physical barrier for further drone penetration. After this extremely violent coupling, the drone inevitably then falls to the ground bleeding to death.

This mating process typically gets repeated between 10 to 20 times for each “virgin” queen’s short duration nuptial flight. So strictly speaking she’s no longer a virgin queen for most of these matings. She then, all being well, flies back to her hive, and unless she subsequently leaves the hive in her own swarm, she’ll never fly again. Simply spending her time continuing to lay eggs, through most of the year, and being the central controlling influence in the hive, though her egg production diminishes dramatically from mid summer on into autumn.

The vast majority of drones will be unsuccessful with mating, and so return to the hive, refuel and potentially try again. Maybe a few trips per suitable day. But they only tend to fly on warm afternoons between about 2 and 5 pm.

With all this necessary background to what is a frankly extraordinary life cycle strategy, still poorly understood in many ways, I began to notice over these past few weeks, an obvious swarm like buzzing around the hive in mid afternoon. My video clips confirmed that this noise and activity did indeed mainly consist of drones leaving and re entering the hive in quite large numbers, but only for a short period in early afternoon.

The first interesting thing I then spotted on the video clips was the behaviour of the drones just before they took off. They almost always spent a second or two wiping their big eyes with their front legs, as though to clean them after a night and morning spent in the claustrophobic dark of the colony –  presumably in part to give them the best chance of spotting the queen ahead of the pack.

The second thing I was able to do was the track the direction most of the drones were flying – which turned out to be slightly South East, towards our stream and then above the tall trees in the copse on the far bank, to the left of the above picture. At this point, high in the air, I lost all trace of them, but did notice a group of animated House Martins circling above the tree line. My guess is that if not the actual edge of a DCA, the Martins were probably picking off fat bodied, sting free drones high above me, as they headed towards their eventual aerial goal.

But the most dramatic moment after a week or so of observing these regular noisy drone gatherings around the hive entrance was witnessing an extraordinary tsunami like mass return of drones around 3.15 pm. If you look carefully at this video clip below, you can see a few drones are still leaving the hive, and quite a lot of worker bees are still entering with pollen loads swept inside with the drones. A few are also leaving, but for this brief period it’s almost a complete deluge of drones returning en masse.

At this point I should add that for several sound reasons conventional beekeepers don’t want many drones in their colonies, since they’re viewed as being completely unproductive from the point of view of nectar, and hence honey, collection and production. Worse still they’re extra mouths to feed from whatever nectar has been collected.

But in a wild hive or one that has been built by the bees on its own design and size of wax comb, rather than using the small cell pressed supplied wax “foundation” typical of most commercial bee hives, the bees will naturally produce far more drone cells – perhaps up to 30% of the total number of cells for the queen to lay drone eggs into. So perhaps I might well expect to see more of the maybe 10-20,000 plus hive’s population as hyped up males at this time of the year. However I’ve failed to find many other video clips of this sort of tidal wave of drone bees entering a hive. Videos of bees and mating flights seem to concentrate on the queen bee, or even very cleverly the occasional clip of the actual mating process – see below for a technically superb bit of filming…

Literally just 5 minutes after filming the torrent of returning drones, and this was how the scene was calming down…

At 1pm, or indeed any time in the morning, and almost no drones would be visible – just busy female workers leaving and returning.

There is also sadly a chance that I might be witnessing the first signs of collapse in this colony. If the queen bee has died for any reason or been replaced with a queen that wasn’t able to mate successfully; or in the absence of any queen, when the sterile female worker bees will transform and begin to to lay their own eggs, then there’s a chance that the only eggs being laid within the hive now are simply haploid, unfertilised ones, which will inevitably the hatch into drones. Without eggs being selectively fertilised by a queen with stored sperm from a previous successful mating, that’s the only sort of egg, and hence bee, which can be produced.

In this scenario, gradually the existing worker bees will die out over a few weeks, and without workers to gather food, the drones will die as well. In due course, the colony will probably be robbed out to destruction, since the stingless drones have no defensive capabilities. Intervention beekeeping with regular inspections would spot this change in egg laying and drone production, and potentially could rectify the scenario by placing a replacement queen into the hive.

However if all’s still well with the colony, is this huge drone population actually a very good way of influencing the genetics of the local bee population? This is where I struggle a little with bee genetics and the haploid male/diploid female strategy employed by a few of the “eusocial” insects like honeybees, ants and wasps.

An individual queen bee can only produce haploid drones which will carry identical genes to her own, and in turn the drone’s ten million or so sperm will also all contain the same genes, apart from any one off mutations which might occur in individual sperm.

In contrast her fertilised queen or worker bee eggs will include not only her own genes, but also chromosomes with genes from the 10 to 20 different drones which she mated with. So future queen bee cells, and workers, will carry quite a range of genetic diversity.

However the genetically identical drones which fly out from a single hive can mate with queens from potentially many different hives, thus giving the chance for this hive to leave a significant mark on the genetics of the local bee population, if drone numbers are as high as they seem to be. See here for more information and probable clarity!

So maybe the left-to-its-own-devices bee hive approach of producing really quite large numbers of “unproductive” food eating individuals which hang around in the hive for much of the day, contributing very little, isn’t quite such an odd strategy from an evolutionary point of view. Time will shortly show me whether this extraordinary event was a one off, and merely the precursor to the hive’s decline and fall…

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Equally exciting following on from this was collecting a swarm from our near friend, Tony, who supplied our initial colony in the late summer of 2018, and which he managed to shift into one of my modified insulated conventional type hives. Not so encouraging was a second swarm which flew into another vacant hive from somewhere, unknown, at the beginning of a poor spell of weather around the 11th, and apparently succumbed to cold and wet within a few days.

As the weather improved a bit more, I found scout bees once again checking out the larch tree hive. This was the third occasion this has happened this year, at roughly monthly intervals, each time about mid way between full moons. Each time lots of bees were “measuring it up” and carefully flying in and out; and round; and up and down to assess its size and suitability – all part of the careful assessment a swarm will make of multiple possible new homes before deciding which one to head for.

However, this month, after such a scouting session in the early evening, I found that they were back again first thing in the morning – a change from previous scouting sessions when they hadn’t reappeared until about lunchtime. Sensing a possible difference I set up the camcorder on time lapse with 10 second exposures and did some garden tidying and then a longish bike ride before lunch. Arriving back ahead of Fiona, who’d done a detour to try to buy some eggs, I’d gone inside to put the kettle on when Fiona returned and told me she hadn’t been able to release the battery from her bike.

This proved to be extremely fortunate, since instead of sitting down and enjoying a cuppa, I struggled outside for a couple of minutes before sorting the battery problem and just as I was turning to come inside, heard the unmistakable building sound of swarming bees from behind the barn.

Dashing to the camera, I arrived just in time to change the recording from about 3 hour’s worth of silent time lapse, to real time video with sound, as the first bees of the swarm arrived at the hive entrance, and the sound began to build. Interestingly the time lapse showed fairly consistent bee activity around the hive all morning until about the last 4 seconds of recording – equating to about 15 minutes of real time. Almost all the scout bees then disappear from view and must have headed back to the swarm cluster, resting outside its base hive, somewhere due West of us, to speedily help prompt and guide the waiting mass of bees to fly to this, their newly chosen home. I’m including the last 15 seconds of this time lapse recording (just over an hour in real time) below:

I’ve also included a few merged clips below of footage of what I still find is an extraordinary spectacle, as the swarm arrived. The real time span of these clips from beginning to end is less than half an hour. You’d have no idea if you watched just the last few seconds though, what you’d missed earlier on, both in sound or spectacle !

I find it amazing that probably over ten thousand of these tiny creatures can move en masse in tight formation and can locate this novel (to most of them) location, from perhaps a mile away; flying there with accuracy in less than 10 minutes, and within less than half an hour all of them have managed to make their way inside, and set to work to make it a (hopefully) viable colony home.

13/07/2020:

I guess we’ve all played kick the can at some point, a great multi-generational game though possibly needing modification in these days of social distancing – actual physical contact probably not being a good idea. But I’m now programming myself to remember a new usage for the phrase here, at least for me.

Over the years I’ve occasionally referenced my habit of recycling urine and the number of valuable uses it has around the garden and land – compost heap and leaf mould accelerator, rabbit, fox and badger deterrent being the most common. Frankly I rarely seem to be able to generate enough of it, and it has to be of male origin for deterrent purposes. Lest readers are appalled by this, there’s an interesting read by Mohi Kumar, entitled “From Gunpowder to Teeth Whitener: The Science Behind Historic Uses of Urine”, and beginning with the line – “There’s a saying that one man’s waste is another man’s treasure”. It illustrates that from both a historic and now contemporary perspective, urine is something of a wonder product – far too valuable to just flush down the loo.

However it does need collecting in a simple hygienic way, and for many years a watering can has seemed to me to be the best solution. Easy to pick up and use, and great for subsequently dispensing where it’s needed, though over time significant crystalline deposits akin to limescale in a kettle seem to accumulate. Regular local visitors know about this (one of many?) quirky habits of mine, and avoid this paticular can located conveniently near the back door, though it’s usually tucked away when we have visitors.

I’ve never had any problems with this system, although by the time it comes to be emptied, as happens with urine over time, decomposition of the urea it contains into very alkaline ammonia has well and truly begun, and if emptied en masse on to the compost heap, it does leave a very strong ammoniacal, rather than urine, type pong for 24 hours or so.

Perhaps because of the recent change in the weather, reverting to very grey damp gloomy conditions for days on end, or perhaps because we have more honeybees about the garden this summer (more later), I now have a significant safety issue with using this pee collection system.

Most days now, there will be one or two honeybees lurking inside the watering can. The first time I encountered this, as you can imagine, was a bit of a shock, since the bee exited the fairly narrow opening just as the collection process began.Suffice to say a sting anywhere, but certainly there is best avoided, so I now have to remind myself that before picking the watering can up and performing, I give it a gentle kick. This is usually all that’s needed to startle the bee(s) which suitably, but gently alarmed, speedily buzzes out and off. On occasion I’ve even had to rescue a bee, which unrelated to my kicking, has already slipped and fallen into the toxic brew, gently giving it the woody end of an ash seedling as a lifeline escape route.

The question which occurred to me though is why are the bees attracted to it, and what are they harvesting from the contents?  Trawling on line, suggestions of diabetes kept cropping up on bee forums, but I’m pretty certain that isn’t an issue. However I do eat some of our home harvested honey most days. Might some olfactory cue from the honey be surviving passage through the kidneys and attracting the bees? It’s certainly well known that bee’s sense of “smell” is about 100 times more acute than than ours. Or perhaps they’re after some of the other minerals which will be concentrated in urine? In a paper titled “Salt preferences for honey bee foragers” there’s interesting consideration and assessment of bee mineral requirements for healthy larval development, and discernible forager worker bee preferences for sodium from different water sources.

I’d been pondering this when I sat down outside in heavy mizzle at the terrace table to write some plant labels, after potting on some of the many tiny Sorbus seedlings I now have, following our gardening club seed collecting trip to Hergest Croft last autumn.In a thoroughly miserable, wet, grey scene I was amazed to hear persistent loud buzzing. I’m now getting much better at recognising the pitch and nuances of different insect buzzes, and am also now quite used to seeing the local honeybees foraging whatever the wind strength, temperature, or rainfall. They’re a very tough bunch.

Looking around to see what flower the bees were exploring in such soggy conditions, it took me a while to actually spot the bees, which were systematically exploring the terminal tips of the Persicaria vaccinifolia where it was extending over the terrace gravel.This particular plant’s pink spires of tiny flowers are a magnet for honey bees later in the year, when the whole terrace buzzes with animated bee noise. But the flowers are only just beginning to open, and the bees were ignoring these. It then occurred to me that they might be after the salt, which I apply to all areas of hard paving and yard, mixed with washing machine detergent, to suppress weeds. I’d applied my mix, using a different watering can, to this area about 36 hours earlier, but we’ve had over 20 mm of rain since then and what’s more the bees were completely ignoring the gravel itself, or even other plants around the perimeter.

The tips of the plant where it’s spreading across the gravel are consciously also wetted by me with the hot salt/detergent mix as a means of defining margins to the path. As a result within 36 hours some of these tips were starting to show signs of wilting and damage. What if in the process the plant cell walls become leaky and start to ooze plant fluids? Which in turn have a similar sort of attractive, or nutritious content as the Persicaria flowers?Might the bees now be able to detect and harvest this “sap” or tissue fluid from the damaged shoots?

I guess I’ll never know, but it prompted me to read up and discover that bees not only have a highly developed and sensitive sense of smell (through huge numbers of olfactory receptors in their antennae), but also have separate receptors for taste, although these are found not only in their mouths, but also in their antennae and in their feet! Interestingly their sense of taste isn’t so acute – they can’t apparently specifically detect and avoid bitter substances directly, even if the presence of a bitter material in a mix with a sugary material like sucrose will slightly modify their enthusiasm for it.

Another question therefore is do the bees “smell” these leaky plant tips first from flying nearby, or land on them and “taste” them through their feet? I’m guessing that they must.

Once one starts exploring the research conducted to explore the physiology and biochemistry of honeybee taste, you discover some probably necessary, but frankly unpleasant sounding lab techniques. Including chilling individual bees down so much they become immobile; securing the chilled bees in special metal tube braces, with taped extended legs so that they can then be subjected to various chemical (taste) stimuli being applied to their antennae; or feet; or electrical shocks being applied to them; or even having their antennae cut off to confirm that it’s just their feet that are detecting the taste ( since they can taste through their antennae receptors as well)! Bees that fall out of the range of compliance parameters are “eliminated” or “discarded” from the experiment and data sets.

Science has often progressed through such experimentation, but elements of this work read like something from a CIA torture manual. Much of the assessment relies on the fact that even when confined and restricted in such a way, the poor bee will reflexly extend its tongue (proboscis – Proboscis Extension Reflex) when a “favourable” taste is applied. See here and here for examples of some of this quite recent work, and in the image below the red arrow indicates a drop of sucrose applied to the tarsus (foot) and the proboscis being extended. ( From “ The tarsal taste of honey bees: behavioral and electrophysiological analyses” –  Maria Gabriela de Brito Sanchez, Esther Lorenzo, Songkun Su, Fanglin Liu, Yi Zhan and Martin Giurfa.)

Another recent example of honeybee smell or taste preference witnessed here in the garden, is for the flowers of the Opium poppy, Papaver somniferum.This particular gorgeous form was given to us years back as unnamed seed by a gardening friend, though I see that it, or one very similar, is currently available as P. somniferum  “Black Single”, from Sarah Raven – frankly an uninspiring name for such a stunning flower.

Years ago I attended a multidisciplinary symposium at London’s Royal Society of Medicine in Wimpole Street, London on current developments in analgesia. And was somewhat surprised to hear from the medics then at the cutting edge of human pain relief research, that no new drugs had really improved on the analgesic properties of morphine. Which is, of course, derived from latex harvested from the seed capsule of the Opium Poppy, and has been in use for centuries. Sitting in a large audience I was too timid to put up my hand to ask a question which intrigued me. What did the speaker think that the opium alkaloids were doing in the plant? Just waiting to be harvested and used for mankind’s benefit? Or maybe more likely as a fix for pollinating insects? Does poppy pollen contain traces of these alkaloids and if so, what effect, if any, does it have on the behaviour of the collecting bees? As a possible explanation for some of these questions I found this:

“Consider the role of plant opiates. All plant alkaloids (including opiates) are potent astringents, even toxins to many vertebrates. Such compounds were originally synthesized as protection from potential predators – not as medicinal or recreational drugs for human beings. The fact that most poppy opiates infuse the walls of the developing seed capsule indicates to me that their primary goal is to protect the huge load of seeds that are responsible for a future generation. Why lace pollen? After all, pollen must remain alluring – indeed, safe – for pollinators.”

Interesting insights, I thought, though difficult to prove.

This is from a great article here by Gary Ross, (a retired American professor of biology) “TREAT YOUR BEES TO A BANQUET OF POPPIES” on the merits of poppies, particularly P. somniferum, as a pollen source for honey and other bees. In this piece I also learned that all poppies lack nectaries, so the bees are only visiting the flowers to collect the pollen. I’ll certainly aim to sow more of these stunning flowers next year, having had just two plants randomly pop up in 2020 after an absence of several years. I haven’t noticed Californian poppies appealing to bees at all here, though maybe we don’t grow enough of them to feature on our bees’ preferred flowers.Our native Welsh poppy, Meconopsis cambrica, is certainly popular, particularly earlier in spring, though a second flush now still appeals.

Finally I must mention the flowers of Eryngium alpinum which seem to be a honeybee magnet, even in damp and dreary weather – the poppy really needs sunshine to open its flowers.This alpine form of the sea holly has sown itself into the gravel of the yard, having jumped across the track from the spiral washing line bed. Here it flourishes beneath the shadow of a large oak and along the drip line from our barn roof. Not perfect conditions for it, if you read about its apparent preference for full sun and limited rain! Along with a self sown Erodium manescavii growing in amongst the Eryngium, they’ve become another example of a really appealing self sown combination which I’m now trying to replicate along the whole of the base of this barn, to add colour and an insect larder to an otherwise redundant, marginal spot.But it’ll take a year or two to achieve, since sowing seed or transplanting young plants into such inhospitable terrain is a little challenging.

 

I should record that in spite of the poor weather, (80 KW hours of PV generation in the long daylight hours of July shows just how little we’ve seen of the sun recently), the 3 weeks or so since my last post has seen two more honey bee swarms take up home in the vacant insulated “hives” or simple boxes which I’d placed around the property.  Allowing for the earliest swarm which moved in and for some reason, probably the cold and wet conditions, succumbed after just a few days, this means 4 out of 5 boxes have been selected as suitable homes, in their first year. (The remaining sixth hive was filled with a collected swarm from Tony’s apiary). This was frankly more than I could have hoped for, and so the one hive which was also scouted out several times but not chosen by a swarm has now been dismantled.

A significant issue it’s really difficult to find good advice on is just how many honeybee colonies can thrive within a given area. There are so many variables it’s understandably difficult to estimate. My main aim isn’t to produce vast amounts of honey – just sufficient for personal use – but rather to monitor how viable such colonies are in this wet upland environment when “managed” with almost no intervention. Much conventional bee keeping advice seems to confidently predict that I’m doomed to failure  – the bees will all die out within a year or two from untreated Varroa mites, or the viral diseases that the mites can transmit. Time will tell, but in the meantime I’ll have the immense pleasure of seeing them at work around the property, continuing to assess which flowers they prefer, and being able to record interesting aspects of their behaviour. As well as aiding excellent flower pollination and seed set.

For an in depth look at UK “feral” honeybees, their long term survival, and a glimpse at their genetics, there’s an excellent discussion which I discovered just before publishing this post by Catherine Thompson of the University of Leeds in her PhD thesis, titled  “The health and status of the feral honeybee (Apis mellifera sp) and Apis mellifera mellifera population of the UK”.

I was fortunate to once again witness and film the second swarm taking up residence, even though this one moved in before 8.00 am, and I just missed the main body of bees of the third swarm, which moved in as I was having lunch. However I did manage to film the last several bees of the final swarm exhibiting a classic piece of honeybee behaviour.

Once the bees have arrived at their newly selected home, several bees will stand with their abdomen tips raised and expose special scent glands located beneath the abdominal scales, releasing what are known as Nasonov compounds into the air. This complex mix of chemicals is further distributed into the air by the bees fanning with their wings, so creating a scent stream from the new hive’s entrance which guides any workers in the airborne swarm to the new home’s entrance. Interestingly this complex mix of 7 different volatile chemicals produced by the Nasonov gland, includes geraniol, geranic acid, and 2 forms of citral. As a way of alerting bees to the presence of my empty “hives”, I’d smeared a mix of olive oil and beeswax, mixed with just a few drops of Geranium oil, and Citronella oil around the entrance. Another example of the links between plant and insect biochemistry. Click here for an in depth review of “Chemical communication in the honey bee society” by Bortolotti and Costa.

