Winter's a comin'

This morning when the sun was shining and the ivy flowers were blooming in the sunshine our bees were busy and active bringing home nectar and pollen. I pottered down the garden to say hello and as usual, when getting in their flight path, I had to disentangle a few of the ladies from my hair (I'll never learn)

I nipped out for a couple of hours, the wind blew up and the weather changed. Recently the temperature has remained between 17 and 21 degrees Celsius or 62 and 69 Fahrenheit. In the United Kingdom that's pretty warm weather for October. When we've been out to check their feeder at night the entry platform has been covered in bees either protecting the hive from robber bees and wasps or regulating the temperature.

This evening it was 7 degrees C (44 degrees F) It's pretty cold. I'm sitting in bed wearing fluffy socks because Bob complains when I warm my feet on his leg. The window in our bedroom is closed. I may even resort to putting a fluffy blanket on the bed!

This turned my mind to wondering how bees regulate temperature inside the hive. I noticed the other night that when you take the roof off to pour sugar syrup in the feeder you can feel warmth radiating from the hole where the bees enter the feeder. It's noticeably warmer than the air around it. Of course they need to evaporate water from the nectar and sugar water to make honey but they also have to keep brood and larvae at specific temperatures to ensure they pupate and it turns out temperature plays a part in which roles the bees eventually fulfill.

Research at the Universitat Wurtzburg (please excuse missing umlauts. My keyboard is not set up for German) at the center for honey bee studies HoneyBee Online Studies UW  have discovered that there are particular bees in a colony who perform the job of regulating the temperature in the hive. They have named them Heater Bees. If you click the above link it will take you to the centre's website where you can see live data for yourself. Apparently their body temperature is significantly higher than those of other bees in the colony. This allows them to make subtle changes to the temperature of cells in which specific larva are developing and pupating. 

It seems the temperature at which larval bees pupate and develop influences the type of bee they will later become. Those who develop at 35C become intelligent forager bees those who develop at 34C are likely to become housekeeper bees who clean the cells and look after the internal needs of the colony.

It is not yet understood exactly how they achieve this although it is hypothesised that some bees can increase their own body temperatures by vibrating their wing muscles. It is known that on very hot days the worker bees will gather as much as a litre of water in 24 hours and using their wings will evaporate this from the hive driving down the internal temperature. 

We've looked at how some drones have a miserable time of it but most of them live an avarage of 90 days. a worker bee at the height of summer will live a mere 42 days while the queen who has a single mating flight then returns to the hive to be pampered by housekeeper bees while she lays egg after egg will live up to 3 years. Even then it's unlikely that she will die of old age. Most likely she'll become less fertile and the workers will bring on a replacement queen. When this virgin queen is ready they either drive the old queen out, sting her to death or the new queen leads a revolt and half the population swarms and heads off to pastures new.

so 42 days, 90 days or a 1000 days. Even the latter seems to be short of a bee's possible life span which seems such a shame when one considers the intelligence and cooperation within the hive.

Sleep warm, Sleep tight.

Katherine xxx

Thought for the day.

I've had a lot of feedback about the miserable lives of the drones. While I agree that a small number of them do pay the ultimate price for genetic diversity the comment that made me laugh was from the lovely Caz. 

She made the point that drones basically live at home with their mums eating more than their fair share while doing nothing to help out. It's perhaps unsurprising that their overworked sisters get annoyed and throw them out when the work gets really hard.

One thing I forgot to mention is that one of the ways you can identify a drone from his sisters is that they have much bigger eyes. This is so they can spot willing queens when they're out on the pull. They also have much wider rears. Perhaps this is because of all the sitting around eating.

As an aside when I googled Drones I got hundreds of images of american un manned aircraft. It took some foraging to find a picture of a bee. Perhaps this goes some way toward an understanding of the worrying decrease in bee populations. Ignorance and the practicing of ignoring.....

More from the ladies at the bottom of the garden.

I went to check the feeder this evening and for the first time since the hive arrived it was still almost as full as it was last night. 

