Beekeeping – Woody's Workshop

May 12, 2024May 12, 2024

My bees have swarmed

No rhubarb crumble for lunch today

Three warm sunny days and my bees got itchy feet and swarmed yesterday. The hive is what I call a passive hive in that it provides a home for the bees and I make no demand on their honey. Free lodgings are given provided they pollinate my various fruit and veg production.

The hive is shown below and is mounted high on the wall of an adjacent building, well above flight paths. The central column is an original commercial item from Gardeners Beehive. (Note that Kevin at Gardeners Beehive is very dyslexic so please be patient and understanding when reading his website). The side boxes are additions to give more comb space. The right hand side box has a hinged door over a Perspex viewing window which is opened by the lever.

The bees had been unnaturally grumpy this week and I picked up a couple of stings. The first one occurred while in the veggie plot and started as a serious buzzing in my right hand side hear aid. This did not abate and stupidly I brushed at it and in the process my hearing aid flew out among the veg. The buzzing then came round to the left hand side and the second hearing aid ended up also in the veg.

I had had enough and headed out onto the lawn running tighter and tighter circles to shake off my attacker. Revenge was a sting under my eye which was very painful and tender for a couple of days. I recruited my wife to help me to find both hearing aids, one of which now had a damaged transducer cable. A trip to the audiologist followed. (There is some discussion about whether hearing aids give off some form of acoustic signal that attracts insects).

The second sting was while I was on the roof of our bungalow cleaning the solar panels. I try to keep them as clean as possible to get every last kW of energy. Regular downpours containing Sahara red dust work against me. Anyway I’m on the roof minding my own business when I felt something land on my head. Next minute I felt the sting. I must have been right in the flight line and the little devil must have got out of bed at the wrong side.

Yesterday while heading down to the veggie plot I heard the tell tale buzz of activity and sure enough a huge cloud of bees was vacating the hive and whirling around. It is quite impressive to see them dramatically exiting in high volume. However to my surprise the swarming mass only moved about 10 metres and settled on our rhubarb plant where it has remained overnight. This morning the scout bees are rushing back and forth and no doubt will be voting for the best location for their new home before the swarm heads off.

My wife duly informed me, in no uncertain terms, that rhubarb crumble was off the menu for Sunday lunch. There’s always hope that Spotted Dick might be the substitute…

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August 26, 2021December 1, 2021

Lockdown Pallet Beehive by Jonathan Powell

My side interest in bees brought this booklet to my attention where the author Jonathan Powell describes how he created a beehive from a couple of scrap wooden pallets.

Beehive made from scrap wooden pallets — The beehive mounted in a tree. Length is around 1m.

The hive is intended just for the bees with no intention of humans taking honey. It provides them with a tree like cavity to inhabit in keeping with a natural hole in a tree. We humans seem to chop down our trees at an alarming rate and the potential for ancient trees with cavities suitable for wild bees diminishes by the day.

The hive has an inner core and an outer core with an insulation layer between the two using the sawdust created in cutting the pallet material. My engineering brain kicked in and below is a spreadsheet that helps calculate the dimensions required for a multi-sided structure having the required 40 litres volume that bees appear to prefer.

Plenty of time is available to make one of these before the spring swarming period starts.

Pallet Hive Calculator

I do not claim to be an expert on bees but my interpretation is that such hives with high levels of insulation lead to less stress in the occupants. This in turn means they are less prone to disease. There is also much published information about the stress induced by having high density clusters of ‘domesticated’ bees leading again to disease. Having simple well insulated hives for the wild bees to populate in relative isolation to each other must help these problems albeit at the expense of man being less able to raid honey.

Here is an interesting link on the interaction of wild bees and domesticated bees.

For those wanting an interesting read I recommend ‘The Honeybee Democracy’ by Thomas Seeley. Fascinating book.

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July 10, 2020

After 3 years of waiting I have finally got bees in my hive

Bees Down the Garden

This is something way left field to my usual stuff.

Three years ago almost to the day my wife bought me a beehive for my birthday. This is not one of my normal activities and it was not a normal type of beehive. The design is marketed and I believe manufactured in the UK by Gardeners Beehive and you can see from the picture below it is very unconventional. It is meant to represent a hollow tree stump and is more in keeping with the natural home that bees would inhabit in the wild.

gardeners beehive — The unusual Gardener’s Beehive that has waited 3 years for some bees to arrive

The concept of the design is that once you have bees in residence you leave them alone. No white suits, smokers etc that are the norm for conventional hives. After the first year you can add honey boxes on the side of the hive. These act as additional storage for the bees over and above the bulk stored in the main section of the hive. Taking honey from these additional storage boxes does not drain the bees main store which they need to survive the winter. The hive does not deliver loads of honey in the way a conventional hive would but you get some busy pollinators buzzing round the garden.

So why has it taken three years to get bees in residence ? To be honest I don’t know. I followed all the instructions with the hive which detail the best location and the use of lure spray to attract the searcher bees but to no avail. Perhaps it was because swarms are most common in June, July and August when we would normally spend time in France so we missed the opportunities.

This year, isolated at home, we have spent more time in the garden and we have now seen three swarms pass overhead. It is quite an impressive sight if not a little intimidating. The third one took a fancy to a pear tree in our garden and this looked like a long awaited opportunity to get some residents.

There is a couple we know in the village who are beekeepers and we quickly rang them and asked for their help. They climbed into the tree and managed to shake most of the swarm into a cardboard box and then drop the buzzing contents into the top of my peculiar hive. It was then a matter of waiting to see if we had captured the queen and the swarm would like their new home.

Friendly local beekeepers transferring the swarm to my hive — Friendly local beekeepers transferring the swarm to my beehive

All seems well so far with lots of traffic to and from the hive so maybe the three year wait is finally over.

And if three swarms weren’t enough, next day I found a small one down in the vegetable plot clustered on one of the bed protection nets. It seems it is a good period for swarms.

Bee swarm in vegetable patch — Another smaller swarm the next day

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