The final point I wanted to touch on is where these honeybees have come from. The original colony came from about 3 miles away, having in turn been sourced from a very local apiary a few years before that. So no imported queens in their recent breeding history. Yet this year our sheep shearer, who’s spent his whole life living a couple of miles away, told us that his grandfather who had kept bees at the same property, had in the middle of last century imported honey bee queens from Russia and the Caucuses. There’s historically been a huge debate about whether a sub species of honey bee, Apis mellifera mellifera, the so called Dark European honey bee still exists in its true form. Or whether its been hybridized into extinction. An interesting paper by Norman Carreck : ” Are honey bees native to the British Isles?”   discusses the history of the honey bee in the UK, explaining that as a species it was probably present over 4,000 years ago, and certainly way before the Romans had begun to manage colonies in a semi domestic way for honey production. In recent times it’s become common for queen bees of other Southern European sub species to be imported to cross with local UK bees to “improve” the honey production efficiency of colonies.

But generally speaking in more out of the way parts of the UK this probably hasn’t taken place to the same extent – my reference to what were presumably tougher Russian/Caucasian origin bees may have been an attempt to add more hardiness.  The arrival of the parasitic mite Varroa destructor in the UK in April 1992 from its origins in Asia certainly caused many colonies to fail, and has been a much discussed curse for modern beekeepers.. However there’s evidence from around the world that left to their own devices “wild” honeybee colonies can evolve strategies for successfully mitigating mite infestation within a decade or so. There’s a recent in depth review of a long term experiment in Sweden, which demonstrates that the now mite adapted bees in the isolated island of Gotland also now seem to have lower incidence of several varroa associated viral conditions. (Temporal changes in the viromes of Swedish Varroa-resistant and Varroa-susceptible honeybee populations).

I’m inclined to think that several if not all of the swarms that moved in to the hives this summer may well have come if not from feral local colonies, then certainly from colonies where genes from feral colony drones will have had a significant effect on the genetic make up of the bees in the swarm.

With my gardener’s hat on, I’m very much in favour of developing a population of any plant or animal that’s adapted to one’s own particular climatic and other environmental conditions.I guess only time will tell just how hardy these particular bees really are in the long term, though I do think that our on site bees have a huge advantage in access to such a very varied, diverse, uncontaminated and nearly year round availability of forage options. Both from the unspoiled, and in places “neglected”, local environment as well as our garden and meadow plants. It always surprises me that discussion of honey bee diet, or diet diversity and its importance to bee health is given such minimal attention in most  honeybee literature that I’ve read.

Our neighbour’s unimproved wet meadow above and below are full of Valerian, Willow herb, Meadow Thistle and Meadowsweet flowers, as we move into July, and the latter is certainly a firm honeybee favourite. Revisiting the bee-plant biochemistry theme, might honeybees benefit from the effects of the salicylic acid, or salicin, it contains, or might Meadowsweet  honey contain traces? The drug giant Bayer marketed their new wonder drug derived from an acetyl modification of Meadowsweet’s salicin in 1897, as “a- spirin”. Meadowsweet was then called Spirea ulmaria, since changed to Filipendula ulmaria.

16/08/2020:

Yet another, probably local “wild” or “native” honey bee swarm has taken up residence, and I’ve continued to try to take short video clips from each of the 6 hives now occupied, to build up a good record of what constitutes normal frequency and numbers of worker bee flight from the different colonies, pollen intake and any other interesting behaviour. Since the hives are all distanced around the property, this makes for a fun regular walk each day, which has developed into a sort of mundane activity. Yet it’s meant that I’ve been able to see (on screen) aspects of behaviour like ventilation fanning and grizzly, bouncer guard bee activity at the hive’s entrance which aren’t always obvious to the naked eye. More later.

And not really mundane, more reflective of the strangeness of 2020, has been the planning needed for a socially distanced visit from our younger son’s family of 7 which meant mustering all of our squirreled away tents some of which hadn’t seen the light of day in over 20 years, and trying to remember how to erect them.

16/08/2020:

I’ve been thinking a bit more about blue as a colour after reading a recent blog post by Scottish beekeeper, Ann Chilcott, in her  Bee Listener blog,  in which she discusses how bees are thought to perceive colour and mentions in this regard the work of Adrian Horridge. He’s a 93 year old Professor at Australia’s National University in Canberra, who has spent much of his career studying vision in insects and particularly colour perception in honey bees. Click here for a fascinating radio interview with him, and here for a link to a book he has only just written and had published (at 93 !) on how the honeybee perceives colour and vision more generally, as well as the history of research into this topic.

He also explains how discovering the principles of the insect compound eye’s light capture processes paved the way for the critical use of fibre optic glass cables in allowing the hardware necessary for the world wide web to really take off in the 1970’s.

The interview begins with the startling response to the lead in question about the well known fact (amongst beekeepers anyway) that if you move a beehive more than just 3 feet from its original position, the bees can’t find it.

They’ll ignore where the hive now is, very nearby, and instead fly back to its original position. Horridge, a Fellow of the Royal Sociey, who qualified many years ago with a degree in Natural Sciences from Cambridge, dramatically explains that this is because the bees “don’t ever “see” the hive at all ! ”

He goes on to discuss how easy he’s found it to train bees using the colour blue, but only blue, and rewarding them at simple sucrose feeding stations, since blue is the only colour that they actually “see”.

It’s been known for a long time that bees can actually detect light with 3 distinct photoreceptor types which respond to 3 different frequencies of light, the short wavelength receptor peaks in the UV  (344 nm); the next receptor peaks in the human blue wavelength range (436 nm); and the final receptor is maximally sensitive in the human green wavelength range (544 nm).

However apart from the blue colour, the other receptors only seem to be used by the bees to detect lines of contrast, or edges between other colours or areas of contrast in a very different view of the world to our own. Bees thus see any mix of other colours as more or less blue than the amount of blue light actually present in the background vegetation or ground colour. They are also capable of adapting their vision tenfold in response to changes in light intensity within less than a second. And bees are also photo tactic, ( meaning naturally tending to move towards, or away from, light) although how this manifests itself can change in the lifetime of an individual bee. Thus queen bees, nurse and other hive bees are light averse in the hive, quickly moving away from light and towards dark areas, whereas when older worker bees leave the hive to become foragers they are attracted by lighter areas, though obviously still have to retain the ability to see in the dark of the hive on their return to it from foraging trips.

It also turns out that what we perceive as the colour white is actually perceived by bees as being a very strong blue colour, (this whole subject is fraught with conceptual challenges for me!) and so by a pure fluke, my decision to paint simple different patterns with white paint onto the dark cork exterior of most of my bee “boxes”, may mean I’ve actually created something which the bees might be able to “see”, and recognise easily from a distance.I’d figured that to reduce the chance of bees returning to the wrong hive, which creates the potential for all sorts of aggression and disease or parasite transmission, having a clear visual distinction between boxes might be helpful. However I should have spent more time researching this subject earlier on, since many and various experiments into honey bee recognition of coloured patterns and shapes was explored over a century ago, and pretty much ever since!

If I moved these pattern marked hives further from their existing position by more than 3 feet, would the bees locate them more easily? Maybe something for a small scale practical experiment  for me in due course, if they survive the winter.

However having finally found what I think is a somewhat garbled format version of the complete Horrabridge book on line, click here, a quick scan read left me admitting I’m completely out of my depth. A hundred year’s worth of studies of honeybees’ visual perception by numerous researchers, all documented in detail by Horridge, seems to result in proposals for how bees really see the world which I simply fail to understand, let alone be able to communicate to any reader of this blog.

I remain in awe of the roll call of researchers who’ve spent years, even lifetimes, investigating these topics, but as yet can’t seem to communicate them in a simpler way to a layman like me. Have a quick glance at this contemporary paper to see how detailed and impenetrable much of the painstaking research still is. Published in 2018 under the title  “Opsin expression patterns coincide with photoreceptor development during pupal development in the honey bee, Apis mellifera” it outlines the sort of experiments used to assess honeybee vision in the lab, though these researchers use the aversion form of training by giving bees electric shocks, rather than the reward form of training with sugar solutions favoured by Horridge.

I’m not even attempting to be distracted by how our local ant species’ visual system works, but after reading about bees’ vision being influenced by light in the UV range, which our eyes can’t detect, and blue (and indeed white perceived as strong blue!) possibly ants may perceive the world in a similar way to bees.

This could certainly help to explain what we’ve noticed over many years. On ant swarming days, and this year we’ve had vastly more of these events than ever before, the flying ants nearly always settle on, or very near to white surfaces, and typically mainly the white washed, East facing wall of our main barn, in late afternoon.I’ve struggled to understand why this should be, and this year took surface temperature readings from this wall and compared it to North, West and South facing white walls which rarely get any ants settling. But found no major temperature differences. Perhaps being shaded from the late afternoon sun in the West, this particular East facing wall would be exposed to different levels of UV light at this time of day?

In any event the ants also always settle on us if we’re wearing one of our many blue or white tee shirts, as they do on the white sides of the builder’s bags which we use for dragging hay off the meadows, and indeed our sun hats.

 

I’ll finish this monthly round up with some pictures from around the garden and 2 short video clips of one of the final significant moments of observed honeybee activity this season (probably). In a previous post, I’d shown the huge waves of male drone bees returning to the butter churn hive after trips made to the mating aerial drone congregation areas in June. The swarm season now having largely ended, hopefully, and with food supplies available to workers beginning to decline, there comes a time when the colony determines that it’s time to get rid of the vast majority of these otherwise non productive male bees, which require food, yet contribute none to the colony, since they don’t collect nectar or pollen.

I’d read that this process can begin quite suddenly so was really pleased to be able to capture this moment on the morning of August 11th, the same day as the storm, when the much smaller female worker bees begin to grapple, drag and force the drones from the hive entrance. The poor drones, in spite of their larger physical size, can’t seem to resist the onslaught. I’m not sure whether the workers are using their jaws to chivy the drones as well.

Though the workers obviously possess a single use sting, they won’t want to use this,  since it would result in their own death, but standing beside the hive allowed me to watch a continuous stream of bees involved in this battle of the sexes in which there was only going to ever be one eventual winner. The set up of my hive with a sloping metal sheet beneath the hive entrance allows the determination of the harrying worker bees to be clearly seen.

The evicted drones will quickly starve to death, or suffer from hypothermia outside the warmth of the hive, and many will be approaching the end of their short life anyway. Yet another facet of the life cycle of the honeybee finely honed to optimise survival of the colony and species, over the individual.

And how, typically, it’s the gals who call the shots and exercise real power!

25/09/2020:

For many decades, I’ve been convinced that our diets have a huge impact on our health and state of well being, but a few recent observations and discoveries had me trying to track down who was the first to coin the pithy title phrase of this post.

It turns out there are a number of contenders, in the following chronological order:

Firstly Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, in 1826, in his seven-volume book The Physiology of Taste. That’s quite a thought – writing a seven volume book on the physiology of taste way back then before modern science really got going. However this book which has been in print ever since, and could be yours tomorrow with a quick click, is perhaps more gourmand cuisine than real physiology.

German philosopher Ludwig Andreas Feurerbach, in 1863, repeated the idea in his essay Spiritualism and Materialism, writing: “A man is what he eats.”

However in spite of these earlier uses, the most famous and probably the one responsible for its continued use today is that of American radio presenter, come osteopath nutritionist, Victor Lindlahr. In the 1920’s he wrote: ‘Ninety per cent of the diseases known to man are caused by cheap foodstuffs. You are what you eat.’  Now that’s a strap line to make you sit up and think, in times completely taken over with thoughts surrounding a single tiny infectious agent’s impact on human health around the world.

In 1942 he published a book of this title: “You Are What You Eat”, which went on to sell half a million copies, and was perhaps the first to promote a catabolic and low carbohydrate diet. Something that has been reprised by many others since. Possibly the most recent tweak of the concept being the work by ZOE in the UK, who have also pioneered COVID symptom recording across the UK, and promoted their own app developed to track the spread of the disease. As an occasional IBS sufferer who was disappointed years ago by the conventional non holistic approach of medical services to my symptoms, I’m intrigued to see how this ZOE concept develops, but more than a little sceptical that it’s just another money making wheeze.

My thoughts on food – origin and preparation – have always been a little less intense than Lindlahr’s, if still wide ranging. I feel trying to tune in to one’s body’s state of well being and rewinding to recent novel dietary changes if something goes awry, is often a simple strategy which yields results.

Apart from our own species, and those we’ve chosen to domesticate and manage over millenia, we’re probably the only animals that don’t source their food directly from the wider natural world. Increasingly a huge proportion of many people’s diets is processed, prepared and packaged. Intense heat treatment in one form or another, and chemical additions are common at many stages before our food ever enters our bodies, and many of us in “developed” (?) societies now ingest a huge variety of foodstuffs from all over the world, in combinations never possible just a hundred years ago. All of this makes interpreting the impact of what we as (potentially) omnivores choose to take in to keep our bodies functioning even more difficult. Our basic physiology just hasn’t really had long enough to evolve and adapt to such radical changes I sometimes feel. Certainly most of us rarely assess, or indeed have the skills innate or otherwise, to judge our intake from a nutritional or health perspective.

Around the time I was mulling over how to feature this in a post came the latest delivery from The Courtyard Dairy. I’d chanced upon this award winning cheese monger early on in lockdown and been struck by the detail of their story, and their support for small scale artisan cheesemakers in the UK, who by selling mainly into the hospitality trade, had been devastated by a collapse in demand for their specialist cheeses when restaurants closed during the spring lockdown in the UK.

We’ve never eaten much cheese, and the hand crafted cheeses offered by this cheese monger are unsurprisingly pricier than a vacuum packed supermarket slab, but I liked the concept of supporting real family farms, and management systems more in tune with our own holistic approach to land and stock management.

I can say that each cheese supplied has been a taste revelation, and of the highest quality, but what has also fascinated me is the detail and research which goes into the crafting of such farmhouse cheese. Preferring sheep and goat’s cheeses led us to eventually receiving a sample of Martin Gott’s Cumbrian produced St. James’ ewe’s cheese. By chance this arrived in the week that Martin was featured on BBC Radio Four’s On Your Farm programme.

Titled In Search of the Perfect Cheese,  if you’re interested in food or particularly unpasteurised cheese, I’d suggest listening to this to try to understand why artisan cheese makers love what they do. Aside from the complexity of microbiology that is considered in the production process. You’d learn for instance about Martin’s visit to a seventy year old American’s Sister’s woodland lab where she spent years studying the microbiology involved in her convent’s cheese production, as well as the cheese mites which are an integral part of the fauna of a rind washed cheese!

For a more detailed discussion between Martin, his partner Nicola who milks the sheep, and Andy Swinscoe the pioneering cheese monger who set up the Courtyard Dairy, click on the following You Tube link, as an example of what you can learn about every cheese that Andy and his wife Kathy stocks and sells. As someone fascinated by scientific detail, and food, I found this revelatory.

Finally for anyone thinking of establishing any new business, Andy’s detailed blog posts on how he came to set up and equip his Courtyard Dairy are a brilliant insight into his painstaking research and attention to detail which have clearly paid off over time given the success and recognition he’s achieved. If you fancy a treat sometime, give his cheeses a try, I’m sure you’ll be impressed with both the cheeses and service.

As a comparison with our own species’ current food sources and choices, and their impact on our physical and mental well being, I’ve spent a lot of time this year thinking about honeybee nutrition, nectar and pollen sources and collection, and even its impact on honey quality, which of course many of us also find is a wonderful and hugely variable, from a taste perspective, natural foodstuff.

Way back in 2011 I began to spend a lot of time looking at which flowers in our garden seemed to attract which insects, and came up with producing a webpage The Real Botany of Desire – Insect Friendly Flowers. 

This highlighted the fact that only a small proportion of our flowering plants ever seem to attract particular insects in any numbers, and very few attract a wide spectrum of different types of insect. More recently work by the National Botanic Garden of Wales (NBGW) on pollen grains in honey samples have confirmed this – probably less than 10% of the 7,000 plus flowering plants at the NBGW ever turn up as pollen traces in their bee’s honey.

Much to my amazement my IFF page very soon began to feature in the top few google searches using the “insect friendly flowers” (IFF) term, and with no real updating over the years continues to do so. The consequence of all this observation, and of noting plants in nurseries and other gardens which seem favoured by different insects, has been gradually planting the garden and meadows with more and more of the plants which seem to have big insect pulling power. In particular focusing on any that extend the season, early or late, so providing our native insects with much needed food options when the landscape around us in spring and autumn has precious few alternatives.

Even in rural areas like ours, it’s surprising how the landscape is largely flower free for a big part of the year.

However back then in 2011/12, we only had occasional honeybee visits to the flowers in the garden. This year, after all the swarms taking up residence in my home made hives, and all but the last one in, out of 6, still having good levels of foraging activity in late September, I’m a lot more aware of what and how honeybees collect food, and really need to rework some of my IFF pages for next year.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m incredibly indebted to and inspired by Thomas Seeley’s work on honeybees, and how he and his team have unlocked aspects of normal bee behaviour over recent years and elucidated just how complex and efficient many of their processes are. Often using painstaking and laborious experiments such as individually painting and numbering 4,000 worker bees, putting them into a glass fronted observation hive and then driving them to an area with no other bees or food options, so that he can assess how the bees find and select the best food options available.

One thing that has always intrigued me is how apparent levels of bee activity vary from day to day, and during the day. It’s not just as simple as being down to the warmth, wind and sunshine – at least not with our apparently very hardy bees!

It’s been shown that one of the advantages of having a social and reproductive system that involves the queen bee making multiple matings with many different male drone bees on her brief mating flight, is that it tends to produce a greater diversity and vigour in forager working bees.

The foraging bees that fly out to find and collect nectar and pollen are always the oldest bees in the hive – many readers will know that there is a strict progression of duties for worker bees from when they emerge from their pupae. Very simply, the youngest bees, up to around 10 to 12 days old tend to have various menial cleaning and nursing duties around the hive; the middle aged bees 12 to 18 to 20 days then shift tasks to, for example, becoming food receiving and storage bees; and the oldest bees, from about 20 days old, leave the hive to forage and collect food, and water, continuing until they’re worn out and die around 5 to 6 weeks of age (during the summer).

These older foraging bees are the only ones in the hive which ever seem to sleep – either at night or when weather conditions prevent them from flying. They’ve probably earned it, as we’ll see later.  In most of our hives, a few bees will already be leaving the hive shortly after dawn if it’s not too wet or cold. Certainly a few intrepid ones will fly out early even in cold, drizzly or very windy conditions. If they return after a successful trip, they don’t automatically go in and perform their waggle dance to inform other bees of the success of their mission and where the food is.

Rather, early on in the day, they’ll be on shake and wake duties. After unloading their nectar to food processing bees as soon as they enter the hive, they’ll move around the hive literally shaking and waking other dozing and inactive forager bees to recruit them to foraging activities. As the day progresses, if sufficient bees are persuaded outside, the bees who have found really good sources of nectar and pollen will indeed then begin waggle dances to promote their sources to other foragers, which they conduct on the frames or comb of the hives close to the entrance – their own dance floor.

In Northern temperate climates, Seeley reckons that in a typical managed colony, the vast majority of the bees’ annual supply of nectar, which is around 100KG is probably collected on just 20 really good days when the nectar is flowing from a particular plant and weather conditions are benign enough to collect it in quantity. As well as mobilising the maximum number of bees to exploit such conditions at very short notice, the bees also have to ramp up the numbers of bee food receivers/storers who quickly offload the regurgitated nectar from foragers returning to the hive, and transfer it into the wax honeycomb cells for storage. So there’s always a real division of labour – foraging bees almost never stash away the nectar themselves, it’s always passed on through regurgitation to other bees.

It turns out that after 70 years of uncertainty as to what the different tremble dance was used for, which many bee studying scientists had seen some bees perform occasionally on honeybee combs, Seeley discovered the answer by chance. He was able to demonstrate that this dance is performed by foragers who’ve just returned to the hive and not been able to quickly locate a receiver bee within a couple of minutes to unload their nectar to. The trembling dance performed deeper in the hive alerts bees that more nectar receivers are needed PDQ, so bees are quickly recruited to help with this task. To supplement this message, an additional trick involves “trembling” bees emitting audible Beeps, whilst simultaneously bashing into the thorax of any forager bees they come across performing a waggle dance, to try to dissuade them from recruiting more collectors, until the storage side of the nectar processing is resolved. They’ll typically have to do this about 20 times to get the waggler to cease!