The bees are able to access the syrup from inside the hive without danger of robbing by other colonies because the feeder is sealed inside the super by the roof and there is a cone of plastic over the opening which allows the bees to access the syrup but prevents them from getting into the the unused super and getting trapped. The speckles in the syrup are leaves of thyme.

There seemed to be no great hum coming from the hive and unlike previous occasions there was no pushing and shoving to get to the syrup. Of course it's been another beautiful day with plenty of Ivy to forage. Our bees were making the most of the water bath that we have close by so they evidently needed a little more to go with the pollen they were bringing in on their clown trousers.

-------------------------------------------------

By this time in the season there are no drones left in the hive. Drones are the male bees and a friend of mine once said he didn't fancy being a drone much as they got rather short shrift. I hadn't realise quite how right he was.

They eat a lot, have to be cared for by the workers and the nurse bees but they're tolerated by the colony because they may be needed to keep the colony fertile. So they have a pretty easy time until they are needed to fertilise a virgin queen or if the old queen needs to be superseded. They fly out of the hive to the drone mating area which is between 2 and 3 hundred feet up and usually up to a mile away from the hive. There are usually drones from many hives which ensures the genetic diversity and so the health of the hive.

Now this is where things turn ugly. The drone's intimate equipment is barbed and when he has impregnated the queen he is unable to withdraw it so, as with the worker bee's sting, when he tries to pull away his chaps bits, along with significant portions of his innards, are pulled away so he suffers and dies.

The queen mates with numerous drones on her nuptial flight. She stores their seed in her spermatheca and then goes back to the hive where that store of sperm will last her for two to three years. Fertilisation with a sperm is only necessary for laying females. Drones can be born to a virgin queen so a large number of drones can also be a sign that the queen is no longer fertile and needs to be replaced. 

So at the end of the season when there is no need to fertilise queens they stop laying drones which, due to their short and shocking lives, are expected to do nothing in the hive towards the maintenance of the colony.

There is only food for worker bees so they can keep the queen warm, maintain what brood there is, and keep the temperature of the hive constant through the hard winter. So when I talk about the ladies at the bottom of the garden really I'm talking about a colony of ruthless hardworking amazons who serve their queen to the letter, work till they die and exclusively for the good of the hive. 

Really when you compare the selflessness of the bee it puts the human race to shame! We could all take a leaf out of the bee book of dutiful living.

Yours thoughtfully

Katherine

Woke up it was a Chelsea morning....

Not so much about bees. Written Saturday morning while making damson jam.

We're having a rest from Goose Fair Weather. The sun is shining and the sky is fairly blue. We ate our breakfast on the decking in the sunshine. The bees were busy helping themselves to the new wave of ivy flowers that have opened in the late sunshine and it was a perfect time to appreciate the good things about our lives.

I may have mentioned that we are planning for the arrival of chickens into our lives. More accurately we are planning for the arrival of hens. Somehow, in our suburban paradise, I feel the insertion of a cockerel into lazy Sunday mornings  might not make for domestic harmony. Our neighbours have absorbed the news of our novice bee keeping with good humour, they've even put up with the Saturday and Sunday power tool show that has been chicken run building but 5 am crowing on a weekend? Well we're British. It would be like lighting up a cigarette in a no smoking area. There would be stern looks and letters to The Times. While we are lucky enough not to live in an area where neigbourly issues are dealt with by a large chap called Bubba who brings round his 12 bore I'm not keen to upset anyone. Besides which I don't want to be woken at the crack of dawn either.

I should mention at this point that we do not own a car. We have never owned a car. This frequently elicits gasps of horror, a little like confessing you prefer to wear rubber at the weekends or GASP you don't drink alcohol. (I don't and I do in that order though i'm sure you didn't really want to know) However it does mean that occasionally we have to get a taxi or ask one of our very kind car owning friends to take us places.

