River Cottage has come to the Lincolnshire Fens

Sunday 27th May 2018

With Sue's rapidly expanding apiary, I spent some of the morning knocking up some new brood frames and a new brood box. Meanwhile Sue was inspecting her bees.
While I was in a DIY sort of mood and with Sue annoying the bees (actually they seem very calm and peaceful this year) I spent some time in the garage cleaning and sharpening my tools.

Bee city

I got to work hoeing some of the veg beds. What a difference a sharp hoe makes.
But it wasn't long before bees took over my day again, for a giant swarm appeared on one of the willow arches. I've already posted about this so won't go into too much detail. But I can't resist posting the picture up again.

Today's outdoor work was intermittent, for I was having a bit of a lazy day. You can't work solidly every day. At my age the body needs a rest every now and then, even if the mind doesn't want it to!
Fortunately one of our Freeview channels was showing old episodes of River Cottage all day long.
I had seen most of these before, but before I was a smallholder, and it is only watching them again that I quite realise how much they affected my life. The first time round, Hugh F-W planted a dream in my head.
The second time around was more of a nostalgic experience. We've done that... and that... we tried that... that happened to us too.
Very notable is that the rules have changed. No kitchen scraps for the chooks and pigs any more. No burying fallen stock. No blood back from the abattoir for black pudding. Apart from these details though, it was inspiring to watch all the shows again. I wonder what seeds have been inadvertently planted in my mind this time.



With the new bees in the brood box (the new one which I constructed this morning), I spent a very pleasant hour weeding the strawberries with Sue. They are looking good this year and fingers crossed there is no sign of a return of the Strawberry Seed Beetle, a plague of which devastated our crop this year.
There was still plenty of the day left, enough time to mow and edge the paths in the veg plot (overgrown edges are where the slugs like to hide) and ridge up the potatoes.
Sue made another batch of asparagus soup which smells absolutely delicious. We have a few weeks of asparagus left now before we let the plants grow and gather the sun's energy to store in the crowns ready for next year. The spears are coming thick and fast and are hard to keep up with.
At the moment every meal is accompanied by fresh asparagus, new potatoes and mangetout. The potatoes will continue for a long, long while with different varieties coming along nicely, but the asparagus and mangetout will soon be replaced by broad beans, the next vegetable to come into crop.

I leave you with a few images from the smallholding today.

The yellow flowers of Scorzonera in its second year.

Behind, the beautiful blue flowers of its cousin, Salsify

 

Left: Honesty which I have left.to flower and go to seed.
Right: The lambs enjoying a few freshly cut willow branches.

A Wasp Fly I found while planting bee seedlings.

A Scorpion Fly which got stuck in the polytunnel for a while.

A Swarm Captured

Any guesses how many bees in this cluster?

Somehow every swarm event seems to happen when Sue is unavailable. Last time it was when I witnessed a cloud of our bees heading off over the veg patch, over the road and spooking a herd of cows as they disappeared over the fields.

And so it was that, late afternoon a couple of weeks ago, I found myself stalking the Little Owls. For an adult was sitting right out in the open and I could clearly hear its young calling from somewhere round the old, hollow ash tree. I kept moving around the base of the tree, trying to work out precisely where the begging calls were emanating from, when something else caught my eye.

There, on the fence, was a beard! A beard of bees. Not a huge swarm, but still an impressive cluster of bees loyally surrounding and protecting their queen.

I rushed inside to get the camera, the bee suit, the bee brush and the key to the garage where, somewhere, there was stored an old nucleus box in which our first ever bees had been delivered. ( A nucleus is five frames of bees, including a young queen and new brood. This is how you buy bees if you can't find a nice bee-keeper to give you a swarm. But it doesn't come cheap, running in at up to £240!)

I didn't know what to do first. If these were our bees, they have a habit of moving on very quickly indeed.
But they just might be a swarm from elsewhere. Whatever the case, they would be sending out scouts to find a suitable new home.

Now, theory goes that when the bees are swarming they are at their most peaceful, having gorged on honey to prepare for their journey and intent on protecting their queen, without whom their attempt at colonisation would be futile.

The "nuke (nucleus) box" - a suitable temporary home for the swarm.

So, suited up in my spaceman gear, I approached the beard. First I trimmed some of the long grass to clear the way. Some of the bees dripped off the cluster as I did so.
I eased the box into position underneath them, then took the plunge, sweeping them decisively off the fence. It worked!
Almost all the bees were now in the box.

But a few were left on the fence. Those which had fallen off the bottom of the cluster plus others appearing from nowhere - maybe scouts returning. They were clearly attracted back to the same place on the fence, presumably by the queen pheromones. I scooped as many as I could into the box, keen to collect as many bees as possible, not just to make the new colony stronger but also to make absolutely sure I'd not somehow missed the queen. She should have been in the middle of that cluster and was hopefully now exploring the frames of foundation wax I'd placed in the collection box.

The stragglers were attracted back to the very same spot on the fence.

But my lack of knowledge was making me worry. What if the returning scouts came back and led the swarm elsewhere? Anyway, I'd done all I could. I sealed the bees in until Sue got home from her evening meeting at school.  

While I had the bee suit on and the camera to hand,  I took the chance to take a few more piccies.

I quickly looked in the existing two hives but wasn't sure whether this new swarm had come from either of them. For both hives had been closed down for a couple of weeks since the first swarm. I studied the pictures on the camera and the new swarm looked very similar to those in the other hives. My guess was that this could be a cast swarm, a secondary swarm following a main swarm, during which a virgin queen splits the already depleted hive.