There are some excellent video clips of these behaviours towards the end of a lecture given by Professor Seeley in 2017 at the British National Honey Show in 2017. Click here to watch the whole lecture, or if you just want to see clips of the different dances, move on to about 40 minutes into the video. Well worth a view to an insight into bee behaviour most of us will never see.

These are just a few examples of how brilliant the just-in-time management of the hive’s food collection and storage issue is. In addition there’s the still poorly understood and innate ability of an individual bee to assess just how nutritious a particular nectar or pollen source is. However it is now known just how they can communicate this critical assessment of nutritional quality to allow the bee colony to switch forage sources within less an hour of finding a new and more productive nectar and pollen source. Much of this helps explain how the presence of honeybees within the garden can wax and wane so dramatically from day to day, or even within the same day. Currently on trend here are visits to this 2 metres plus tall and late flowering Sanguisorba tenuifolia var. alba…

We certainly consistently find more honey (and bumblebees) in our upland garden than in any other garden we ever visit, which I suppose reinforces our message that plant selection is critical if you aim to have a vibrant bee and other insect garden population to enliven your garden scene.

Over the last month the consistently well visited flowers, by honeybees, in the garden have been:

Geranium procurrens – a long season of flowering from early August until the frosts strike it down.

Dahlia merckii – an absolutely star plant for length of flowering season – at least 5 months and still going strong with a bit of mild dead heading, and favoured as both a pollen and nectar source.Way more valuable to the bees than the few larger named cultivars, like Magenta Star, below, which flowers over a much shorter season and with far fewer blooms.

Persicaria vaccinifolia, and to a lesser extent other Persicaria – both have brilliantly long seasons of flowering which extend well into autumn.

and Sedum spectabile “Herbstfreude”.

Of these the Sedum is hugely popular when it begins to open its flowers, but really only for about 10 days, and mainly only of interest when the sun shines, so a fleeting bonanza for may insects.

Bumbles have instead been mainly visiting autumn fruiting raspberries, Devil’s bit scabious along with the Dahlia merckii and Geranium procurrens.

There are still days when almost no honeybees are in the garden, yet large numbers are seen whizzing in and out of the hives, obviously exploiting distant unknown forage options (probably ivy and Hilamlayan Balsam at this time of the year) within the 3 to 4 mile radius that they can reach should they assess the reward is worth the extra effort in flying that far. It’s quite a thought that being essentially “wild” colonies, the 5 most active colonies on site will have collected this summer a minimum of roughly 100 KG (5 X 20 kg) of pollen and 300 KG ( 5 X60 KG) of nectar, based on Seeley’s data for wild American honey bees. This will have required roughly 20 million individual bee foraging trips with the bees covering around 60 million miles of flying in total.

How’s that for some dodgy data! And think of all the pollinated flowers as a result.

With plenty of honey from last year’s harvest still left, I removed just the uppermost (fourth) box, or super, from my modified insulated conventional “National”  hive this week to discover that the bees had managed to build out most of the frames with wax comb, and partially fill them. Even if the comb was a bit wonky in places.

This will provide a small back up reserve of honey for us. Not a bad achievement for a colony only taking up residence in late May this year, in what has been a really poor summer, (there have been many reports of bees starving this year and needing supplementary feeding). They also had to create all the wax combs and fill the other 3 boxes of frames below this one with combs and nectar as well, in barely 4 months. At this stage last year, which was overall a much better summer, 3 out of 4 hives, all linked in some way to swarming events had already failed.

A couple of other articles exploring how bees, and their honey, aren’t immune to environmental issues, and how it can impact on our own food intake have recently caught my eye. Canadian based researchers analysed honey from Parisian hives which were downwind of Notre Dame, and from which honey was collected in the aftermath of the 2019 fire which devastated the cathedral, including the destruction of its enormous lead roof. The striking findings showed lead concentrations about 2.5 times higher than Parisian hives located upwind of the fire, and about 6 times higher than honey samples taken from hives in the Alps region.  Click here and here for more. Honey can thus be impacted significantly by pollution events, and it also suggests that if you are a honey fan, it’s worth opting to buy local individual producer honey from rural areas, and not typically pooled international sourced honey since as with artisan cheese, you’ve a better chance of knowing exactly what you might be consuming.

Another article discussed research specifically looking for traces of pesticides in honey samples from different regions of Lebanon with some striking findings. One of the  points from this study is just how long some pesticides persist and are still found in the environment and are capable of being picked up and brought back into hives by foraging bees, years after the pesticides had been banned by international consent. (look for the details on hexachlorobenzene). In this regard we are indeed fortunate to live in an area still with low levels of agricultural pesticide use – though more next time.

____

18/11/2020:

Finally, I’m going to finish with a little more about honeybees. Many beekeepers will by now have fed their bee colonies earlier in the autumn with some sort of supplementary feed to ensure that they have enough stores to get them through the winter. This after removing much of the honey which the bees would have foraged and stored away over the year!

Such feed supplement is usually either a simple sugar syrup, or sugar fondant, a bit like royal icing, placed inside the hive. Keen to encourage survival of the fittest, I’ve always been of the mind to let the bees survive, or not, on the back of their own foraging. Particularly since we’re blessed with an abundance of wild source as well as garden foraging options for much of the year, even if our climate is challenging. (Gorse, Ulex europaeus pollen recently discovered by just one of the hives so far, below).

One of the delights of the last month has been seeing just how active the bees continue to be, in spite of very wet, windy and sometimes very cool conditions. Though bumblebees have now completely disappeared from the scene since the beginning of November. It does seem to me that rather like sitting a child in a sweet shop, should honeybees be offered high concentration sugary feed as a supplement within the hive, they’re much less likely to be bothered to stretch their wings and legs to go looking for greater variety in the wider world. And my guess is that as with us, there are real physiological benefits for the honeybees in being physically active, not least giving them the ability to perform cleansing flights to void waste materials.This is a big issue for bees kept in much colder climates, where they literally are unable to leave the hive for months on end – the hive may even be buried deep in snow.

Therefore as well as searching for the first snowdrop, Cyclamen coum and even Daphne bholua flowers which are already fattening buds nicely, I now have frequent chances to assess honeybee activity here through this “No-thing” month of November. Things really aren’t as gloomy as in Thomas Hood’s London of 1844, when he wrote his poem No,  penned in smog and fog afflicted conditions. One can really sense the depression.

Thank goodness for our open spaces and garden experiences!

No sun—no moon!
No morn—no noon—
No dawn—no dusk—no proper time of day—
No sky—no earthly view—
No distance looking blue—
No road—no street—no “t’other side the way”—
No end to any Row—
No indications where the Crescents go—
No top to any steeple—
No recognitions of familiar people—
No courtesies for showing ’em—
No knowing ’em!—
No travelling at all—no locomotion,
No inkling of the way—no notion—
“No go”—by land or ocean—
No mail—no post—
No news from any foreign coast—
No Park—no Ring—no afternoon gentility—
No company—no nobility—
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member—
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,—
November! 

(My emphasis and italics),

Here, 800 feet up in a much wetter climate, even by the middle of the month, there’ve only been 2 days with no comings and goings from the most active hive. About 6 weeks ago, on days when the bees seemed most active, I decided to have a go at trying to estimate just how numerous the bee foraging trips were. So 3 or more times a day, on a very imprecise and irregular basis I’d stand, timer in hand, and count the number of bees returning to each hive over a minute.

This confirmed in a very dramatic way just how variable the 4 colonies closest to the house were in terms of flights into and out of the hive, and when these flights took place. Fiona, with a bit of help from our younger son, had a go at designing a simple programme to display this data in an accessible way.

The most striking feature has been how one colony (labelled as compost, blue) very consistently sends foragers out and back, way before any of the other colonies. Although this colony was the last to swarm, the date only lagged the other 2 swarmed in hives (larch and oak, grey and orange) by a week or two, and all the viable swarms had moved in by very early July, so I don’t think it’s just that the other colonies may have completely full stores, whereas this one still has space to fill.The PV hive, yellow, was much earlier in the year, and a captured and transferred swarm, so has already grown to be a much larger colony. Since all the colonies have been insulated with 40 mm cork boards to almost the same extent, and all face South and hence get similar exposure to direct sunlight on the rare occasions when the sun has indeed shone, I’m inclined to think there has to be another reason.

Rather I reckon that this colony has a significant number of “tougher”,  or hardier bees. Or even a gene line of bees who are early risers, and send out their foragers, who are perhaps more adept at shaking other resting and inactive bees on their return to get them up and out there.

At this point, I’m including a link to an excellent and diverse range of lectures on many aspects of honey bee behaviour, available free to view, from the library of the National Honey Show. This British based event is internationally diverse, and covers a lot more than awarding prizes to jars of honey from around the world! Inevitably cancelled this year in physical form, it’s clear from a number of folk I’ve consulted about this, that there’s very low awareness of this excellent resource. Click here for the lecture listing from the last 7 years. All of the lectures I’ve looked at are recorded in a very professional and high quality way, unlike some of the Zoom type events which have become common place this year. More importantly, many, though maybe not all, are delivered by superbly competent lecturers, often with decades of significant research into many aspects of honey bee behaviour and ecology.

For sure, some are focused on aspects of hive management of no interest to a non bee keeper, but perhaps listen to Simon Rees talking about “How Bees fly”, from the 2019 series. I had no idea of the complexities of anatomy, physiology and physics which are all involved.

Or from 2017, Tom Seeley from Cornell University “The Thirst of a Hive: How Does a Honey Bee Colony Control its Water Intake?”

However the most relevant to my observations of the differences in patterns of foraging activity is the talk by Heather Mattila, from Wellesley College, again from 2017. “Well-mated Queens Produce the Busiest Bees.”

She was one of the first researchers to experimentally confirm that honeybee colonies with a queen bee mated with multiple drones on her single nuptial flight as a virgin, (as is typical in nature), end up being both healthier and much more productive than a queen mated with just a single drone.

She managed to confirm this by creating her own colonies with queens artificially inseminated with either a single drone’s semen, or the mixed semen from 15 different drones. The implications of this research are fascinating, perhaps even for our own societies, regarding the benefits of multi-culturalism, if not promiscuity! This can be best illustrated by a memorable example she gave. Kick a honey bee hive (preferably with a very good protective bee suit on!) and then after the guard bees have whizzed out and stung you multiple times, retreat, remove the stings from the suit and get their DNA genome patterns analysed, and you’ll find that the majority come from the same patriline.

In other words, most of these aggressive bees will have all come from the semen of just one of the single drones which mated with the queen, and which tended to have a predisposition for more aggressive behaviour. The concept of different fathers, or patrilines, affecting different characteristics of bee activity is therefore a key way in which the fitness potential stemming from such diversity of fathers can be manifested in real life colony activity and survival potential – even though all of the productive members of the bee society are female.

In turn this makes sense of honeybees’ seemingly curious and risky strategy of having the drones and virgin queens undertaking their long flights away from the hive to meet up with multiple potential partners from different hives, rather than simply mating with their own colony’s drones in the safety of the hive. As well as aggression, one can equally imagine that all the other drones may impart subtly different sets of chromosome influenced skills, contributing to the overall colony survival chances.

So what price a vibrant ethnically diverse origin society? Or not?

To use examples from the starting thread of this post, a good job that William de Havilland, b1375 from Isles-Sur-Marne, Champagne-Ardenne, France, had a son who moved to Guernsey, and many generations later, made another family move to England, so that in due course Captain Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, OM, CBE, AFC, RDI, FRAeS, could set up his eponymous dH aircraft company in London in 1920, and not elsewhere. Or more mundanely, that Nicholas Kove, a 1930’s refugee arriving in Britain from Hungary, contributed to the material and cultural wealth of his adopted nation when he set up his rubber inflated toy firm Airfix in 1939, and post War had the drive to acquire the first plastic injection moulding machinery in the UK, leading to the kit part models which are still produced, via multiple changes of ownership, today.

But back to my consistently very early rising hive. My guess is that it has a significant patriline of worker bees with an ability to fly early, and at lower temperatures, or simply be better bee shakers, thus rousing the resting, than the norm. Perhaps as with “the early bird”, there’s an advantage in getting out and finding good sources of forage ahead of any other colonies, particularly at this time of the year when resources are scarce and foraging weather opportunities more limited? Wild or feral honeybees locally adapted over many years to a particular area and its climate are much more likely to have evolved such survival traits. Which makes the recent data showing that the percentage of imported mated queens into the UK has increased fivefold in the last decade very worrying.  Click here for more.

However my real light bulb moment in recent weeks has been thinking a little more about which garden flowers these early risers (in particular) are visiting. In addition to the distant valley bottom stands of Himalayan Balsamwhich are clearly worth flying over 0.6 miles to reach, even in cool, damp and windy October weather, it turns out many of their favoured flowers in our garden also have origins in the Himalayas.

Thus, Persicaria amplexicaulis…Geranium procurrens.and Persicaria vaccinifoliaall continue flowering into November if frosts permit. In particular P. amplexicaulis is regularly visited at dawn, even in the rain, so clearly doesn’t need warmth, or strong sunshie to elicit good nectar production, unlike many flowers.

Casting my mind back to earlier in the year, and Daphne bholuaand Skimmiasalso hail from such distant and harsh conditions.

I then discovered that the largest of the world’s 8 species of honeybee, Apies laboriosa, is native to the Himalayas. Moreover, and more remarkably, it doesn’t nest inside a protective cavity like our native honeybees, but rather builds a single huge slab of tough wax comb, hanging vertically from a suitable overhanging cliff ledge. There’s a wonderful short You Tube film below, which illustrates this and shows the remarkable lengths which some Nepalese villagers will go to in order to harvest this honey. It really is beautifully recorded.

Over many years we’ve had a very keen awareness of how critical weather conditions, and minor temperature changes can be for energy consumption, having a wood pellet stove/boiler that needs “feeding” on a daily basis. The two photos for consecutive days shows how strong winds and rain, combined with adjusting the thermostat by just 0.25 degrees C for one hour on the second day, can nearly double pellet consumption. External temperatures were very similar, and it would be quite tricky to monitor such nuances of energy use with oil or gas fired heating, I guess.

So think back to these larger Apies laboriosa, exposed in all weathers on a Himalayan rock face, and with a body mass twice that of our own smaller A. mellifera. They may have a lower metabolic rate than our European bees, (as discussed by B. Underwood in this paper  “Thermoregulation and Energetic Decision-Making by the Honeybees Apis Cerana, Apis Dorsata and Apis Laboriosa”). They may lose heat less quickly, than our smaller bees, but with the extra weight will certainly need more energy to stay airborne. Perhaps though in the local Himalayan flora they may also have access to a range of flowering plants with high value nectar, or at least plants with the ability to produce it more copiously? Which is why our own bees preferentially seem to make a bee- line to these flowers. (Sorry..)

I’ve been unable to find any more information detailed analysis of the nectar produced by this range of plants. They rarely seem to appear in lists of the best pollinator flowers to grow, yet in our wet cool conditions, along with the high altitude origin Dahlia merckii, have huge merit for anyone wanting to help support honeybee, and indeed some bumblebee, species. I should add the caveat, after discussion with Amelia of A French Garden,  that although all of these grow vigorously here, they may indeed be unsuited for hotter drier climes!

Honeybees have incredibly sophisticated methods for using scout bees to locate new food sources, and then separate inspector bees to monitor previously located food sources to see if the sources are still producing. All the while the colony being capable of performing cost/reward analysis of visiting the potentially many different, and constantly changing, nectar and pollen resources available within flying range of the hive. And thus capable of directing most workers to the most “profitable” options. (This is discussed brilliantly in Tom Seeley’s “The Bee Colony as a Honey Factory”.)

I’d like to hope that at some point someone will look at the energy value of some of these Himalayan origin flowering plants and confirm that either in through-the-day quantity or quality, they do indeed offer particularly high reward nectar offerings for visiting pollinators, and thus confirm a wonderfully virtuous symbiosis for pollinators living in extreme conditions.

15/02/2021:

February began with another cold day and another light dusting of snow, and it was a huge relief in these still locked down days, to see some benign sunshine on February 3rd, which saw really significant honey bee activity around the garden. By now I was certain that only 3 of the hives had colonies of bees that were still alive. I mentioned last year that Professor Thomas Seeley’s wonderful research on wild honeybee colonies in the U.S.A. estimates that a maximum of about 1 in 6 swarms is likely to survive their first winter, so fingers crossed that at least one hive will still be active come spring here. As you’ll see shortly, this may prove to be optimistic this year.

Aside from the delight of seeing and hearing so many honeybees around the garden in the first week of February, albeit for only a couple of hours or so, this was the first year in which I felt that I was able to take some lovely photos of en masse snowdrops, which go a tiny way to capturing what the garden looks like in this first week of February.So, it’s only taken me about 27 years to reach this point! As I’ve mentioned before, but this year is turning into a classic illustration of why this is important, in most years, little if any viable snowdrop seed will be produced, because of inclement weather conditions at flowering time. Thus, to create the large drifts of snowdrops that everyone enjoys seeing, you really do have to take the time to lift and split clumps.

16/03/2021:

Within the garden, there’s been real, uplifting delight at seeing the wonderful mutual advantage that stems from having not one, but for the first time, 3 honeybee colonies so close to the garden areas at this time of the year. In spite of several periods of a week or more when 2 of the hives have seemed inactive, they’re still all viable as I write. They’ve really had very few opportunities to get out and forage, but on Monday February 22nd the temperature hit 9 degrees C, with only about 30% cloud, and light winds and we had vast numbers of honeybees in the garden, and visiting several flowers which I’ve never seen them visit before – Primrose, Pulmonaria, Chrysosplenium macrophyllum.

This provides a huge extra level of interest for me, and whereas in the past I used to have to chase individual bees around for photography, with these numbers, one’s spoiled for choice. (4 bees below visiting this single small clump of Crocus chrysanthus ‘Blue Pearl’)

This was also the day of our first bumblebee sightings of the year, though only fleetingly and not until about 2 pm, by which time many of the honeybees were returning to base. There were briefer opportunities for them again on February 25th, 27th and 28th, but heading into March the chilling wind and lack of sunshine meant almost no bees ventured forth all week, and it wasn’t until Monday 8th when the winds dropped slightly, and Ventusky’s “perceived temperature” hit a dizzy 5 degrees C, that bees were active from all 3 hives once more. Much of the last week since then has seen minimal activity.

So, they’re hanging on in there, but I’m very conscious that with no supplementary artificial feeding, they’re reliant now on dwindling residual stores, at the end of such a long, poor winter, and on any flowers which the garden currently has  – there are none locally in the landscape, although distant gorse would be available if the weather was more benign to allow them to fly that far.By now I’d opened up the 2 other died-out hives which had swarms fly in at the end of last June, and discovered that there were no signs of any disease, they’d simply run out of food. All the wax cells were empty of both pollen and honey. one had also had a mouse nesting towards its base.

Such is the tough existence for new colonies in the wild, and why so few (a maximum of around 1 in 6 according to Professor Tom Seeley), survive into the second year, after they swarmed. Perhaps in future years if winters really do become longer, gloomier and wetter, I’ll need to rethink this one, and incorporate a system for providing supplementary nutrition, but I’m still drawn to the work of Dr. Dorian Pritchard, a human geneticist/beekeeper with many years’ experience in keeping and breeding locally adapted, treatment free strains of bees, fit for his Northumberland conditions, click here. 

I’d rather encourage the fitter, more locally adapted strains to survive, and have them foraging early on, from the diverse range of flowers in the garden, than encouraging them to stay at home with simple sugar supplements. I’ve spent a few hours, out in the cold pulling out dead bees, lodged head first in the depths of the wax cells, so these two hives and combs are available and ready to be re-occupied come the spring, should any swarms locate them. It’s hugely impressive that all this comb was created in just a few short months from July with nothing, save a tiny wax starter strip running along the top piece of wood.

There’s now no question that if they get any brief weather windows, there are huge numbers of nectar and pollen source flowers, very close to the hives in the garden, for them to access.The virtuous circle is closed, and complete.

All these alien origin, early spring bulbs can now get pollinated, and thus through seed production, will multiply and add to the numbers of flowers in years to come.