So we'd arranged that friends would give us a lift to the rescue centre where we are planning to get our ex battery hens. Regrettably it seems the rescue centre is so busy they don't answer the phone. So our chicken run remains palatial yet sadly chicken free. I will let you know what happens. By hook or by crook I plan to have chickens in the garden by next Saturday.

We have agreed to give a home to a small grey kitten. She's about 8 weeks old, the prettiest shades of grey and white and has a damaged hind leg. Good freinds of ours, one of whom is a vet who does work for the RSPCA (for non brits this is a charity called the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. They rescue neglected, abused or abandoned animals and where possible treat them and re-home them-They also prosecute people who neglect, abuse or abandon animals and where possible rehome them in prisons) Yon small kitten was brought to Erica's practice by the RSPCA inspector who said she'd been dropped at their facility by a bloke claiming to have found her damaged. When he asked if he could have her back after treated it became clear that he was trying to get free care for an animal he had not adequately protected so they took her away.

The long and the short of it. Cute kitten picture on Facebook.

Woman who has recently sent her beautiful son to university. Really cute little kitten needs home......Yup. She's arriving Tuesday.

Facebook message arrives later in the day "Oh Mum, I'm coming home next weekend to see you"

Brilliant!!! anything to do with cute kitten?

Happy Sunday.
Katherine

Colony Size and Elderberries. 

I've been unsure about the size of a bee colony. This is partly because I know so little about bee keeping and partly because every book and website you investigate gives different numbers.

I've extrapolated that in autumn a bee hive will have between 30 thousand and 40 thousand bees and this will dwindle over winter to between 10 and 15 thousand. Its difficult to be more accurate than this when it's impossible to count your bees. When Alex and I took the frames out to inspect the hive last week I was amazed by the sheer numbers of them crowding round the comb but equally wondered how, with so many frames and such thick comb, so many could still fit in what is essentially quite a small box.

When we went out to feed the girls this evening we were surprised by how warm it was. There were a lot of bees outside fanning the hive. I'm starting to worry increasingly about damp. I really don't want them to feel soggy in their little corner of the garden.

-------------------------

Elderberries have nothing particular to do with bees. Of course the flowers are perfect for bees and will contribute to wonderfully healthy honey which in turn contributes to healthy bees. Elderberries just happen to be preoccupying me in my other guise as a herbalist. It has been an astonishing autumn for soft fruit and berries. As we walked down the road the other day we could see the heavy glossy panicles of small purple black berries and the purple smudges under the bushes where either the berries had fallen under their own weight or the birds had gorged themselves and the purple blue flesh had made its way through the bird in the way such things do and ended up coating the ground beneath their perch.

Nature has a way of supplying what we need in abundance. At a time when flu becomes an ever present concern here is natures protector against the virus. Research has proven the effect of elderberry syrup, tincture and standardised extract both in vitro (in the test tube) and in vivo (in the human subject) against numerous viruses including influenza and a number of strains of herpes the nasty little viruses that give us cold sores but also are part of the same family which causes glandular fever, shingles and in some cases viral meningitis. As I was standing stirring the bee syrup I was also stirring honey into the elderberry syrup to protect us against this winter's diseases. I always add cinnamon, ginger, cloves and star anise but this time I took a bunch of the thyme I've been putting in the bees' syrup and added that. It's a spectacularly effective anti infective so I feel it will add to the healing and health promoting benefits of the elderberry syrup for us.

Sleep tight

Katherine xx

Goose Fair Weather.

Every year in Nottingham we have the Goose Fair. This dates back 700 years and is regarded as one of the most prestigious fairs in the country. Originally it was where folk went to sell and buy geese for the Christmas table. Now it is a fair of rides and candy floss and excess where teenagers reeking of cheap perfume and excess hormones go to consort in what can only be described as Goose Fair Weather.

It matters not what went before or what comes after but the first weekend in October will always be damp. It may be mist, it may be drizzle it may be torrential pouring rain resulting in flash floods and knee deep mud but the one thing you can guarantee is that you will return from Goose Fair wetter than when you went out.

