GBKA  Registered Charity Number : 1014600

Are You Doing This?

You should be treating for varroa (if necessary).

Use Apistan or Bayvarol strips and leave them in for six weeks.

Feed now before the weather changes. They cannot concentrate the syrup to honey strength for storage once the weather is too cold. Use a syrup made with 1lb of sugar to 1/2pint water.

When they have enough stores for the winter it should be difficult to heft the hive.

Honey in Medicine

The Times reports that researchers in Cardiff have found that honey can break up the resistant films formed by bacteria which make them less sensitive to antibiotics.

Apiary News

The apiary has had a good year. It is going into the winter with three nucs and seven thriving colonies. They have been treated for varroa and are being fed at the moment. The meeting on the 19th will be the final preparations for winter.

About 120lbs of honey has been extracted. If any members would like to buy some association honey it will cost them £2/lb. It comes in tins weighing about 30 lbs. Please get in touch with Eric if you would like some tel. 01633 412617.

Comment

It is not just beekeepers who are complaining about the number of wasps this year. And now an even more annoying robber has come to my attention. At the moment I am fostering two colonies who, having been besieged by wasps until all the nests in the vicinity had been dealt with, then started to be robbed by very determined BEES. Their owner, having tried every ploy to protect them , was in despair, so eventually I offered them a home in my garden as a last resort. I was terrified that my bees would recognise an easy target and start robbing them too, or the local wasps that I felt were under control would have a go (the foster bees are really nice friendly creatures with no idea about what a sting is used for). So far all is peaceful. After a few hours, going to look at them every half hour with wasp traps ready, the visitors settled down and the milling around which I find difficult to interpret ceased. My bees, 50 yards away, are flying off in a completely different direction, they are very busy but I don’t know what they are gathering. Earlier it was Himalayan Balsam which I haven’t seen before in Raglan, but they aren’t as dusty now so it must be something else .

If your hives have varroa floors do get in the habit of monitoring the natural death rate. If there are less than 2 a day dying, then ‘they’ suggest you do not need to treat. This is worth knowing. In fact at this time of year (Sept-Dec) you don’t need to treat if there are less than 6 dying every day.

Another tip

Janet has suggested that I remind you of the difficulty often encountered when removing varroa strips, especially when the bees have been very active while they were in place. Remember to take a pair of pliers with you when you go to take the strips out.                             Bridget

Wasps

I expect every beekeeper has experienced the assumption that people have that as you are a beekeeper you are therefore an expert on every flying insect. Particularly if it stings. And in one respect this is correct. You are a great deal more informed than the average person, who it would appear from my experience, cannot tell the difference between a bee and a wasp.

The trouble is that it is much more complicated than that. As there are a great number of different bees, social and otherwise, so are there a great number of different wasps. They are mainly black and yellow so they all look the same (!!!!)

 There are basically two types of social wasp that we see in this country, the long and the short headed. The difference is identified by looking at the space between the lower edge of the compound eye and the top of the mandible. This is just a dark line in Vespula spp but it is a distance greater than half the width of the mandible in Dolichovespula spp. According to one book,  Dolichovespula saxonica is non-aggressive and ‘when it does sting, it is not especially painful. It is not only relatively harmless to man but is not a nuisance even in households. It does not attack man even when he moves in the immediate vicinity of  the nest.’ All Dolichivespulas build their nests in well-lit places attached to wood or branches and protected from wind, rain and the heat of the sun. Quite often these will be near human habitation—house eaves, garden sheds etc. The nasty wasps, the Vespulas build their nests in a dark cavity—underground or in a loft etc.

All wasps are predators when feeding the larvae, and in fact even at this time of year you will find them sometimes with a fly or something. But once the next years queens have been produced they seem to go on an adolescent rampage devouring sweet things. According to what I have read Dolichvespulas are seen on snowberry  and umbelliferae but never go to carrion or butchers shops the way Vespula do. If they do get into the kitchen they immediately head for a window and don’t fall into food.  As far as I can tell, from the wasps I have caught in my apiary, I don’t think the Dolichovespulas are involved in robbing bees or in destroying fruit in orchards. It is the two short headed wasps, Vespula vulgaris and Vespula germanica who are to blame for wasps bad press.

Natural Histories

This is a programme on radio Wales introduced by Iolo Williams, and he did one on ‘Bees Unique to Wales’. It was quite interesting, he talked to a series of people who live in Wales and ‘have devoted their lives to bees’. 

First he interviewed Gordon Hartshorn and put on a bee suit to go through some hives!! Gordon talked about Isle of Wight disease wiping out most of the original British bee Apis mellifera mellifera in the 1920s, which led to the importation of Italian bees to replace stocks. The hybridisation of these with the remaining British bees produced the very bad tempered bees that we are suffering now. His aim is to select for the original British bee and get a placid stock.

Elynor Gwynn from CCW in Caernarvonshire told him about a very rare mason bee, Osmia xanthomelana, (rare in Britain that is), which builds exposed mud nests and lives in 2 places on the Gower where it finds the necessary conditions: viz. sloping soft cliff, mud seepage and bird’s foot trefoil. It has a bright orange furry thorax.

Bumblebees were covered by Oliver Prys-Jones, (he wrote about ‘Bumblebees’ with Sarah Corbet in the Naturalist Handbook series) who has planted his garden in Denbighshire entirely with bee friendly plants. He gets 5-6 different frequent visitors as well as the cuckoo parasitic bumbles. He mentioned some plants, Jerusalem Sage, foxgloves, daisies, Pulmonaria, and willows.  He also said you must think less tidy for a wildlife garden, do not cultivate too much. He bemoaned the change in farming since the Second World War, more intensive, no field margins and no weeds co-existing with crops (ie use of herbicides).

The last speaker talked about how important bees were economically for pollination. Bumblebees are especially so because they fly when the light is very low and also in bad weather.

I think we should all think bumble bee as well as honey bee. I particularly like the idea of a wildlife garden, not too tidy or too cultivated. All those creatures who live in holes in the ground get really messed about when we go disturbing their entrances.

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