This year we’ve had the added experience of honeybees finding their way into the greenhouse on a few occasions through a narrowly opened door and roof lights, and so pollinating our apricot flowers naturally. A frankly tedious job if one has to perform it manually with a feather, as I have in previous years. But listen to the noise, if not their excitement, in the final clip of the short video montage below.

A secondary benefit of this, is that they’ll naturally aid petal fall from the “Tomcots”, which I’ve always found necessary to complete manually in previous years, to avoid fungal rotting of tiny fruitlets. As a back-up for those spells when the bees can’t visit for several days in a row, my trusty little Li-ion Makita blower is brilliant at dislodging petals without blowing off the fruitlets. I used to do this manually and always managed to knock some fruit off. It’ll be interesting to see whether this turns into a bumper year for apricots and nectarines, after the bees’ hard work. Although once or twice I’ve had to usher a few from the greenhouse as the weather has changed, and they can’t always speedily escape.

Whilst discussing honeybees I’ll also briefly link to a unique foreign language film which we watched recently – “Honeyland”.

Full of wonderful colour, light, life, and important messages to ponder about how we live, or don’t, at ease with the natural world around us. You need to grasp before watching this (which we didn’t fully), that it’s a real life documentary filmed over 3 years, in a part of Northern Macedonia, between 2015 to 2018. For those unclear of geography this is a small landlocked country bordered by Greece, Albania, Kosovo, Serbia and Bulgaria.

The people are real. Their lives are real. But far removed from life in Western Europe as most readers will appreciate from the excellent trailer below. It’s one of the most beautifully filmed works I think I’ve ever seen, so don’t be put off by the title or the fact that it’s subtitled. It really isn’t just about bees, although they are the only source of income for the lead character, Hatidze. The film’s two directors didn’t even understand the Turkish dialect they were hearing as they filmed – the translations and editing took a year of trawling through the 400 hours of footage they captured, whilst the small crew were camped, for 3 or 4 days at a time outside Hatidze’s basic hovel, with no piped water or electricity. Enough from me, watch the trailer and then I hope you’re inspired to see the film, if you haven’t already.

___

30/04/2021:

The other recent bee observation, relates to honeybee water collection.

About 3 weeks ago, I was again alerted to honeybees visiting my pee collecting watering can, something I first observed last summer. A gentle kick, before use, is now a necessary safety measure. But before the last 48 hour’s very light showers, my attention was grabbed by the stream of honeybees visiting the still running water in the churned up ditch, where earlier in the year I’d managed to get the tractor stuck.This ditch is about 100 yards below one of the closest hives, (beneath the large sycamore above), and judging by the numbers of golden banded bees visiting the water, most, if not all these bees have come from that hive.

Water collection by honeybees is a fascinating and critical part of a honeybee colony’s existence, which is explored in a typically excellent review video lecture by Tom Seeley below.

To briefly summarise his lecture, which is in itself the result of many years of observation and research, water isn’t stored within a honeybee hive, other than occasionally as a temporary crop/stomach-based storage by specialist water receiver bees. And only then occasionally, if the hive has experienced a collective thirst episode recently – no water is ever stored in cells in the way that nectar is. In most situations, a readily available supply of water is ubiquitous in the landscape, so there’s really no need for stores, unlike, say the patchy availability of both nectar and pollen through the year.

However, the recent dry spell here, would have made this a bit more of an issue for our bees. Water collection, as with many aspects of a honeybee colony, is delegated to a particular group of honeybees, which in this case, tend to be older (20 days plus). Their sole task is to source and collect water, and bring it back to the hive.

On entering the hive, typically laden with a distended crop full of water (around 50% of the bee’s bodyweight), they are greeted by younger (14-20day old) specialist water receiver bees. These seek out the water collectors just inside the hive, and using extended tongues, the water is transferred in a matter of less than 30 seconds or so. The water receiver then moves on, around the hive, distributing the water both to other bees within the hive that beg for some, as well as using it within cells with developing bee larvae to smear the cell lining as a means of cooling the cell, and larva, down. (Evaporating water requires so much energy, it’s the best system the bees have, alongside fanning to create drafts, as a means of regulating brood nest temperatures within the very narrow band which are required for healthy bee larval development).

Seeley explains that the 2 periods when the collective and individual thirst of a honeybee colony are at their greatest are either in the depths of winter, when severe weather has prevented any external flights by the bees, or secondly towards the end of April. More water is needed around now, to satisfy the increasing demands for creating the food being fed by nurse bees to the hugely increasing numbers of bee larvae now developing as the queen bee ramps up egg laying to increase the colony size for maximum work during the summer months.

Once the rain had fallen, I found large numbers of bees much closer to the hive, focused around our stone seat, beside the greenhouse, and barely 20 yards from the hive. I concluded that this was a favoured site, since firstly it was out of the chilling Easterly/Northerly winds that have been such a feature this April, and secondly it received early morning, body warming, sunshine.

Bearing in mind that these water collectors can be out at work as early as 8.00am, when the air temperature is still only 6 degrees C or lower, with wind chill; that they take on board 50% of their weight of close to zero degrees C water; and then have to fly back to the hive, keeping their flight muscles around 36 degrees C to work properly, and their ability to source water close by, becomes critical, or they’ll never make it back.

Water collectors are also remarkably faithful to a good site, once discovered, and can communicate this to other collectors with a waggle dance, in the same way that nectar foragers share information about good foraging opportunities.

It’s interesting that this critical role is allocated to ageing bees, since when not required to collect water, they just stand around idly within the hive, doing nothing. Only springing into action when the water receivers start to beg them for water. Such water collection activities can be risky, and I often find bees in the watering can, and elsewhere which have drowned. Additionally, any insect regularly returning to the same spot, and remaining fairly immobile for seconds at a time remains vulnerable to predation, which is I think what the male House sparrow, below, Passer domesticus, has worked out.

Hopefully all of this points to this hive still being in fine fettle, though I suspect swarming this year will either be very late, or non-existent, unless the weather warms up soon.

20/05/2021:

World Bee Day 2021.

I’ve just bought a new external Røde VideoMic NTG microphone to link into my standard Lumix FZ 1000 bridge camera, to enable me to capture sound better without the machinery rumble which comes from the camera’s on board mike, when using video mode. I was really pleased with the sounds I recorded in the last 2 days using this, as our bees seized a brief, slightly warmer interlude to forage, and produced the short You Tube compilation, below.

Only to discover that today is apparently World Bee Day 2021.

So this is being rushed out as a rare, brief, post.

So for all you bee lovers, who’ve never heard the sounds and sights of busy happy honey bees up close, and working incredibly hard, have a look below, but you really need to watch it in HD (you can change this in your You Tube settings box). This truly is one of nature’s marvels.

I’ve also copied some relevant notes below.

April 2021 has been record breakingly cold, dry and sunny here. Then May 2021 has been, so far, record breakingly cold, wet and windy, with many night frosts. The 3 honeybee colonies shown here have all survived the long winter of 20/21 with no treatments or artificial feeding. The ‘hives’ (one’s an old butterchurn, one’s a simple home made double box, one’s a conventional ‘National’ hive, but all have been modified and insulated with cork or bubble wrap) are rarely if ever opened.I prefer to observe the bees closely from outside, and leave them undisturbed. These clips were all taken around 1 pm on May 17th and show dramatically different levels of foraging and drone activity, on a day of sunshine, cloud, Northwesterly winds and cool temperatures, peaking around 12 degrees C. (But with perceived temperatures nearer 9 degrees C. Air pressure 1008 hPa, and humidity of 80%  – data courtesy of Ventusky.com).

So certainly not warm.

There are no commercial crops like oil seed rape nearby in our remote upland, pasture and woodland landscape, but sycamores and Malus are just beginning to flower, and there is much yellow and orange pollen being taken in from gorse, willow and dandelions.

The busiest hive’s bees now have 5 smaller ‘super’ boxes to inhabit and fill, as well as one deeper, brood box. The other two hives have a fixed, and much more limited capacity, so have no need to be working as hard. There are also differences in the bee’s genetic mix, as evidenced by the mainly dark/black bees in the last 2 smaller colonies, and possibly the ages of the queen bee in each hive.

So it’s not really a case of languishing or flourishing, just coping with their different circumstances. Each colony is about 50 metres from each other. You can see the many, much larger eyed drones, struggling to leave the busy hive, against the incoming flow of laden bees. They’re flying out to, and back from, the special ‘aerial drone congregation areas‘, where they all meet up with drones from other colonies nearby, to attempt to mate with any virgin queen bees on their nuptial flight, who’ve also flown to this small mating zone. If successful with their brief, in-flight mating attempt, the drones are permanently and instantly fatally damaged, and fall to the ground and die.

Today the bees will be working hard inside their hives all day, making the most of their provisions – they have 48 hours of incessant rain and strong winds, with nearly constant rain for the next 5 days, to look forward to.

Finally, I’m still trying to identify this species of Andrena, a solitary mining bee, which I spent ages trying to photograph, pressed belly down on the turf, as a group of 3 of them whizzed around our crazy mossy croquet lawn as I was whizzing round, cutting the ‘grass’. The bees seemed disturbed by this and were struggling a little to find the entrances now, to their underground nest mines. There are 68 different species which have been found in the UK!

Earlier in the day, I’d found this recently emerged example of a nomad bee, probably Marsham’s nomad bee, Nomada marshamella, on a flower of the stunning Rhododendron yakushimanum ‘Koichiro Wada’ AGM.

Nomad bees, of which there are 34 species in the UK, are all small, cleptoparasitic bees. They locate the mines of other solitary bee species, like the Andrena above, enter, and lay their own egg in the uncapped underground cell of the Andrena. The emerged nomad grub destroys the host’s egg or larva with its strong mandibles, and then feeds on the food stores laid down in the nest by the adult Andrena bee.

So, this nomad would probably find its way to the mossy croquet lawn, about 20 yards away, and locate the bee’s mines. The known hosts for this bee are A. scotica, A. trimmerana, and possibly,A. rosae and A. ferox. 

Which one is she?

For the most impressive photos and knowledge about the vast range of bees in the UK, do look at Steven Falk’s amazing website and Flick site. 

31/05/2021:

Looking for any signs of scout honeybees exploring the two vacant hives convinced me that a pair of Blue tits, Cyanistes caeruleus, were indeed using the roof space of one hive as a nest.But what I also discovered was that one of my nearby shaped mushrooms, barely 5 yards away, had also been occupied by Great tits, Parus major.

A surprisingly short time settling, crouched, with camera held to my eye, waiting for the bird’s return to the nests confirmed that both pairs were now feeding young.

So it was a sad moment, 2 days later, finding that the woollen mat, which I’d placed as insulation above the hives, had been pulled out by claws, or beaks, unknown. The mossy remnants of the nest clear to see, but the chicks were gone, presumed consumed.

Life is indeed sometimes short. And hard.

And then you’re dead. Reminiscent of my photography from 7 years ago of the demise of a canada goose, sitting on her nest in the lower meadow, just a day after I’d taken her photo.

 

27/06/2021:

Before my recent last brief post with a video clip of the garden, I’d posted a couple of pictures of bee swarms about which I can now elaborate. The first video clip below is of the mother hive, around 3 pm, a couple of days after after not 2, but 4 swarms had sallied forth in the space of just 6 days from Thursday May 27th. (It’s worth altering your You Tube settings to HD, to view some of the detail in these clips).

The first swarm, in theory, probably consisted of about 70% of the female worker bees from the mother hive, along with the existing “old” queen from this hive, which would clearly already have mated and therefore capable of laying  eggs, destined to become more female worker bees, immediately. The swarm was typically noisy as the bees filled the air, before settling out, initially in 4 separate clusters, about 15 metres to the West of the hive. There’s little point doing anything at this stage, it makes more sense just to observe and hope that the bees sort themselves out into a single cluster containing the queen, which is exactly what they did over the next hour or so. Watch the sequence below, which follows the path of this swarm from emergence to its re-homing, or just read the text which follows, and in particular look for the example of scout bees waggle dancing on the surface of the swarm cluster to promote a potential, already checked out new home. Within just an hour or so of the swarm having left.

By my reckoning it was a good option (very vigorous waggling), and many hundred metres or more from Gelli Uchaf – the direction of waggling indicates the direction. And notice how the waggling bee quickly recruits a few fellow scouts who pay very close attention to her, to get all this location information from her dance. In due course they’d probably fly off to formulate their own judgement of whether or not the new home was a sensible choice.

This really is quite something to watch and listen to, and having all gorged on honey before venturing forth, since they’ll have no longer have access to the stored food reserves left behind in the old hive, the bees are, in theory, in very benign mode. Thanks to a link sent to me just this week by my sister-in-law, (thanks Gritti), I can now add a bit more detail as to the how the bees manage to unite to form an impressive cluster in this way, so quickly and effectively. It’s thought to be due to a chemical pheromone which the queen bee releases, and thus highlights where she is at any given moment.

Such chemicals only have a limited ability to diffuse in the air, so recent research has shown how the worker bees closest to the queen, once they’ve detected this chemical, will amplify and direct other bees to her, by aligning themselves to point towards her, and fanning their wings. In turn, other bees further away become alerted to her behaviour, and repeat the process. The original paper outlining this discovery has some lovely videos of this process in action in an experimental setting, but sadly I found much of the text written in a jargon filled style, with complex algebra and statistical analysis as well, so click on the link only if you’re really keen!

But what should I do with this swarm? It had emerged early enough in the year to have a good chance of survival, was spotted immediately, and I’d a prepared vacant hive to put it in. How should I remove it from its position centred on a sapling tree, and more importantly encasing a double height meshed tree guard, secured in place somewhere in the middle of the cluster, with wire ties? I consulted with Fiona, and we both agreed that the best option was the radical one of chopping through the base of the sapling. It was a grown from seed Malus tschonoskii, which had never thrived and was anyway a bit close to the fence. We reckoned an early large swarm was potentially more valuable. Such is the tricky decision making process for the gardener/beekeeper!

So, I prepared a wooden Warré style box, complete with a couple of old wax filled combs and I’d stapled a few sheets of newspaper across the base of the box to prevent the bees falling straight through. I also grabbed a pair of loppers, secateurs and wire snippers, and having put on my bees suit, I approached the large cluster, and started by snipping away at some of the upper plastic tree guard, gently and carefully, to avoid clipping any bees. I levered apart the rigid, meshed plastic of the upper part of the guard, to discover a group of bees in single file were linked, and stretched, foot to foot as I carefully lifted the guard away from the cluster. This is known to happen inside recently swarmed hives, but no-one seems to know why. The top of the trunk above the cluster was severed, and the base of the trunk attacked. Sadly the ancient loppers weren’t quite up to the job, so I had to resort to a pruning saw for the last bit, but as the trunk started to topple, I grabbed the upper section and lifted, for the first time getting a idea of just how heavy a swarm of honey gorged bees can be.

Holding the severed tree over the box, I did what you’re meant to do. Shake the tree several times in a vertical plane, and somewhat miraculously, most of the bees, many still clinging to each other, dropped off the trunk and tree guard, and ended up in the box, below. Inevitably however, a lot don’t, so at this point the noise level ratchets up a notch or two, and you find yourself amongst a cloud of bees with the pitch and amplitude of their buzzing rising somewhat.

The next part of the considered plan was to carry the box over the fence and set it down on a levelling, pre-positioned base, since there’s quite a slope at this point, and cover 80 % of the top with a tea towel, leaving a small gap for the huge number of milling around bees to find their way into the darker interior, and settle onto the combs. Assuming that I’d managed to shake the queen inside with the mass of worker bees. Part one completed successfully, I left them to it, and had some lunch.

A few hours later, around tea time, the scene was much quieter, so phase two was to carry the box over to the prepared hive, remove a few more frames from the centre of the hive’s upper box, put the bee containing box over the hive, carefully tear off the stapled newspaper on one side and slide it out, and then lifting the bee containing box slightly, give another couple of vigorous shakes. Again, most of the bees, many of which had been clinging to the tea towel covering, fell down into the void in the middle of the hive. The upper box was now removed, the tea towel drawn back and the 2 frames still with many bees hanging on could be carefully lifted out, one at a time and gently lowered into the central void, which was by now a seething mass of bees. The heat and rising scent of swarming bees, a mix of geranium and lemon, was a wonderful novel sensory experience.

With these two bee covered frames now in place in the new hive, the remaining missing frames were gently lowered back in to give a full complement. Another empty, but frame filled box was added on top. The hive capping crown board and cork insulating board finished off the job, and with a still significant number of bees on the sides of the transporting box and tea towel, these were left in front of the new hive, for the bees to find there way in to join their sisters, and again (fingers crossed), their mother queen.

In outlining this process, one can appreciate how critical the pheromone communication is, to enable all the bees to quickly regroup around the queen in their new home and immediately get to work with cleaning up the old wax, and repairing damaged wax cells, so that the queen can begin egg laying as soon as possible. Although I’d had a simple spray bottle of water to hand, none was needed, as the bees behaved in a benign, if noisy, fashion throughout.

Unlike my first encounter with catching and moving a swarm in May 2019, which I’d written about here, I was surprised by how much less intimidated I was, and having been better prepared, and thought through a likely sequence of events, it all went pretty smoothly. The next 24 hours would be the key period, to assess whether the bees were happy in their new home, or exited to pastures new, as soon as possible. I was well aware a secondary swarm might be produced within the next week or so, but was still surprised that just 2 days later on Saturday 29th, at the same time of about 11.30 am, a second swarm had sallied forth and this time settled just 10 yards from the back door, entangled in a mesh of honeysuckle, willow and bramble stems at the top of the rear bank. So whilst access was feasible it meant using a ladder, and Fiona gamely offered to photograph the event, (with no bee suit, hasten to add!)

It ended up being the closest experience to the adrenaline rush one used to get from certain unusual and tricky surgical challenges, when patience, care, and a good degree of luck, were often critical to a successful outcome. Here the planned final, severing foliage cut, after minutes of peripheral twig removal, was meant to see the swarm drop into the box. In fact a third of bees did, but the cluster’s twiggy hold in the hedge stayed intact, so the remainder had to be shaken, for the sake of uniting them all as quickly as possible, before I carefully reversed down the ladder holding a fortunately much lighter cardboard box, than the wooden one I’d used for swarm 1. This also contained 2 prepared comb filled frames from the hive they were moving to, placed inside for at least some of the bees to hang onto, and give them a sense that this was familiar, bee approved territory. Again it was fascinating to see how quickly they all made their way inside the box, to join, this time,  a newly emerged, and (probably) still single, virgin queen.

Later on the swarm was re-homed in a similar fashion to swarm one with no fuss.

We were relieved to have got this drama out of the way, before our younger son and 6 grandchildren arrived 2 days later, for once coinciding with a run of mainly dry weather. However the Tuesday saw a phone call from our sheep shearer, that he wanted to visit around lunchtime, and shortly after this call, a third swarm exited and settled on another tricky fence/tree branch location just 15 yards from where Richard was due to shear the sheep.

The family sensibly left for the seaside with all this unplanned drama, leaving Fiona and I to await Richard, and then discover with relief that this third swarm had vanished just 30 minutes after I’d seen them settle into their cluster. Phew! What was a relief.

Until 2 hours later, as we still awaited Richard’s arrival I found them all milling around the hive that swarm 1 had been put into. There they would stay. The shearing went well, a successful day at the beach was reported, life seemed to be settling and then the following morning there was the by now very familiar crescendo sound of milling around bees, and a fourth cluster began to settle out at exactly the same location as that occupied initially by swarm 3.

I’d decided by then that 2 more colonies were probably sufficient, though I still had a vacant hive, so we left them where they were, expecting more photo opportunities of waggle dancing scout bees, and all headed out for lunch together. Where a predicted heavy slow moving rain storm passed through.

Returning home the cluster was still where it had been, though now noticeably tighter and in heat conservation mode as the rain continued to fall. I mulled things over for an hour or two, eventually deciding that if they were still there in late afternoon, I’d catch and rehome them, and thus give them a hopefully greater chance of survival.

So mission accomplished, with 3 swarms safely housed in a few days, some of the family even being keen to witness the amazing sight of a swarm of bees, and more critically no one was frightened or stung in the process. The mother hive has ploughed on as before, with its huge number of drones left behind from the move.

Had last month’s full super-blood moon been a possible trigger for all this activity? Who knows!