It's actually fairly warm at 17 degrees but the damp seeps into your bones and the bees are finding the same. They're busy but the lack of sunshine means that what flowers are out are perhaps not producing as much nectar and pollen as they would like. The temperature is also fairly constant through the day and the night. It's muggy and a a little warm. This means the bees are having to work very hard to keep the hive at a constant comfortable temperature. 

In the evening when we go out to feed them there are serried ranks of them standing on the entrance platform facing in desperately using their wings to ventilate the hive. I have not seen but am told that one lot stand outside pointing in and another lot stand inside pointing out and this helps to regulate the temperature. There is another issue of course and that is damp. The colony produce moisture through their own metabolic processes but so does the nectar and sugar syrup which they then need to reduce so that it stays in the wax cells. Damp is more of a killer than cold and promotes disease in the hive. I may need to call upon my mentor Alex as I'm a little worried that the 18 odd litres of sugar syrup that have disappeared into the hive may be causing damp that in the current climate they are unable to dispel. As I did not put the hive together I don't know whether we have a mesh bottom and if we don't, ventilation becomes an issue.

When we went out to check on the girls last night the feeder was again empty. We were a lot steadier in pouring the syrup so there were no unfortunate losses this time. Its astonishing how upsetting it is to know you squished or drowned a bee.

Now I need to decide whether or not to subject myself to goose fair this weekend.

Enjoy the day

Katherine xxx

A Change in The Weather

Today I was woken by the unexpected sensation of rain on my face. That and the frantic scrabbling of the cat to get out of said rain. We've been sleeping with the window of our loft conversion bedroom open all summer but the disadvantage of a pitched roof window is that when the wind is blowing torrential rain sideways it comes right in and, as happened just now, blows in my face!

It's been an eventful few days. Yesterday was my birthday. I'm 45. This feels a little weird as inside I don't feel any older than I did 30 years ago though things creak a little more than they did then. The net result is I've had lots of lovely people around being nice to me and didn't have time to write for a couple of days!

However I have a wonderful stash of chocolate to sustain me while I catch up on what's been happening.

The bees have had a wonderful few days. The sun has been shining and Ivy flowers seem to have come out everywhere. I spent a  lovely half hour watching the girls bringing home bright yellow pollen in their leg baskets.

This is not my picture; thanks to Borderglider for this one.

Pollen is a protein rich food and is needed for raising brood. Generally the fact that the bees are coming back with yellow trousers is an indicator that the queen is fertile and if she isn't currently laying brood she will be in the spring. The nurse bees feed pollen to the larvae which enables them to grow into fully fledged bees. Honey is a carbohydrate rich food that keeps them going but the protein is needed for growth and development. 

We have the hive entrance pointing at the wall. This is because, in theory, the bees will fly straight up and make their departures over head height. In fact the hive is not quite close enough to the wall so they have plenty of space to swirl around and bump into you. I've found that bees are not particularly suited to late changes in flight path so if you're bent over watching them coming into the entrance they will bump into you. If. like me, you have lots of fluffy hair then both you and the bee can be distressed by the job of untangling the unsuspecting girl from the mess. I've been saying it for a week but we need to move the hive about a foot forward. 

Another development is that when we went to put sugar syrup in the feeder last night for the first time it wasn't empty. This could well be because the nectar has been flowing and they haven't needed the additional sugar. It could also result from what spaces left in the comb being full of stores already. When Alex and I looked at the brood box the combs were pretty full with only a couple of frames showing spaces. That was last Thursday, almost a week ago. We've given them around a litre of sugar syrup a day. That equates to 14 kilos of sugar. plus Alex gave them around 4 litres before they arrived so they've had 18 kilos of sugar.

I like the idea that next year we'll be leaving them sufficient stores to avoid the need for sugar syrup but I find myself deeply attached to the bees already. I cannot imagine allowing them to go hungry when I'm capable of boiling herbs into sugar water for them. However I gather that you can save frames of honey for the purpose of bee feeding and that may be the way to go.

Goodness there's a lot to learn.

Happy October

Katherine xx