___

I’ve written before about how bees seem to love all poppy flowers, (except when we grew Meconopsis grandis – I’d never seen a bee visiting their stunning blue flowers in many years) and only for the pollen, since all poppies lack nectaries. But in spite of several oriental poppies, Papaver orientale, opening every day for the last week or two, I rarely saw that many bees in them. Perhaps I wasn’t looking at them early enough! The short clip below was taken around 8.20 a.m. on a warm morning. I don’t think I’ve ever seen bees so excited. Are they really just trying to be the first to shake the pollen from the anthers? Or are they getting some other chemical fix?

19/10/2021:

Not to be outdone, Fiona also got involved as a fall gal, three days ago.

The annual big leaf clear up began in earnest, the day before more rain was due. A major area we always tackle is the green lane, which isn’t really part of the garden, but yields an enormous crop of  leaves, collected with our small Li-ion lawnmower, and swept or blown off the large expanse of low shed roofing that houses all manner of woodstores, and other mess, beyond the perimeter of the garden. All was going well, with her insisting she should clear the roof, whilst I start on the leaf chomping. The stepladder was positioned to gain roof access, though we both forgot to risk assess the beehive just to the left of the roof above. OOps. Then, just as approached the point where she was working above me on the roof, there was a shrieked shout that she was being stung, she scrambled for the roof edge, grabbed the side of the stepladder, hurled herself onto it, the ladder fell sideways, and she landed in a tangled heap, once more in a curious, unpreventable, slow motion, right in front of me.

Having been stung on the lip, we now have a well worked out protocol. Dash inside. Remove the sting and venom sac asap, apply Medihoney with its great anti-histamine properties, massage in briefly, and apply an ice pack to slow down peripheral blood flow. This all worked well, and it was only a quarter of an hour later she commented that she hoped the lawnmower was OK.I hadn’t even noticed in the drama, that she’d actually landed sideways on this, and in the process had snapped off the cutting height lever. I suspected severe bruising, or even worse, nightmares, in the following 24 hours, but Fiona is made of sturdy stuff, and thankfully although bruising did develop, and she had a fitful sleep due to soreness on one side, she’s fine. Phew, another lucky escape.

23/01/2022:

It’s turning out to be another stonking year for our Daphne bholua bushes. I read recently that Roy Lancaster fondly remembers seeing thickets of these winter flowering shrubs up to 7 feet tall in their native setting on early plant hunting trips to the Himalaya. Eat your heart out Roy, for West Wales hillsides must be to their liking even more, since several of our clumps now tower over us, maybe to 9  to 10 feet in places, and are covered in masses of inflorescences beloved by early foraging honeybees.They just need enough sunshine, or warmth, and lack of wind to travel the short distance to and from the hive to fill up with nectar, collect a little pollen, and make it back before the inevitable rapid chilling in such low temperatures makes maintaining their flight muscles at around 36 degrees C a lost cause, and fatal hypothermia sets in.

So where the shrubs are sited isn’t just important for our senses – in fact the scent travels so far, they can be enjoyed from many parts of the garden. But I really only worked out this year – far too late – that as far as the bees are concerned, they’re most valuable if they’re located somewhere where they’ll catch any sun from around 11.30 am to 3 pm. Why? Well, if the weather is clear at this time of the year, then a frost is almost certain, and it takes until about mid morning, for the air to warm enough for the bees to sense/trial their first foraging flights. So having your flowers in glorious sunshine earlier than this, (which equates to a more open aspect to the East), may mean that if the shrubs are in more shade later on, they’re less valuable as foraging options, when the bees are actually flying.And let’s face it, apart from some early snowdrops, there really aren’t any other flower options yet in our upland garden.

So a direct, open, South or South Westerly aspect is best. Once the bees are out and about, the message clearly gets out that there are flowers to be plundered, and D. bholua scores well on this front – there are so many individual flowers on a large shrub to be raided. Literally tens of thousands. And a single flower can keep a bee occupied for many seconds.

This year, I’ve been struck by the significantly different floral characteristics of the 3 seedling D. bholua which we bought back in 2018, from Pan Global plants, when we stopped off on our snowdrop garden tour. Bought with no flowers, from a selection of variable looking, short but well grown plants, it was a risky punt, but I figured that they’d all be on their own roots and so should eventually sucker and thicket in the same way that our (fortunately) micro-propagated D. b.  ‘Jaqueline Postill'(‘JP‘) does, below.

The set of photos below show how variable the different plants now are both in terms of vigour, winter leaf retention, stem colour and flower buds.One of the great things about any range of cultivars, is the ability to extend the flowerings season. With the Daphne, there’s the added interest of scent.But the point that got me really excited with one of these novel forms, below, is both the flower colour and the number of flower buds per inflorescence.By my reckoning there are typically around 16 to 20 flowers in each cluster, compared with the more usual 10 to 14 buds on the ‘JP‘. To my nose, the scent is almost identical to ‘JP’, added to which the new stems are a wonderful glossy cinnamon colour. The overall effect with the pale rose pink flowers is, in my humble opinion, even more appealing than the classic ‘JP’. Worth naming or propagating? Maybe so, once it gets a little larger!

05/02/2022:

The warmth quickly had all the snowdrops and very first Crocus opening their petals. The honeybees, primed by just a couple of previous fleeting sortie opportunities in January, particularly onto the Daphne bholua flowers, already knew that there were plenty of flowers around to be visited. The moment was seized, and the garden was soon humming with bee activity, for most of the morning, with all of four of the garden hives in action.

Not quite out of the woods for them this winter, but so far so good.

This of course presents a dilemma for the garden display, particularly of snowdrops. One such weather window of perhaps 3 hours of good foraging weather will probably have ensured most of the early snowdrops will have been visited, and any fertile seed bearing forms will soon see their flowers going over. Many of the larger, early hybrids we grow don’t set seed, so will persist for longer. But the plus side of all this pollination is that hopefully plenty of seed will be set this year, to help fill in the gaps in our plantings, and perhaps throw up the odd interesting variant in years to come.

However, thanks to the wonderful range of cultivars and particularly Welsh origin snowdrops which we now grow, there are probably still only 20 % of the total number of bulbs which have flowered, so far. The remainder will emerge gradually over the next month, and will take us into the next wave of flowering in the weeks ahead.

20/03/2022:

Whilst we await our first lambs, within the next week or so, it’s also a time of the year to keep a check on our bee hives. One point of interest has been observing how my Swedish butter churn hive has been much more active than any of the others, both earlier in the day, and earlier in the year. I’m beginning to think that the peculiar high entrance to the hive box is a critical factor. This was created in a hurry after the conventional lower one was blocked early on, after the small bedraggled fourth swarm cluster was installed last June, and clearly created large amounts of entrance clogging debris from cleaning up the old comb. I’d realised within 24 hours of installing the bees that none were exiting the hive. So a new box and lid were fashioned from cork boards, the thin roof covering the internal frame bars was odged back half an inch, allowing the bees to exit thie hive at this point, and then find their way out through the gaps in the external cork outer layer. I feard that the colony would not make it through the winter with such a potentially drafty home, allowing any hot air to leak out. But this clearly hasn’t happened – at least not in this past generally mild winter.

The couple of images here illustrate how much warmer the dark front of the hive is than ambient temperature, below, and my guess is that because of the overhanging insulated roof sheet, warm, and possibly even scent laden air, is more easily detected by the bees at their apex entrance, than when the bees are clustered towards the top of a more conventional hive, with its only entrance at the base.

A bit of research suggests that some bee keepers are indeed convinced of the possible benefits of additional, or even exclusive top entrance holes to hives, so my plan is to add holes to the honey supers which I shall shortly be putting onto our single most conventional, insulated National hive, which seems to have come through the winter in good shape, in spite of the current colony forming from a virgin queen and the dregs of the colony left behind after the 4 swarms which emerged from it last spring.

2 other colonies look to be functioning well, but my suspicion is that a third, which I filmed entering my box as a wild swarm 2 years ago, may be failing, after fighting behaviour was noticed over a month ago, and there’s no evidence of pollen being taken in yet, in spite of significant bee activity on sunny days. Pollen collection by returning workers is always a great indication that the queen bee is laying again after a winter pause, and the colony has young larval bees to nurture.

2 days ago, I finally got round to inspecting my original German butter churn based hive, above, which was the result of my very first swarm 3 years ago, when I captured it with some drama – as below.

The colony began to fail last May, and I was certain the hive was robbed out later in the year.

But this was the first time for me to observe just how impressive a job bees can make of constructing their own system of comb, left to their own devices. The images show how extensive and fluid the comb design is, without the rigid constraints of any artificial frames, and also how it’s braced and secured both to the roof and sides of the butter churn.

My plan is to now rework this “hive” with some external cork board insulation, give it a new top and base, and probably new small top and, maybe, bottom openings and re-locate it off the ground in a suitable tree, closer to the garden, with no plans to ever harvest any honey from this particular colony. I’ll post an update when this is complete. My hope is that it might then attract a swarm into it later this year. Fingers crossed.

04/04/2022:

The garden entered April with 3 viable honeybee colonies – an increase of 1 from last year. Since all were essentially new colonies from last May (2 caught and re-homed swarms, and one taking over with a new queen in the hive from which the 4 swarms emerged), it seems that our essentially minimal intervention bees – very limited honey harvest, no treatments and no feeding – are increasing in numbers in a gradual way, which matches Thomas Seeley’s studies of what seems to happen with ‘wild’ or ‘native’ honey bee populations and colonies.

Since we’re blessed with a wonderful array of native wildflowers and suitable tree and shrub forage for honeybees locally, but only really from April onwards, one of my main interests is to always have around 3 hives which are active during winter/very early spring, so that our spring bulbs provide pollen and nectar opportunities for them. These flowers should also then get pollinated and achieve good seed set in return. The final 3 hives/boxes which are empty this spring, have now all been repositioned, and/or re-purposed with greater roof insulation and optional small top entrances.

All these repurposed, empty hives will stay blocked up and closed until we reach the early swarm season towards the end of April, when I’ll mark the entrances with my home made wax/olive oil/ citronella and geraniol mix to try to alert any local scout bees from swarms to their presence as possible future colony cavities.

Although I’ll need to keep an eye open for tree wasps, Dolichovespula sylvestris, and tree bumblebees, Bombus hypnorum, which both seem to spot their potential as good nesting sites too, and are already actively exploring some of them.

In addition, I obviously need to add birds as a potential problem.I nipped out to take a few extra photos of the three hives to include here, having finished work on them just yesterday, to discover that something has enlarged the hole in the cork which I’d carefully covered and closed with my door yesterday, and even chipped away at the paint and wood of the inner box layer. My guess is that this degree of damage is too great to have been caused by insects in just a day.Some quick thinking has meant a small slate being pushed into place to obstruct access. Will this survive further attack ? Let’s wait and see.

26/04/2022:

Another angle on attention spans, is how long it can take, simply standing and looking, and doing nothing at all, to observe many things in the natural world. Take my 3 currently unoccupied bee hives. We’re fast approaching the time of year when swarms may occur, and scout bees will appear to check out such potential new homes. But really one needs to spend at least 2 or 3 minutes in front of each one if you’re going to establish if any interest is actually yet being shown. Yesterday, 2 out of 3 had no obvious interest, the third had an occasional bee around and entering the hive. Just an hour later, numbers had risen to perhaps half a dozen.This is the only hive with any remaining honey present inside the structure, since I’d added a glass jar with residual honey, right at the top of the hive, a month ago. I suspect the bees have smelled this, and hence their interest, rather than genuine scouting for a new home. However, just standing and watching very little happen for 2 or 3 minutes is way above the average attention span now, for many, it seems. Excitement and entertainment need more constantly changing stimulatory fare….

… However, this approach changed suddenly after a curious synchronicity.

I’d just been stung on the back of my neck by a bee, (a rare event for me), after rashly breaking 3 of my cardinal rules for avoiding such incidents. Fiona had noticed that although all the hives had seized a brief weather window of real warmth, as they speedily do, one hive was really noisy on the first day when this significant warming and drop in winds allowed the bees to forage in numbers, together with a nectar flush. In a rush to capture this dramatic event, I’d stood too close in front of this hive, unprotected, in order to video them (rule number one – I’m convinced bees don’t like certain electronic devices, so beware of phones, and video filming cameras); 2 days before a full moon (rule number two – I’ve always been stung within a couple of days of a full moon); wearing my black jeans and dark blue sweatshirt (rule number 3 – bees dislike dark clothing – I normally wear very light blue colours as a practical alternative around the garden to white, and bees indeed perceive light blue as white).

Dashing inside after the sting, we swiftly instigated our sting protocol – Fiona quickly found the sting, and having failed to speedily remove it with a sliding plastic card in a scraping movement (preferable), pulled it out, to minimise the ongoing pumping of more venom into the punctured skin from the venom sac which will otherwise continue this pumping for many minutes. I washed the area down as best as I could with cold water, whilst Fiona retrieved the Medihoney, which she applied generously over my neck/skull base, before a pre-prepared cold pack of ice cubes in a plastic bag was held over the already swelling sting site, for 15 minutes. I sat down. End result? The swift removal of the sting structure, the very efficient antihistamine properties of the Medihoney cream, and the icy chill to limit venom diffusion from the area, meant that there was almost no pain, and only modest swelling, 20 minutes later.

I decided that then, mid-afternoon, would be a good time to take a break from outside work, sit down, and finish the book. So I opened the book at the point I’d left off, with Mark’s lovely photographic bookmark of one of his own catches, “Living Metal”, marking the place. My eyes quickly scanned to the top left and instantly fixed on the short sentence of 4 words on page 252.

“That must have stung”.

(Which referred to Hughes’ likely reaction to a critic’s response to the recent publication of his challenging work ‘Gaudete’.)

___

30/06/2022:

Eventually feeling like I was returning to normal, after my tussle with Omicron, I was set back a little by the first honey bee swarm of the year, which emerged from my minimal intervention modified Swedish butter churn (SBC) hive. I’d been alerted to the likelihood of a swarm, since one of the 3 vacant “hives”, below, was for the fourth time this year, being vigorously scouted by bees – previously significant numbers appeared around March 20th, April 20th, and May 14th.

The difference this time was that there were lots of scouts around the empty hive really early in the morning, and numbers built rapidly over an hour or two. It was also forecast to be the warmest day of the year so far. I’d just returned from filming all this activity for the second time that day when I heard and watched the swarm leave the hive, and quickly settle out on one of our lower row of spirally trained apple trees.

I filmed the developing cluster which seemed a very good size from such a small volume hive, and initially settled in a form rather similar to a pair of lungs. Every couple of hours I filmed the cluster again and only ever saw minimal scout dancing on the surface. But I was fairly certain that the bees scouting the empty hive had emanated from the swarm’s SBC colony, from their direction of flight. The generally held opinion is that honey bees only begin to scout for a new home, once the swarm (including in this case, the old, already mated, and egg-laying fertile queen) has left its hive and settled out a short distance away.

These bees didn’t seem to have read much of the literature, scouting, as they had, well before the swarm had even exited their mother hive. The other generally accepted rule is that bees will typically try to find a new home at least 2-300 metres from their previous home base. This vacant hive was only about 40 metres from their mother colony.

As the day moved on, with the swarm slowly coalescing into a single entity, I was faced with a difficult choice. Did I want to leave the bees where they were, and hope that they eventually headed off to the hive which I was certain they were scouting? Or try to capture the swarm and locate it in another (easier to access empty hive). It’s said that few swarms will depart from their cluster for a new home after about 5 p.m. so as we headed towards this time with no signs that the bees were getting ready to move and being reluctant to risk losing this large swarm from my most active colony, I decided to try to capture it. Although the swarm was conveniently low down, I couldn’t cut the branch off without wrecking the apple tree, so decided I’d have to try to shake the bees off – something I’ve never done before – however if you watch this video, from the “Yappy Beeman” you’ll see it’s all rather straightforward, and exciting, isn’t it ???

Thus encouraged, I just had to figure out how to position the recipient box underneath the swarm, balanced on one of my tyres, on steeply sloping ground, since I was working on my own. Eventually, I sorted it out, duct-taped some newspaper to the base of the donor hive box, spread a white sheet onto the ground and used an upturned bin to help prop the box as horizontally and centrally as I could manage beneath the cluster. I took a deep breath and gave the branch a really good shake – unlike the wacky American beekeeper in the video I was wearing gloves and a bee suit while doing this and didn’t plunge my hand into the cluster pre-shake to assess their temperament.

Of course, until you’ve tried this, it’s difficult to predict what will happen, and how hard to shake. In the end, a lot of bees fell, many into the box. Many flew into the air and milled around and an awful lot were left clinging to the branch in a sub-cluster. So a few more shakes were needed, at which point, annoyingly, the branch split longitudinally, and the generally calm nature of the bees was by now inevitably changing a little. I decided there was nothing to do now, but wait and see.

If I was lucky, having dislodged sufficient bees into this box part filled with some old frames and wax comb, they’d feel sufficiently at home, that they would all fairly quickly make their way inside into the relatively dark space, and re-form into a new cluster centred around the queen. So I placed a top board over the hive, leaving an entrance open at the front and a gap of around an inch for the bees to find their way inside. They duly and impressively quickly began to move inside and settle once more. Since I was now past the magic, no-fly time, I waited until much later before the next phase – easing the top board over the 1-inch gap, taping it in place, and then gingerly lifting the whole box, which had been laid onto a wooden tray to give additional support to the newspaper.

The final job was carrying it gingerly about 200 yards up the hill to the new location. Here I had to try to insert a few more frames into the bee-filled space to achieve, almost the complete number, and then slide out the newspaper sheets at the box’s base.

The duck, or is that duct, or even Duck tape, (click here for more of the fascinating history of this invaluable product) had worked wonderfully, but peeling it off the box was tricky when you’re wearing sweat-filled Marigold gloves!

Mission accomplished as well as I could have expected, I went inside and immediately felt exhausted again. So my recovery was set back a little, but the following morning, after an overnight shower, all was well, and the bees got to work cleaning up the old combs, orienting themselves to their new base, and foraging as quickly as possible.

This was the start of a 10 day period when a week later, a second (external origin, from the South) swarm moved into the hive that the first swarm had been exploring, followed 3 days after that by another pre-cluster/swarm surge in scout bees around the remaining empty hive. This activity preluded a second mass of bees swarming from the Swedish butter churn and settling on a pear tree, barely 5 yards from the initial swarm’s location. How very obliging of them. Since the swarms used to fill four hives last year all settled out low, I wonder if cluster location height is a heritable trait in honeybees? Or just a happy coincidence, linked to available low firm vegetation close to the mother hive?

Once again I’d spotted it just after it had flown, so was able to film it, and observe the initial lack of much real scouting waggle dancing on its surface. Also notice how the cluster becomes more compact, with the bees crammed together to conserve heat, within 80 minutes of first settling onto the branch.

Some 3 hours later though, as I walked down to turn some hay in the lower meadow, the swarm had visibly changed in appearance and the surface had obviously become much more active. Only later could I see on the computer monitor, that all the activity was created by many bees grabbing the immobile bees hanging in the sublayers of bees in the cluster, and vigorously shaking them.

Had I realised this is what was going on, I’d have got a chair and stayed put, for this shaking activity preludes the take-off of the swarm to their new home. All the bees have to warm their flight muscles to around 35 degrees C pre-flight, and since the swarm leaves together when the cluster breaks, the cool immobile hanging bees in the centre of this mass need to be warned that the departure time is approaching fast.

As it was, when I walked back up the hill, the cluster had disappeared from the tree, above, though there were quite a few bees around the entrance to the cork-insulated German butter churn (below), about 15 yards due South from this tree. I was confident that the bees were now all inside – subsequently confirmed over the next 2 days by the bees’ activity patterns from this hive. This particular hive, whose free-form comb was only visible once I’d taken the “hive” apart, below, is now (consciously) impossible for anyone but the bees to access. But once again the SBC’s bees appear to have been actively scouting and cleaning up a previously occupied home, a very short distance from their base, well before the bees actually swarmed and had formed a cluster. In this case though, perhaps because of a lack of suitable other new site options nearby, or maybe because the swarm was a smaller size and more vulnerable to chilling, the cluster only took about 4 hours to plump for this as their new home, and move in.

Two final points to note from the video footage which I’ve now uploaded above, and here on our YouTube channel –

Firstly that the cleaning up of the old comb began well before moving in, and continued for a time afterward, with wax debris being kicked /carried out by bees at an impressive rate. Of course, if a colony can find a location, and get this necessary spring cleaning underway well before moving in, it’s going to reduce the fairly long gap between the queen being able to lay eggs, and new workers then emerging to replace the aging workers which leave with the swarm and typically only live for around 6 weeks in mid-summer. They’ll also have some prepared wax cells immediately ready to receive vital nectar to cope with any poor weather just after they’ve set up their new home. Thus improving the swarm’s chance of making a viable new colony and collecting enough stores eventually to survive the winter. I now realise that the amount of cleaning debris created at this time is so significant that it can easily block an inadequate lower entrance (as indeed happened with the SBC hive last summer, within just 24 hours of me installing the swarm).

The second interesting point is that all 3 hives with these new swarms have been created with both upper and lower entrance options. The 2 which were taken up by swarms from the SBC hive have immediately begun using the upper entrance for the majority of foraging activity, with just one or two bees on guard duty at the lower entrance. This is indeed how they work at the SBC hive they left.

In contrast, the external origin swarm from elsewhere, has opted to use the lower entrance option, almost exclusively, with a guard bee lurking inside the upper entrance.

A swarm in May is worth a load of hay.

A swarm in June is worth a silver spoon.

A swarm in July isn’t worth a fly.

Enough of bees, for now, however!

__

24/07/2022:

In our absence on a blustery cool day, what will probably be the last honey bee swarm of the year, had finally decided to move on. I’d watched and filmed this small swarm, the third from the same mother hive, for over 3 days, and it had stayed put despite some of the heavy rain and cool weather in the first few days of the month. Scout bees could be seen occasionally doing waggle dances to advertise potential new homes at various points of the compass. Other bees regularly shook those deeper in the swarm cluster. But they resolutely refused to budge.

On our return from the day out, however, there was the merest trace of wax deposited on a few apple leaves to indicate where they’d been hanging for all this time.

28/09/2022:

I wonder how an alien surveying from space with an eagle, (or more likely artificial digital satellite), eye, would have interpreted all these unusual scenes of activity in the UK over the 10 day period of mourning for Queen Elizabeth II – the massed crowds lining streets for miles and miles, the queues, the processional marches, the unfamiliar attire and lack of traffic, then black limos disgorging people arriving at Westminster abbey. If their alien culture had similar customs honouring their dead, then I guess they might have deduced very easily that someone significant in this nation’s life had recently passed away. But if not, how would they account for the very dramatically altered patterns of human activity and behaviour they witnessed for these few days?

It’s a similar challenge for me observing changes in honey bee activity. One develops with time an increasing awareness and knowledge of what constitutes normal behaviour for a particular colony, or society, but still has to try to account for sudden, dramatic, alternative scenarios of activity, and if inquisitive, to deduce what it all might mean. In this regard, trying to understand how a honey bee colony works as a whole, and how individual bees perceive and behave in their environments both inside and outside the hive, are useful starting points. My decision to host colonies here in a generally hands-off manner means that external observations become even more important since it’s very rare for me to actually open a hive up.

(The two images taken below, just before we popped off for 3 nights away, almost certainly indicate the demise, for whatever reason, of the colony set up by the swarm (2) above, which I featured in June, above. The colony is being robbed out of its resources by bees from a different colony ).

There have been several recent new sources of information which have been added to my database of understanding in recent weeks. The first is the work of Lars Chittka, who has just published his first book, “The Mind of a Bee” encompassing a lifetime of experimental work with both honey bees and bumble bees. Professor Chittka is a German zoologist, based with a team he has gathered around him at Queen Mary University (QMU) in London in the Chittka lab for Bee Sensory and Behavioural Ecology. He summarises his work thus:

My research has established links between sensory physiology and learning psychology on the one hand, and evolutionary ecology on the other. Why do animals have the sensory systems they do? How do they use them in their natural foraging environment? How do cognitive-behavioural processes function in the economy of nature?

Pollinator-plant interactions have been used as a model system to study these questions. I have been particularly interested in mutual evolutionary and ecological influences of insect colour vision and flower colour signals, and insect learning and flower advertising.

In addition, I have studied bee navigation using large artificial landmarks, orientation of bees in complete darkness, as well as the question of how bees use spatial memory to navigate among several rewarded sites. Recently, I have also become interested in the evolution of cognitive capacities and communication, and the pollination biology of invasive plant species.

For those not inclined to buy his book, I’d thoroughly recommend watching this discussion, hosted by the Linnean Society of London, with some very interesting Q&As. He explores not only how bees, in many ways, are better equipped with more diverse sensory options for assessing the world around them (and in the darkness of their own colonies), than we are, but also considers how impressive they are at problem-solving and learning from others.

In addition, he touches on whether they can even be thought of as possessing a mind, or consciousness. That they can achieve this with a brain containing only about 1 million neurones, (very similar to Winnie the wasp, featured here) compared to the 86 billion that the average human brain contains, is discussed, and the extreme plasticity and interconnectivity of bee neurone connections are highlighted.

All this left me pondering just how under-utilised most of our neurones must be, for most of the time.

The other very interesting feature of the book, which only gets touched on in the video, is his deep historical knowledge of the development of bee research. Much of this goes back decades, and even centuries and recent advances in technology have enabled early theories to be tested and confirmed, in many cases. I found his discussion of how certain eminent, even Nobel prize-winning bee scientists working in Germany just before WW II, were ostracized, (mid 17th century: from the Greek ostrakizein, from ostrakon ‘shell or potsherd’ – on which names were written in voting to banish unpopular citizens), particularly chilling. I fear we’ve entered another dangerous period when free speech or thought is far too easy to shout down or suppress.

One method used in his research involved attaching tiny radio transmitters to individual bees and tracking the totality of their lifetime foraging missions. His colour images of the lifetime travels of individual bees are superb and extremely well reproduced in both his book and the talk. What this revealed is that the busiest bees can be at least 10 times more active than the least active, in terms of missions flown, or pollen and nectar collected.

In summary, I’d suggest anyone with an interest in gardening, nature or bees would enjoy this beautifully produced and clearly laid out, fascinating book. (Even if the font is quite small!)

This concept of variations in levels of activity is discussed a little more in another fascinating take on honey bee colonies. Provocatively titled, “Man-made breeding and selection vs natural reproduction and selection – why modern beekeeping will eventually send the species of honey bees into its demise”, this discussion by German Torben Schiffer, from the excellent 2021 programme of The National Honey Show (N.H.S) series of lectures, highlights how much individual bee colony’s foraging behaviour can vary. And what appears at first sight to be very lazy bees, may actually be bees that spend more time, say, on within-hive activities to the benefit of the long-term survival of the colony, rather than simply the beekeeper’s often honey-centric assessed need for vigorous foraging for nectar.

Much of this phenomenal natural variation in apparent “busyness and productivity”, should perhaps be considered by our current politicians in their drive to up the productivity of our own nation’s output. To what extent can the limited economic levers which they have to pull, really achieve anything? For sure they can, and do, tinker with societal rules, and tweak some guiding parameters for behaviour. But maybe it’s all just down to huge natural variations in individuals. Some of us are busier, more academic, more artistic, more musical, whatever. Genetic variations, or more probably their epigenetic expression really call the shots. In turn influenced by diverse environmental or even dare one think, dietary influences. We’re probably unrealistic in expecting too much from our politicians, certainly once they stray into heavy-handed state-driven edicts.

Surely the most extreme example of the huge epigenetic impact that simply a change of diet can achieve, is indeed the story of the next generation of honey bee queens. Starting out as an egg laid by the fertile queen bee within a colony, with exactly the same genetic mix as all the other thousands of female worker bees, what creates a physically and functionally completely different being is (it seems) simply the diet that the larva is fed during its very early few days. Paul Hurd’s (also of QMU) lecture at the same N.H.S event “Honey bees are what they eat: how do differing diets result in queens or workers?”, delves into the complex subject of epigenetics, and how genes and sections of DNA are switched on and off, temporarily, or permanently to amazing effect in the development and functioning of individual cells, different organ systems, and whole beings.

On the strength of Hurd’s recommendation I bought Nessa Carey’s review book on the subject – “The Epigenetics Revolution”. Like some of the reviewers featured on the link above, I struggled in sections – it’s really quite a complex subject, and maybe I’m a bit long in the tooth for my brain to cope with much of the jargon. However, it does lift the lid on how modern biology has shown that it really isn’t as simple as just our genetic make-up coding for how we’ll all end up – the impact of our diet and numerous other environmental impacts can, through modifications to how our genetic blueprint is expressed, have the most profound effects on physical form, health and function.

All of this has gone a long way towards explaining, to me, how the most vigorous and efficient of the honey bee colonies here, started out as the smallest and weakest fourth swarm from one hive last year. It’s just as well that I decided to capture it, rather than let it fly off. Their ability to fly in all weather and stretch the foraging times to the limit is amazing. They’ve retained this into their second year, and the large swarm, above, which left the colony, and which again I opted to catch and re-home not only built up quickly in their new, more conventional space but produced this additional box of pristine filled and capped honeycomb in under 2 months.

As well as this additional started extra box of a few uncapped combs, which demonstrates that with no pre-pressed wax sheets of “foundation” for them to use as a guide  – simply the outer wooden frames with the tiniest of wax strips at the top – they created all this new wax, then filled it with nectar, evaporated off the massive amount of surplus water from it, and once the honey was concentrated enough, capped it all off with pristine white wax.

Just how honey bees manage to construct their combs so precisely, has perplexed observers for centuries, and the latest scientist to delve into how they manage it, is another worker in Lars Chittka’s lab at QMU, Vince Gallo. He’s spent 4 years so far on his PhD, researching many aspects of the process, using his background and many years of experience of being both a beekeeper and a software engineer. His talk –  “How to build honey comb – a bricklayer’s perspective”, is the final one I’ll feature here, and once more it’s a fascinating story of detailed, painstaking research to understand the 120-degree angled precision of how the bees make such wonderful structures – in the dark of the hive, from small crystals of wax that they manufacture. They always get the horizontal angle of inclination of the hexagonal cylinders just right to stop all the honey dripping out! And they make the combs two-sided, with the bases of the wax cylinders which began life as rounded half spheres being re-worked into pointed structures which interlock perfectly, back to back in an offset way, with the cylinders on the other side of the comb.

Well worth a watch if you enjoy your comb honey, as I do. You’ll never undervalue it in future.

Aside from all this bee-related thought and a bit of action, the garden has benignly slid through September.

 

20/10/2022:

Along with the delights of the (garden) alchemy scene, it’s always exciting to see how active our local origin on-site honey bees still are at this time of the year, in spite of chilly mornings, and yesterday, really strong, gusty, Easterly winds up to 68 kmph. We’re heading into winter with 5 active colonies, and as always they’re often visible in numbers around the garden in late October, since we still have many nectar and pollen rich flowers for them – in the wider environment almost all native plants have finished flowering other than ivy, and more dispersed bushes of gorse flowers.

(Notice the still-around drone, above).

For years I’ve pondered the number of distinct colonies that might be optimal for a single location. It’s an issue which rarely seems to be discussed, and many commercial apiaries have multiple colonies, one next to another. There are so many variable factors affecting this – climate, weather, near-hive and further afield forage options, and length of season availability of this, as well as how well insulated the colony home structures are, and whether honey is ever removed from them. Of all these, available food is the really critical one, and many years of observation and effort in planting up the garden with appropriate insect friendly flowers, for as long a season as possible helps to support colonies, particularly at the beginning and end of each season. But I’ve come to realise that the biggest factor is availability of forage en-masse in the local landscape. We’re exceptionally fortunate in this regard in our upland, rather unkempt and patchily under-utilised agricultural scene. Given locally adapted bees which can cope with the vagaries of the weather, the abundance of nectar and pollen options trumps all issues.

However! It seems that there’s a growing tide of anti-honey bee eco-warriors who question whether keeping any honey bees is a rational thing to do because of their competitive resource exploitation as generalist foragers on the very diverse and more local populations of often more specialised pollinating insects, be that bees, flies or even butterflies. By chance, just before I was going to write this piece and include a link to another fascinating foray into this topic by Torben Schiffer, Rusty of Honeybee Suite in America wrote this excellent review of the subject, (Once folk heroes, beekeepers are under attack) which has also been published recently in the American Bee Journal. It was a shock to read that in the U.S.A. there are some anti-honey bee zealots who are now destroying honey bee colonies because of their perceived risk to indigenous, native bees and other pollinators. The tide seems to be turning against honey bee keepers, and no doubt similar action might begin to occur elsewhere.

(See the video below – “How modern beekeeping enhances nectar competition and contributes to species extinction of wild pollinators”.)

My own anecdotal observations suggest no significant drop off (yet?) in numbers of bumble bees or other pollinators, other than the significant cyclical changes which seem to happen with many insect forms. but then as regular readers will know, “my” on-site colonies are largely left to their own devices, in small well insulated boxes, with minimal honey harvested. However this is an interesting area of debate which it’s worth thinking about, and monitoring. The current number of colonies now dotted around the garden is definitely my maximum, which I expect will fluctuate as seasons and years dictate.

Just now, numbers of honey bees in each colony will have fallen dramatically from their summer peak, and even the physiology of the individual worker bees changes as autumn approaches. This is not the time for another lengthy discussion on “winter bees” which have to survive for many months, rather than the few weeks of the typical summer honey bee, but the availability of diverse pollen in autumn is really critical for allowing healthy winter bee larvae to develop, and hence adult winter bees to be produced. There’s a great summary of the situation on the excellent “The Apiarist” blog. Or watch this – “Hard Working Bees Need Pollen!” by Heather Mattila

 

This year, a couple of late-in-the-season garden visitors has meant me delaying the annual cut-back, as well as continuing to dead-head the late season pollen stalwarts in the garden – particularly Dahlia merckii, and Anemone japonica – and this is a benign job I may repeat in future years, with my increasing awareness of how critical this is for honey bee nutrition as winter approaches.

( A quite rare, in our hives, non-black honey bee, above).

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20/01/2023: 

I did enjoy a wonderful moment, late morning on one of the freezing but sunny days when walking past one of our Daphne bholua with my beanie pulled down. I was convinced I heard buzzing. Sure enough, I turned and spotted a dark honey bee. Checking on our most hardy honey bee colony nearby, I was amazed to find a huge amount of active foraging/flying activity, just feet from the minus 7 degrees registered on the frozen croquet lawn surface.

The bees clearly have an innate ability to be able to detect and benefit from such insolation. Even past 3 p.m. when the sun was rapidly falling, and not simply be influenced by actual air temperature, when deciding whether to risk a foraging trip from which they might not return to base because of hypothermia. Bear in mind that my 70 KG body was wrapped up in multiple layers to face the weather whilst taking these photos. The bees, roughly 120 mg body weight or about half a million times lighter than me, can manage just a few minutes of honey fuelled flying at most, before their core thoracic temperature of around 34 degrees, (necessary for effective flight muscle activity) will drop away, and they’re doomed.

Our really hardy bees have shown once again that they’re capable of outperforming all the often quoted texts that imply they rarely forage in temperatures below 10 degrees C. See below for a brief video clip.

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10/04/2023:

I made a short YouTube to capture the state of play with the 5 honey bee colonies which went into this challenging past winter with its mix of some severe cold snaps, late spring, and frequent rain. It’s really pleasing that with no interventions or feeding from me, all 5 seem to have made it into spring, and reached what I always see as the critical moment when the pussy/goat willows, Salix caprea, in the surrounding landscape start to provide their bountiful nectar and pollen. Particularly since the two severe cold snaps we had in December and January were bad enough to take out all the Hebes growing here – something that’s never happened before. Cut back to twiggy balls, I’ll wait to see if they shoot again. In the wider landscape, the dandelions and violets are also just beginning to bloom, so the worst is past. The garden’s flowers are no longer such critical food sources for them.

There’s a very interesting lecture from the recent “Learning From the Bees” 2023 international conference, by Gareth John, titled “The Hardest Thing to see is what is really there.” I include this link not just because Gareth describes some interesting observations he’s made about bees creating and using their own upper entrances to hives. This is something I’ve also discovered by chance with “my” colonies”. But also for his philosophical discussion of how we’re limited by our thoughts and words in perceiving and then attempting to interpret natural events from a purely human point of view. The human engineer’s assessment of why his bees have made an upper opening is that the honey bees have got it wrong. Warm air MUST travel in at the base of the hive, and exit through the top. That’s what happens with hot air – it rises. Yet Gareth observes that this isn’t what actually happens in such hives – the bees force the air the other way, downwards through the hive, and attempts to ask why this might be. Well worth a read, even if you’re not that interested in honey bees.

If only to confirm how little we really understand about natural phenomena.

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October 23rd 2023:

We even had 2 late visits by a Hummingbird hawk-moth, Macroglossum stellatarum, onto the terrace garden to sip nectar from our last few hybrid Salvia hyans – a wonderful long flowering perennial with us which is bone hardy growing in the very poor substrate of our terrace. At last, I’ve collected decent seeds and should have some young plants next year.

Some of our seasonal sheep tasks are complete – late weaning of lambs, the annual goodbye to ewes too old, and ram lamb too young, and the arrival of a splendidly horned yearling who after raddling with margarine and yellow powder pigment swiftly got to work.

The other necessity is double ear tagging those sheep who’ve lost their microchip tags. Ideally, I’d do this, but given Fiona’s dodgy knees, the sheep catching and holding falls to me for this task, so she has to do the deed and clip the tags through the sheep’s ears – one on each side, such is the fussy requirement. This really isn’t a nice job, given that our sheep are benign and not used to any form of herding or aggression from us. I sympathise, since any trauma inflicted on animals isn’t an easy thing for anyone, yet as in many scenarios, it’s one where speed and confidence are the order of the day.

I remembered this when at last I seized the moment to take off supers from the 2 honey bee hives which are designed to allow me to do this. This is very late in the year to do such a thing, but my choice of warm, dry days with little wind and time distanced from a full moon, have been few and far between this autumn. The bees are still left with an extra box, but since I only open the hive to add the additional super box in April, and then remove it later, the bees had made a very good job of sticking everything together in the interim, using propolis – a complex compound they craft from gathered plant resins.

Although I now know what I need to do, it’s a curiously special moment. I’m in awe of the bees’ ability to thrive in our wet climate, but still find myself psyching up to get on and do it. I’ve been having a go at writing a piece to try to capture this experience, although words or images are a very poor substitute for actually standing, suited, beside me and quietly taking it all in.

 

The Theft

 

You couldn’t (wouldn’t?) stand beside me.

 

These words lie. Flat, upon this page

Can’t capture angst, anticipated rage.

For when, at last, October’s lowering sun,

dropped wind and quartered, waxing moon

conspired to make a perfect time.

Prepared and planned, geared up –

a thief in the day, set for stealing, I’m ready.

 

The double gloves, the beige veiled suit

implausible deceits of confidence.

Within, expectant mood and teatime warmth

prevail, spill sweat-spoiled scented fear.

Calm. Quiet. Care. My silent mantra  as I

knife-edge crack, each corner forced, gently, gently.

The merest seal-slit breach – that complex smell,

that insulated rising bzzzzz, seep out.

 

 

Familiar hints – how will they bee?

 

Slow-work the stainless blade, lever raise

each cedar side, resin-glued, stuck fast.

First sense that weight. Unseen labours flown,

beyond mere work – a half-year’s captured bounty.

This bee town’s toil and craft and skill.

 

Arms held flexed, I grip diagonal corners,

push-pull and gently turn – the box rotates.

I feel the hidden trauma, tears.

Now deep breath lift, scene-scan as

uncorked fizz, lit bees pour up and over, out.

No time to stand and stare – the dripping

liquid gold, the ragged, sheared brace comb.

 

Moria’s horde begins to fill the air, silence spoiled.

Set down with super human strain,

this safe, now cracked, is laid askew on milkcrate rim

beside the ruptured hive. My readied eke,

a clever clearing board, crushed jagged oozing wax.

The super’s lifted back, the lid’s replaced. Retreat.

 

Cool-cruel dawn awaits. The thief returns,

less stressed, expectant, prizes super’s lid.

Glimpses, fast, nine capped-full frames.

Marvelously free of female forms.

They’ve traced her scent, left through central,

rough-drilled hole, and cunning rhomboid trap

to join their queen. I close the hive and,

lug the dripping super, storws bound.

Scout-safe, secure – a resting space.

 

Another dawn, one final trip,

the eke’s removed and left encrusted,

propped beside the hive. Bee gaggle clings,

intent on salvage restoration.

Ignores the thief, the board is cleaned –

by night no lick of honey’s left.

The colony can calm once more.

 

No smoke, no fire, no domesticity.

A raid, a speedy smash and grab.

 

Worth it? Fair? Honeyed wax, not just reward,

Not just reward. Thrice daily, teaspoon prompt:

my lowly status in this special place.

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January 29th 2024:

It’s always a time of year when I get excited by the daily opening of increasing numbers of late winter flowers, and even more so by seeing signs of life from the honey bee colonies we host around the property – all housed in cork-insulated simple structures. On any suitable day, typically between about 11.30 am and 3.00 pm, I’ll make a quick check of flowers and hives to see if there are signs of activity. This year we went into winter with 4 out of 6 available boxes, with active colonies. But this January has, to date, only had 3 days with potentially suitable foraging conditions. Perceived temperature, wind, and just as importantly direct sunlight are critical in allowing the bees to fly out, and return safely.

4 days ago we had the best conditions so far this year, with sunshine and relatively light winds, so that although the perceived temperature was only about 5.5 degrees C, all the snowdrop flowers began to open their outer segments, as did the first Crocus. It’s amazing how quickly scouts inside a well-insulated box will detect this change in external conditions, and once a few intrepid workers have ventured forth and returned, the message gets around. So I seized the moment and got into the garden to record all this, and was amazed to see for the first time, an overwintered bumblebee queen joining in with the honey bees and venturing forth. This is a good 2 weeks earlier than I’ve ever witnessed before, up here. Not only that, but it was systematically visiting snowdrop flowers. Something I’ve very rarely seen in all my years of studying snowdrop and bee interactions.

As the wind picked up, it was clear that the honey bees stayed much longer inside individual flowers, often hanging on by a single talon, while they groomed and collected the pollen grains. And in the brisk winds, probably still being a bit shaky after weeks cooped up, several lost their grip and fell vertically from the flowers. Quite a contrast with the bigger, hairier, bumblebee which had more of a smash-and-grab approach, speedily flitting from flower to flower.

One of the other things I always check for around now is whether any of the bees are taking pollen into the hive – always a sure sign that the queen bee is beginning to start laying eggs again, after a winter pause. The bees will need plenty of pollen as a food source to feed the young bee larvae which hatch from their eggs after just a few days. Although I could see a few bees actively collecting snowdrop pollen in the garden, which hives were they coming from? Always difficult to spot with the naked eye, when bees can be flying in at great speed. Pausing video clips helps a great deal in this regard. However, by January 28th, at least 2 of the colonies were taking pollen inside. This is about a week earlier than I’d noticed last year.

I’d wandered up to check activity from the (usually) most vigorous colony behind the hay shed and was standing well wrapped up in a very gusty cold wind when there was a blur of movement from the base of the fence between me and the hive. In an instant, a male sparrowhawk flew up, perched on the fence post to the left of this photo, and just sat there. Needless to say, I hadn’t taken my camera with me. And perhaps that’s just as well since swinging the lens up would probably have startled it. As it was, I stood, fixed and fixated, barely 3 metres from this beautiful bird, which seemed to completely ignore me in my tatty thick green pullover and brown beanie.

It behaved as the perfect criminal. On edge, hyper-alert. Yellow, piercing bright-eye glancing, quickly, this way and that. Scanning its familiar territory. Its marvellous flecked breast framed with russet chest feathers. Enough time, as with my close encounter with a squirrel, twelve years ago, for me to contemplate how this scene was going to end. And wonder, if only…

Then in the most agile duck and dive, it dropped from the post, dipped into a right-angle dive and flew West, then banked behind the yews and turned to follow the hedge line, South. Confirmation, if needed, of the likely culprit for the crime scene of the poor Robin’s demise, which I featured last time.

It was only on the walk back inside that I realised that I hadn’t seen any dunnocks as I’d walked across the yard and up to the croquet lawn.

Ever since the big oak had dropped its mast crop of acorns, last autumn, 2 or 3 dunnocks have been ever-present low-level companions, in this part of the garden. Completely unfazed by my presence, they’ve taken over from robins this year. My guess is that the sparrowhawk had already struck that morning, and the small birds were all hunkered down in the safety of thickets or hedges.

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A slightly warmer day had found me once more up amidst the daffodils taking photos and measurements of some of the latest cultivars to open. I spotted a small, pristine solitary mining bee resting up on a daffodil flower. Then another. Then two more. They were, if not everywhere, then certainly in large numbers and were so unphased by me that I assume they must have all emerged in the sunshine and relative warmth that morning. I even had to rescue two which had fallen into a small pool of rainwater trapped in one of the biomass pellet bags containing daffodils waiting to be planted out. I had a go at identifying the bees, but gave up – probably an Andrena species.

We lifted the daffodils in the bags last year, splitting overcrowded clumps and it’ll soon be time to empty the bags, split the bulbs and plant them into newly prepared patches to enhance the display next year. This will be quite a task, since after an hour of effort, with Willam’s help, lugging them into place, I counted we have over 80 bags to process. That’s a lot of bulbs.

This task was in addition to a serious effort by W and I to sort out aberrant daffodils in this Malus/Sorbus copse. Since the medium-term plan is to create a comparative display showcasing different cultivars in clumps, the effect is spoiled if a few ‘wrong ‘uns’ are lurking amidst the uniformity of one form. To help with this tedious job, which continued over several weeks as more flowers opened and I discovered more imposters, I bought a new spade!

Described as a Spear and Jackson ‘tub draining tool‘ it looked to have the sort of profile I wanted. It’s proved to be a boon, since it’s narrow, curved, heavy and deep, which means it can get in amongst adjacent bulbs and can be dug in with arm effort only, rather than having to use your foot and knee flexion to drive the spade into the ground – far more awkward in a group of flowering bulbs.

The spade depth has allowed me to lift all except one bulb in a plug of turf without digging too shallowly and damaging too many bulb roots. A similarly shaped circular plug of turf can also easily be removed from the new planting spot, and the lifted daff plonked in with minimal disruption. In years to come as clumps become crowded, this spade will also prove invaluable for lifting and splitting, I think. This issue is never much of a problem with snowdrops since the bulbs are invariably smaller and nearer the surface.

The daffodils have been a delight in this possibly record-breakingly gloomy April.

This is my very variable sequence of rainfall and PV inverter totals, a great guide to light levels, since 2014:

136.9mm – N/A

34mm – 519 KWH

108mm – 394 KWH

47mm – 410 KWH

158mm – 346 KWH

94mm – 416KWH

50mm – 498 KWH

19mm – 522 KWH

53mm – 420 KWH

111mm – 393 KWH.

2024:  241 mm – 301 KWH – a record high, a record low!

Finding so many solitary bees very close to one of our honey bee colonies was a particular delight since it’s often claimed that honey bees negatively impact other solitary bee populations. Spot the differences below – the honey bee is the last image. The only bee, apart from bumblebees, in the UK, with specially adapted pollen collecting baskets, or corbicula, on the hind leg.

A few days later I located a colony of a different larger mining bee in a small area to the South of a few birch trees in our lower meadow. And an ashy mining bee in our upper hay meadow. They seem to be thriving, along with the even smaller species which survive amongst our cobbled paths, and also became active for the first time this year, over the last 10 days.

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Just before the full moon this month there was a brief weather window when I reckoned I could safely open the honey bee colonies I aim to take a box of comb honey from later in the year. With temperatures barely due to hit 13 degrees C and a brisk North/North Easterly wind, I knew I had to plan carefully and be as quick as possible since any chilling of larval ‘brood’ bees can impact their survival, or long-term health once they emerge as adult bees.

Given the dreadful weather we’ve had, I opted to add a single saved frame of capped comb honey (taken from their hive last autumn) into the centre of the insulated box of empty frames, which I was going to add – for the bees to, hopefully, fill through the summer.  The empty frames obviously require new comb to be built out first by the bees, before any collected nectar can be stored, which all takes time and effort for them. The honey-filled frame should also help to encourage the bees into this new empty space above their colony, and get working, plus be an additional food source should (as has turned out) the weather stays miserably poor for foraging for many more days. The task was carried out on consecutive days on the two hives which I choose to manage in this way, and I’m grateful to our dear friend and garden visitor on the day, Los Hammerton, for taking and allowing me to include some of the photos below which he took of me doing this.

I’d worked out that if the ‘super’ box to be added (stored in a cool outbuilding over winter) is put into the sun-warmed car for a couple of hours, then the super, comb and frames will get pre-warmed to a temperature closer to the inside of the hive (around 36 degrees C). I also did some of the preparatory work of lifting off outer weights and layers from the hive, before I carried up the new box. This had a simple tea towel cover on top, to keep as much warmth in, as the addition was made as swiftly of possible. With no pre-smoking of the bees. Both hives were therefore minimally disrupted.

Los commented that as I prised and lifted off the hive cover, he could actually see from his standpoint a heat shimmer of warm air rising from the colony. Something that working very close to the bees, I’ve never noticed, but perhaps also a reflection of the large temperature difference between internal and external air, during this very cool spring.

Why not wait a bit longer, until better weather opportunities present? Mainly because there are no hints of this any time soon on medium term forecasts, and many of the high value nectar forage sources like Malus and Acer blossoms are about to begin to open.

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18/05/2024:

Apart from excessive gazing into Rhododendron flowers’ throats, the honey bees have also grabbed my attention over the last 10 days. The two hives vacant since last autumn have, to the best of my observation, had no visits from scouts at all this year: in marked contrast to previous years, when the odd one or two scouts, or even masses, have begun to appear from early March onwards, in fits and starts.

A big change with the occupied hives was observed on the first warm sunny day in early May, when the 3 most vigorous colonies were all bringing in pollen in several colour shades, in large quantities.

This got me thinking about making a rough estimate of the percentage of incoming bees carrying pollen as part of my file name for the video clips of each colony which I keep as a record of activity. Along with percentages of drones visible.

For a ‘beekeeper’ who chooses not to open colonies, the percentage of pollen-carrying foragers is possibly the best guide to how many new bee larvae (and by extension, how many eggs have been laid by the queen), are inside the colony.

Within a couple of days of this burst of activity, I noticed the very few first scout bees around one empty hive. Within just 36 hours, the scene was transformed with huge numbers and activity.

I should add that I’d worked on both these empty ‘hives’ in the last two weeks of April, anticipating the upcoming swarm season. I left the main body of the hive untouched, but noticed, to my surprise that in both colonies, an upper box containing 6 x 750ml glass jars had been built out with beeswax comb. The last time I’d checked these boxes when the hives were occupied, the bees had (after 18 months) completely ignored the empty spaces which these jars provided.

I’m guessing that the wax comb may well have been filled with honey too, but this had been removed by robber bees when both colonies failed last year. Inside many of the jars, all I’d found were several large slugs, and the comb was obviously quite mouldy. I’d removed the slugs from between the wax combs with a skewer(!) but otherwise left them alone, and re-assembled the hive, adding extra foil-backed bubble wrap, to try to aid heat retention in this above-colony space.

Simultaneous to this 24 hours of manic activity, bees began to leave the most active colony and ‘beard’ on the front of the hive. I’d already increased ventilation options for this colony by opening a top vent. But still the bees hung out in ever greater numbers, as the sunshine and temperatures increased for 3 days, to around just 20 degrees C.

Such bearding can be a prelude to swarming, as the colony becomes overcrowded, or simply an epigenetic behavioural strategy by the bees to remove some of their bodies, and thus extra metabolic activity and heat production, from inside the hive to keep the hive’s temperature sufficiently low. Which is vital to optimise larval bee development, and avoid issues with comb wax softening.

I even staked out the empty hive with a chair, sat and watched expecting a swarm to fly in that afternoon.

Except nothing happened, and I was pretty certain that I hadn’t missed the actual moment of a swarm flying in, since none of the bees was exhibiting the characteristic tail-in-the-air behaviour when they release Nasunov pheromone to guide straggler bees to the new home’s site entrance.

The following day more bees were appearing at the other empty hive, above, in large numbers, and diminishing in numbers at the first empty box. Which I also took as confirmation that a swarm hadn’t moved in. Yet.

All this came to an abrupt halt when the following day, temperatures fell dramatically and we had a day of rain and gloom. No bees appeared at either empty box, yet still, despite the wet and cold, a significant beard hung from the active colony.

Then the weather warmed again, and gradually bees returned, checking out the empty two boxes. I’m still pretty certain that a swarm hasn’t moved into either empty hive yet. So what on earth is going on? As I’ve speculated before, I reckon that the bees are aware that both empty boxes represent prime real estate for a new home, albeit both need ‘modernisation and a thorough clean out’. So my guess is that they’re staking claims on the vacant pads, and probably beginning the clean-up in anticipation of a later move.

There’s certainly evidence of significant fighting on the threshold/landing board. This suggests that bees from more than one existing colony would like to make this their new home. To date, all this activity has continued now for well over a week.

Time will tell what happens.

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31/05/2024:

We’re very used to bee and insect noise, as well as constant movement in this part of the garden. Particularly at this time of the year, with Cotoneasters, Nectaroscordum, Allium and Aquilegia flowers in profusion, so it might have been a minute or two before we both simultaneously picked up on a louder buzzing coming from the edge of the terrace garden, beneath the hawthorn tree.

By the time I’d grabbed the camera from upstairs the air of the terrace was filling with bees.

A fantastic opportunity to experience the natural marvel that is a swarm of honey bees relocating to a new home. After perhaps just 15 minutes, the terrace was growing quieter, so I moved to somewhere closer to their focus of activity, where I could view the front of the Swedish butter churn hive, located below the hawthorn.

Sure enough, the front of the hive was completely covered with bees which were already beginning to march down the front of the hive, and in through the 2 new holes I’d created in the lower front of the hive: after realising my design flaws which the previous colony successfully put up with for their 2 years in this space.

Within another 15 minutes, the drama was over, and the casual observer may not have noticed anything had changed, from the scene the day before. A real treat for us both to have witnessed this, the natural spring reproductive drama of the honey bee colony, uninhibited by human interventions.

Within a couple of days, it’s obvious that the bee behaviour is very different now around the entrance – much more purposeful foraging with bees entering and leaving the colony at speed, flying up, and South East, before mainly doing sharp right angled turns as they climb higher and head off to forage, mainly due North.

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03/08/2024:

There are probably multiple reasons for this year’s apparent decline in insect numbers, but even in our rural location with the vibrant wildflower meadows, and hedge banks currently brimming with bramble flowers and willowherbs, there seem to be far fewer insects than normal. Particularly few hoverflies of any description. Interestingly there are some exceptions – our 6 zero/minimal intervention honey bee colonies all seem to be very active, and our poor sheep have been really bothered again this year with head flies. A curse for them, since the irritation causes them to rub their eyes and face, since fly swatting clearly isn’t an option for them.

We’re very reluctant to use any insecticides on them, but this year have had to apply a topical permethrin based product to the worst affected, and bring them inside into a lambing pen until their self-inflicted trauma resolves, and the peak of such fly numbers declines. Interestingly, it’s 3 of our older ewes which are affected worst. Just as we react more now to horsefly and spider bites – the picture above shows how I reacted (worryingly) in early July within 24 hours of  (but always unseen culprit) small double puncture, probably spider bites –  with significant erythema and oedema. We suspect that repeated exposure over several years, might be triggering a heightened immune response in some of our sheep.

One plant which highlights this apparent dearth of insects well is illustrated in these photos. They show the largely empty pitcher vessels on the few Sarracenia plants we have around the house and upper pond. We bought a selection years ago for a potential trial which our older son was hoping to carry out on using biological control for nuisance flies around sewage treatment plants. The trial never got off the ground, so we kept a few plants close to the house, to rotate inside the kitchen for fly control over the late spring and summer. By now, the pitchers are usually stuffed with all manner of moths, flies, wasps and sadly on occasion bumblebees. This year many pitchers are completely empty, and in the others, there are just a few insects very low down in the juices, and difficult to get the camera to focus on.

The days of us needing to change fly papers inside the kitchen two or three times during a summer, are long gone too. We’ve had no large flies this year, just a couple of small ones, with no indoor Sarracenia or fly paper needed.

Lest you all think it’s just a problem around here, and maybe even made worse by us owning these non-native plants, listen to what Professor Dave Goulson, a fellow Adams Grammar School alumni, said on this topic at the beginning of July.

Now we’re 3 weeks later than the date Goulson posted this Youtube, the temperatures have risen, and there’s still no sign of any improvement in numbers. You could even think of checking out the long term citizen science data collection project that BugLife has been running for nearly 20 years. It shows a decline in insect numbers in Wales, over that 20 year period, of about 79%. No insects, and any insect eating bird or mammal is clearly going to have problems. Pollination of many plants, including many human food crops will also be affected. As the Buglife strapline of their mission statement simply puts it:

Saving the small things that run the planet.

We’ve noticed over many years, that insect numbers do fluctuate dramatically from one year to the next, but surely the BugLife data, and the disappearance of once widespread birds from our landscapes look awfully like a sign of an impending ecosystem collapse. Whether it’s a reversible one, in any of our lifetimes may well be determined by the collective judgement calls and behavioural responses of the totality of the Homo flagrans population in the years ahead.

With one of my old man scientist’s hats on, I’m certainly curious as to what might be causing such an apparently widespread insect population crash. Habitat loss – probably a factor. Excessive use of (mainly) agricultural pesticides and herbicides? Again a likely factor in many parts of the world. Weather, and climate will likely be playing some role. And if so, what are the specific mechanisms? Why are our honey bees doing so well? Obviously they can better survive the very different weather we’re now experiencing in their well insulated boxes, much better than many solitary free-living insects with honey stores to get them through persistently inclement flying conditions.

Might more honey bees in the environment be playing a competitive adverse role? Possibly, but many insect types don’t compete for food resources with honey bees. (The upcoming HoneyBeeWatch symposium might delve into this topic in a little more detail). It certainly can’t be excessive predation of insects, since many of the daytime predatory bird numbers have evidently declined. Have bat numbers increased? It seems unlikely, even given the considerable resources devoted to their preservation. Could the numberplate splatter survey data indicate that increased transportation over recent years has gradually worn insect population numbers down?

For anyone interested in this topic, as I clearly am, this review article, “Insect decline in the Anthropocene: Death by a thousand cuts – David L. Wagner, Eliza M. Grames, Matthew L. Forister, and David Stopak” (and other papers published in the same special feature) might prove to be an interesting starting point for further enquiry.

Sadly for all our technological progress and scientific endeavour in recent decades, we’ve precious little long term data to come to firm conclusions about what’s really going on with insect declines. We’ve stupidly not been paying enough attention to what many who live in rural areas have noticed for ages, in a vague “it’s not how things used to be” way.

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10/08/2024:

After the excitement of putting together my YouTube of what I thought were honey bees chasing a (very rare) day flying bat, I sent the video link to a number of contacts across the honey bee and wider bee world, and awaited feedback. Like a swarm cluster sending out scouts to locate a potential new home, I didn’t have long to wait. The reports came buzzing back. It seems beekeepers have acquired many of the efficient and enquiring traits of their beloved charges.

Meanwhile, mulling over the thought that if these bees (which I originally suspected might have been male, stingless drones) had been duped into chasing this dark object flying through the sky (the bat), since they’re primed for sexual encounters up there with virgin honey bee queens, maybe they’d chase birds as well? ( I should add that when I came up with this, my second hypothesis that the bees I’d observed might be drones, quick off the mark for aerial sex with a bat, and ran it past Fiona, she did what she often does. Laughed in derision).

Undeterred, I googled “honey bees chasing birds”, and came up with lots of options for bats chasing bees, but also this one, of bees chasing a (mechanical) aerial drone. With its very eye catching creative montage complete with colour cues to attract me, and click it open! (Well done, Adam)

I watched his video, the story and pictures he showed of his bee splattered drone – once Adam had guided it back to the ground. I also noticed, as one of his other comment contributors had, that most of the bees in the still images were drones, with their huge eyes. So maybe I was on the right track thinking my bat chasing bees were drones?. But then what about all the stings on the aerial drone, when it was recovered, which Adam described?

The other slightly disconcerting feature of Adam’s story was how many other drone flyers had had similar experiences – multiple impacts from a “swarm of bees” attacking the drone. At least I now knew that acquiring a drone, or even hiring a drone operator to try to track drones on their flights out to the aerial drone congregation areas (DCA’s) wasn’t a sensible idea! Something I’d been toying with for a while.

Within a few days a number of far more experienced bee keepers than me had volunteered comments:

Firstly no one seems to have seen or be aware of such a bee/bat interaction before.

Secondly I had comments that honey bees have very poor auditory perception so that they’d be unlikely to ‘hear’ the bat, or respond to its prey/navigational echolocation clicking type sounds.

Thirdly, apparently drones are attracted to locations with strong thermal air currents and many people have tried to categorise common features in the landscape which might define DCA’s. There’s some insight into drone behaviour and their importance in free living honey bee biology and their mating with virgin queens in the following two excellent lectures by Dr. David Tarpy, and the late Kim Flottum from the archive of the wonderful National Honey Show:

Plus another great video with more details by Dr. Larry J. Connor, on “Secrets of Drone congregation areas”, which you’ll need to click on here to watch:

There’s great insight in Connor’s lecture into German research on drone congregation areas: just how many drones are produced by colonies; how many are needed in an area to make viable DCAs; and how the apparently crazy and risky concept of bees massing high in the sky away from their homes, (roughly 25% of queens never return from their mating flights) with multiple matings of the virgin queen bees is vital to preventing in-breeding. A real problem leading to consequent lack of vigour within the colony, which is a point that David Tarpy’s talk also covers very well.

After thinking about this more, it occurred to me that all the slate roofs, dark limestone chippings, and terrace slabs of the environment around our house, buildings and yard would indeed, at least on a part sunny day, create air temperatures a few degrees higher than the surrounding ambient temperatures over pasture. There’s also an interesting sort of landscape dividing line with the land dropping away below the house and yard; rising sharply above it, and a fairly continuous line of trees and buildings along the contour that the house and yard sit on. The annotated satellite view (from many years ago) shows the layout of Hives, buildings and the yard where most of the Bat footage was taken. And a scale to illustrate approximate distances between colonies.

One responder wondered if the bees were instead tree bumblebees, Bombus hypnorum, which will aggressively defend their nests.

Finally today, a comment from Professor Tom Seeley, who is a distinguished lifelong researcher in the honey bee world. He agreed with my thought that he sees 2 drones tracking the bat in one of the clips. But also he added that on one occasion he’d used a slingshot to fire a pebble into a known DCA and watched drone honey bees zoom in on it from behind in an attempt to mate with it! I’ve just found this new interview with Professor Seeley, about his latest book, (Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz Runners) which gives you a great insight into what a wonderful and influential writer and scientist he is.

So I’m really grateful to everyone (Andrew M, Paul H, Dave G, Steve R, Ann C and thanks to Ann passing my email on, to Tom S) for the time they’ve spent on this, and their comments. In due course I might try to create another short video with just the slowed down bee-bat interactions. It’s a lengthy editing process and it has occurred to me that interpreting such poor quality images, where I’d been trying to concentrate on keeping the bat centre frame, without any awareness of honey bees drifting in and out of the focal plane is a bit like trying to interpret a 3D image from a 2D Xray. Except that the image was a moving video, and not a still, and the bees are tiny specks on the screen!

My other final thought is that at least it gives me a challenge for next year, once the drones become really active again – buy myself a catapult and get Fiona to fire a few pebbles high above the yard, to see what happens, whilst I have the camera set up on a tripod and focused in the right plane to capture some clearer footage. Or not, if the whole episode was a one-off.

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16/10/2024:

I was prompted to write the short piece below about this year’s honey harvesting session after reading the recent post on the Oxford Natural Beekeeping Forum by Paul Honingman. I was also excited to learn that Paul is about to publish his own significant book, The Observant Beekeeper, which I can’t wait to get my hands on. The group is always a mine of fascinating information for anyone interested in honey bees, and particularly about how to look after them in a more apicentric way.

I notice that as in 2023 it was once again early October before a warmish, dry day with light winds coincided with a period some distance from a full moon. I repeated my routine from last year.

Firstly, adding a rhombus shaped bee excluder eke below the single super on each of the cork insulated National hives around 2.30 pm when temperatures were peaking. Surprisingly, the ‘hayshed’ hive still seemed to have a lot of incoming drone activity, even this late in the year. It requires quite a bit of gentle levering with the hive tool, and rotation of the super box, since the super hasn’t been touched since mid-April, when it was first added to each colony. So the bees have stuck everything together really well with wax and propolis. (Photo – Los Hammerton with thanks!) 

The following morning, around 8.30 am when it was still quite chilly, the supers were removed. In each case this year, there were almost no bees remaining on the combs – none in 1 super, 2 in the other. The cover board and lid were replaced onto the excluder, and since the excluder has only a tiny hole, minimal heat would be lost doing this second hive ‘opening’.

Phase 3 involved returning to the hive, and removing the excluder around 3.00 pm the same afternoon, when once more temperatures will be near their peak. Then, as quickly as possible, replacing the crown (top board) and associated layers of waterproof GRP, (old cut down dog kennel), insulating cork and heavy timbers on top. This is probably the most disruptive phase, and since I never use any smoke before opening the hive, I gave the bees on the tops of the frames a very light spray with some tepid water. There’s always a fair bit of torn wax and loose liquid honey from disrupting the connections the bees had formed between the super and box beneath. And the bees are hard at work cleaning this up.

The removed supers were taken into a secure well sealed outbuilding for a couple of days, then brought inside for honey harvesting. Years ago we had a garden visitor who told us that she always bought honeycomb, and ate it whole – wax and all, since she’d heard that it was recommended in Russia for helping with respiratory problems. Her son had very bad asthmatic attacks, and she’d found it helped. Since I’d had a long term issue with COPD, we opted to consume our honey in the same way, so it just needs cutting out in chunks and pushing into a suitable container. I bought some special re-usable lidded plastic tubs, but frankly any re-usable clean food container would be fine for personal use.

It seems impossible to do any honey processing without honey getting everywhere. Aside from permanently sticky fingers. So I have trays beneath everything which catch a lot of the drips from the comb one is working on, as well as all the combs which have been dealt with. These were all saved, and the following afternoon, once I was certain it was warm enough for foragers to be out and about, I left the frames and trays under cover, to the side of the hay shed. It was extraordinary just how quickly the bees discover them, and then divert huge numbers of worker tongues and stomachs to sip up all this energy rich resource and take it back into the colony for storage once more. By the end of the day, everything is picked clean, with waxy debris all that remains.

After the coolest, dullest summer we’ve experienced, one super was nearly completely full of capped honey – sufficient to keep us both supplied for nearly a year. And this from the hayshed hive that has swarmed once, possibly twice this summer, as well as producing very healthy numbers of drones over a very long season.

The other colony, which is, at 3 years plus, a little older, and which again swarmed at least once, (above) and produced masses of drones albeit later in the year, was obviously less active and had minimal capped honey, although quite a lot of still uncapped honey. The other obvious difference is clear in the photos below. Much of this very dark comb has been used for bee larvae rearing (nearly all of the comb in both supers would have been built out by the bees this year). And I suspect from the size of the empty cells, much of this would have housed larger drone larvae.

(Just honey storage honey filled comb above, left. And comb previously used for larval bee development before honey storage, right, which has the pupal silk case together with larval excreta bound into the cell wall).

So with these frames, I cut out any small sections of capped comb, slashed it up with a knife and strained it through a colander and then sieve overnight whilst keeping the contents on the warm side, close to our switched off wood pellet stove. Once again the frames and honey covered trays and colander were left under cover near this second hive. Within a couple of hours the air around was full of bees, and the hive entrance, which 48 hours earlier had barely 2 bees per minute entering, was plastered with bees trying to return to the hive. Waste not, want not, indeed.

I had a valiant effort trying to find scientific references to the benefits of eating honey comb with wax, and failed. We found the advice to always eat it with other foods, is a very good one – since the wax element becomes almost unnoticeable. Maybe try it with a cracker and cheese, or as we do, with a mix of fruits and nuts. Eaten on its own it can be a bit chewier and the wax will stick on teeth. There are lots of web sites of a general health advice slant which extol its health benefits, without any scientific data.

What I did find however were a few reports such as this, (Honeycomb, a New Food Resource with Health Care Functions– Chinese research) which demonstrate how a honey wax extract incorporated into the feed for both broiler chickens, (Effects of honey comb extract on the performance of yellow bantam broilers- Chinese research):and the supplementary ‘nuts’ fed to fatten lambs, (Evaluation of Beeswax Supplementation on Productive Performance of Growing Assaf Lambs – Egyptian research) produced significant improvements in conversion efficiency of the feed. As well as additional weight gain of animals compared to individuals kept in cohort groups kept and fed in the same way, yet minus the honey wax extract. The amounts fed were also quite small – around 4g honey comb extract per lamb per day.

Entirely anecdotally, my own respiratory problem as a non-smoker, gradually worsening over many years (COPD) has resolved completely, much to my surprise, since we began to eat our honey in this way – half a teaspoon 3 times daily for me. (Though I should add that at the same time we began relatively high dose vitamin D and K2 supplementation – between 4,000 in the summer, and 8,000 i.u. daily from September to April). I am posting this simply to flag up real clinical benefits which I have experienced. Not to make any wider medical claims, or advocate its use by others. 😊

Some will think that this is contentious stuff. I just ask myself the question, “I wonder why the large organisations which control most of the medical research funding in the West don’t seem to have commissioned more investigative work in this field.”  Given that the general benefits of untreated raw honey as a nutritional and medicinal aid have been recognised for Millenia. See here (Exploiting the polyphenolic potential of honey in the prevention of chronic diseases – Indian authors)  and here (Honey and Health: A Review of Recent Clinical Research – Iranian authors). 

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From June 26th 2025:

Monday morning was all change, again, as we woke to warm sunshine. A chance for me to go and gather my last batch of daffodil seed from the single form of N. poeticus which had set seed so well, but only just matured. I walked back through the crazy croquet lawn just before lunch and heard, then saw, this swarm.

Seizing their moment on this glorious day, they were massing in the air, just above the vacant, but scouted hive which they’d been staking out for a couple of weeks. I’m not sufficiently expert in such matters, but suspect that the bees that robbed out this failing colony, which I mentioned in my previous post, might have immediately started to raise new queen cells (in their mother hive) as soon as they’d found this attractive potential new home with its pre-built wax combs.

Then spent the intervening period both cleaning out the empty cells and sprucing the hive up, as well as ensuring that by simply being present on site in numbers every day, from early until dusk, they avoided another swarm moving in and occupying the hive, before they were able to move in. A queen egg takes about 16 days to turn into a larval form, pupate and then hatch, so once the cells were sufficiently advanced – and the perfect hot sunny day came along, the swarm could leave their old hive, with their existing queen, and move straight into this new, prepared home.

Maybe this is what happened, but maybe not! All this is speculation, but whatever, it was once again a real drama to watch them land and enter their new home within half an hour or so.

By the evening, foragers were already returning to their new base with abdomens laden with nectar, dragging them along the landing board. And with even better timing this year, the bramble flowers are blooming early and so there’s a wonderful nectar flow for them to exploit and use to recreate a store of honey and resources to get them through the weeks and months ahead.

Their timing though was perfect – a day earlier and our garden guests would have walked right past this bee maelstrom, since the path passes within a few feet of this hive.

The weather morphed again with some damp spells and then a much heralded heat wave appeared in all our forecasts. 3 days of guaranteed hot sunshine, with winds, and temperatures up to 28 degrees C. Perfect for hay making (and for another swarm which moved into a hive vacant since late last autumn: I was otherwise occupied and missed the actual fly-in, but with minimal pre-scouting, they had safely relocated by the evening to this, their new home, when I’d checked the hive, as I do, for any signs of activity).

As if all of this bee, wasp and moth drama wasn’t sufficient for one post, yesterday afternoon, around 4.15pm I decided to have a breather and take ‘The Light Eaters’ outside to try to finish it quickly. I NEVER take a book outside to read, but it proved to be fortuitous timing. Immediately I opened the door there was obvious loud bee noise. A cloud of bees were milling around the slate-line just above the door, with bees diving in between the rafter ends of our gutter and soffit-free roof. Oh dear. My initial thought was that a swarm had moved in, but on reflection I suspect it was more likely to be a large number of scouts sussing out a potential nest site in between the slates/felt, and the insulation/plaster board. As I watched, the line of bees extended further down the slate line and some seemed to be concentrating on exploring another inter-rafter space. Then I noticed another, grapefruit sized active wasp nest, sitting at this point on the wall plate. Directly above our cobbled path.

Another one of those quick decision moments, when regrettably I opted to use a foam based insecticide to repel/disperse the bees, and eliminate the wasp nest. I’m afraid I’ve heard too many stories of honey bee colonies in roof cavities, which once established are almost impossible to remove. So better to nip the issue in the bud. In all our years here, we’ve never had them explore this space before, as far as I’ve been aware. Within a couple of hours, all the bees had given up and dispersed, and today there was no return, and the wasp nest was inactive too. Perhaps we need to replace the anti-house sparrow chicken wire, stapled above the wall plate, with finer, anti-honey bee and wasp mesh to prevent a recurrence.

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I should mention that following the excellent pollination that our apricots enjoyed as a result of honey bees being able to access the green house for many days in late February/early March, we’ve been enjoying a bumper crop of many kilos, for weeks since the first ripened in early June. The video from 2 years ago, below, gives an idea of what the bees can sound like, even this early in the year, given a weather window for them to get out and forage.

This bumper crop was despite radical fruit thinning in mid-April, which took me over 3 hours, working over just two trees, and picking off hundreds of surplus, touching fruit. If left, they would inevitably result in rapid botrytis destroying the fruit in a humid greenhouse environment.

From 24/10/2025:

I should also record that I was able to remove the second super of honey from our most vigorous, insulated colony of honey bees on September 29th. As always, I opted to wait for a fairly still, dry day, several days away from a full moon, and placed a rhomboid plastic bee clearing board beneath the honey-filled ‘super’ around 3pm in the afternoon. Then returned to remove the ‘super’, and immediately afterwards, the bee clearing board, early the following morning. This year, finding a warm enough day was a challenge so late in the year. The afternoon temperature was about 15 degrees C, but the following morning, waiting for the sun to create a little more warmth by about 9.00am after a fairly cool clear night, meant the temperature would have only been about 9 degrees C. (Conventional wisdom would have it that this is far too cold to be opening up a hive). However, working quickly, and with no frames being removed, the temperature drop for a 2 box, well insulated colony would likely have been minimal.

The last element of removing the clearing board, is always the most likely to create a response from the bees, since many will be working at the top of the frames, tidying up the wax and honey mess created from twisting and removing the super box which has remained in place without any disturbance since April.

Since I never use smoke in any of my hive openings, this time I tried very quickly, and minimally spraying the bees on the tops of the exposed lower frames immediately after lifting off the bee clearing board, with a misting bottle containing lukewarm water, a teaspoon full of dissolved sugar, and a couple of drops of geraniol scent. My impression is that this resulted in far fewer bees taking off and flying around me. And with minimal aggression. There was also much less risk of bees getting trapped as the crown board was swiftly replaced onto the hive, since within seconds of misting, most exposed bees were tending to walk down deeper into the hive. I shall definitely use this protocol in the future.

There is an excellent lecture above, from last year’s National Honey Show programme, by Professor Martin Giurfa on “Honey bee pheromones: new discoveries and unsuspected roles”. He explores the large number of different chemical pheromones which honey bee colonies rely on for communication and task management. Several are related to plant based chemicals. If you watch the Q&A’s (which are always fascinating in these lectures), there is an interesting question and response about the use of smoke by most beekeepers when they open hives, and its potential longer term impact on bees, (from about 1.15.22 ). This gave me the idea of using this particular geraniol based mist spray alternative, which may indeed be a calming, scent based cue for the opened hive bees, at the time of maximal threat – to them and me!

This is the first year I’ve removed 2 full ‘supers’ from a single hive, but then it’s been an exceptionally benign weather year for our bees. The honey filled wax combs in this lower ‘super’, although created from scratch this season (as with the ‘super’ removed back in late August) are inevitably less pristine than the (earlier) removed full ‘super’. Simply since there will have been vastly more bee movements over these combs, and the cells towards the centre of the frames will also have been used for rearing brood, early in the year, as the colony expanded in size. And only later filled with honey as the colony numbers decline in late summer and autumn. Thus the honey is likely to taste quite different from these lower frames, and the wax itself will be a bit chewier, containing the silk cocoon of any reared bee larvae, which will have remained stuck to the inside of the wax cell walls: I never use any sort of queen excluder to limit the queen’s ability to move around the hive, and lay eggs where she wants.

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30/04/2026:

With the weather due to break soon, I took the opportunity of a warm morning on Sunday to add a super to each of the two honey bee colonies I aim to take honey off. This is the only intervention or opening of any of the ‘hives’ which are dotted around the garden, and in a year which has seen very high winter losses across many parts of the UK, I’m pleased that our bees seem to be generally thriving on being allowed to get on with their lives, as they know best. Whether this will be the year that the much hyped and feared Asian Hornet becomes an extra issue for them, remains to be seen – a nest was found in Wrexham last winter. I guess that more frequent routine opening of honey bee hives during regular inspections will probably mean that hornets will find it easier to use the scent of the colony to track them down. I guess time will tell if my strategy of zero colony opening (until September) keeps ‘our’ colonies safe from hornet predation.

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11/05/2026:

As well as the scent sensations, one of my early May dawn walks saw me stepping back behind Rhododendron yakushimanum ‘Koichiro Wada’ to take this view back up the copse (above), where a number of R. flower cultivars and emerging Acer foliage create marvellous and largely unplanned visual treats for a couple of weeks in early May. I wouldn’t normally stand in this place, since it’s quite close to the flight path from one of the free-living honey bee colonies. I glanced across at it to discover that there was some external bee activity even at around 5.50am. But what was the huge blurred dark blob I could see at the hive entrance, in poor light?

Zooming in with the camera showed not one, but 2 enormous dark slugs – one gliding along the top of the hive entrance, the other gliding out, and onto the narrow landing board.

The bees, perhaps surprisingly, seemed to pay little attention to these creatures, and over a period of about 5 minutes I watched as the lower, landing board slug seemed to turn around and head back into the hive. On occasion when I’ve opened a bee hive – including about 3 weeks ago when I added a ‘super’ box to one colony, I’ve found a large slug resting on the top board inside the hive. A hive is of course a safe, damp, dark warm location for a slug to take up residence – if the bees ignore you!. But does the slug only stay in the hive at night? And does it confer some benefit to the colony? Otherwise why do the bees tolerate its presence? Other than as part of a benign ‘live and let live’ approach which many life forms have towards other species that aren’t harming their activities in any way. Even if they are sharing their space.

During a sequence of still photos I noticed a single honey bee (to the right, above and below) carrying out something that looked to be an almost pink/orange hue, and deliberately manipulating it in its jaws and pulling it off the landing board, to drop to the ground below. Was it some sort of resented mite, beetle, or larval form of an unwanted hive guest?  I don’t know. 

Perhaps I’d timed my visit for the moment when, during a generally cool, dry period of weather, these slugs were returning to their warm, moist daylight hours shelter. Following the scent of the slime trail they would have left at dusk, to return to this favoured base.

It’s now thought that our ‘common’ slug species not only use light levels detected by their eyes and other extra-ocular photoreceptors, but also an inbuilt circadian (daily rhythm) clock located in their central nervous system, to determine when they will commence their (usually nocturnal) feeding activity. Thus experimental removal of their eyes, or placing the slugs in constant darkness for weeks, although a considerable challenge, can be circumvented by the slugs – and they’ll still tend to forage at a well defined ‘night’ time. Click on this review paper for more details: ‘Clocks at a snail pace: biological rhythms in terrestrial gastropods’ Rodrigo Brincalepe Salvador and Barbara Mizumo Tomotani 

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