I had done all I could. Sue arrived home much later and gave the hives a quick inspection but was unable to come to any more solid conclusions than I.

Sue inspects the hives.

It didn't seem that the swarm had come from this hive... probably

So, from one very strong colony of bees not long ago, we now had possibly three hives, not forgetting that large cloud of bees which had deserted. This meant that our bees may well be very thinly spread, if we even had any queens in  the hives.

That evening we opened up the small entrance to the nucleus box so that the new bees could go out and explore first thing in the morning. Hopefully they would take to their new home and stay, but it was very possible that they would all debunk.

This sudden escalation to three hives made an emergency trip to Thorne's necessary as we would need another hive, plus a spare in case of another swarm. I got home and set about assembling the hives and building the frames. For any beekeepers reading, we have opted for a 14 x 12 brood box. This is extra deep and gives more room for the brood, rather than using brood and a half. We'll give it a try and see how it goes.

 

These are extra deep 14 x 12" frames for the brood box.

Assembling new hives and all the frames to go inside is a job I love doing, but it's very time consuming. I don't usually mind as I become absorbed in the task. I couldn't finish everything that first night, despite working till very late, but the bees could stay in their temporary home for one more day to get used to their surroundings.

So, after work the next day, I would finish the job and we would transfer the bees to their shiny new cedar home.

Well, that was the plan... until the mega went off.

ASCENSION FRIGATEBIRD, Islay.

The only previous record of this bird species in the UK was in 1953, a moribund bird which ended up in a museum. And it wasn't correctly identified as such until about 50 years after it was collected.

Now, 60 years later, there was another, photographed by tourists that morning sitting on the wall of the small harbour.

This was more than MEGA. It was MONSTER RARE.

All other plans paled into insignificance as my admittedly occasionally odd priorities suddenly changed.

By late evening I was heading towards Carlisle, racing to meet up with a team from the south who were heading up the M6. We had a ferry to catch in the morning.

My second trip to the Hebrides in as many weekends, with a short jaunt to the Farne Islands sandwiched in between during the week.

As if there weren't enough to keep me busy on the farm, late June and July were not keeping to their normal reputation as being the quiet time of the year for rare bird arrivals.

Oh No! Not another swarm

I remember last year toying with a pun between swarm and 's warm.
You can see why I didn't use it.

My point is, on the warmest day of the year in 2012, our bees decided to swarm, having been determinedly building queen cells for a couple of weeks beforehand. This meant that our hive's strength was halved and our queen had gone to pastures new.
We were relying on the bees to successfully make themselves a new queen and hoping that our efforts to intervene and prevent the swarm occurrence had not harmed their chances of holding a new coronation.

As it was, we managed to come out of it with two colonies, though one failed to make it through the winter.

Well, the queen cells appeared again this year. This is a normal process when the colony is doing well and bursting to the brim. Sue took all the preventative measures necessary, splitting the colony, taking out frames of brood and honey to give the bees space and to keep them busy.

So, on Wednesday  just gone, the warmest day of the year and incredibly muggy, yes, you've guessed...

I came round the corned from the stables at about half past nine to see a giant buzzing cloud hanging over the pathway which leads down to the animals. I wanted to run and get the camera, but needed to try to follow our bees. Sue had briefed me what to do if I could capture the swarm, but at the moment I would be needing a rather large net.

I quickly stopped Don from riding his mower and together we watched as the mass moved slowly over my veg patch and into his orchard. I was hoping they might settle here, preferably low down so I could box them up, but they began to move high and to speed up, across the road, high over Don's trees and across the Settlement Field.

I pursued them helplessly, with my eyes on a small copse in the middle of the field. By now they were moving so quickly that I could not pick them up in the sky.
I knew that they had passed the copse when the herd of cows beyond were clearly perturbed by the insect invasion of their airspace.

And that was it. Gone. Not even a wave goodbye.


Typically, this had all happened on a day when Sue was due to be going away on a conference for three days, but she managed to get back at lunchtime and have a quick look at what was left. 
The bees that were left were angry. They had no queen and someone had opened up their hive.
This made my job as official photographer rather tricky. I had to zoom in from about fifteen yards, and even then I had to leg it several times as guard bees buzzed me persistently.

Why can't we have the type of bees which settle in a mass close to the hive for a while before heading further afield? Ours just seem to up and go.

Not for the first time, our bees clearly haven't read the same books as us.

Splitting the Hive and Blue Eggs

Sunday 20th May 2012
Nearly June now, though you wouldn't know it.

Two hives, brood chambers only.
Hopefully a successful outcome in a couple of weeks.

Too may queens
I apologise for the lack of pictures, but I had to concentrate on my bee-keeping and a camera would get in the way. The day started with a visit from a helpful fellow bee-keeper. Into the garden trudged the three of us in our space suits. We opened up the hive and had a good look at our buzzy friends. They impressed our colleague with how calm they were and how busy they had been drawing comb and bringing in new honey.

But what we were most interested in was the brood frames, which would provide a trained eye with vital clues about the state of the colony and the fitness of the queen. Many of the frames were full of sealed brood. This means that the larva inside the hexagonal cell has been sealed in by the adult bees, ready to turn into a bee itself. There were also fairly mature larvae, but a distinct lack of smaller larvae and it took us a long time to find eggs. The fact that we did meant that the queen is still laying, but the reason for so few was not obvious - maybe lack of space, the long spell of cold weather or a weak queen. There were some drone (male) cells, but not overly many.
There were queen cells too, some sealed with their giant larva sealed in a sea of white royal jelly. The first warm day next week would probably lead to a swarm. This could be followed by further cast swarms, each time halving the strength of the colony.
So, we had a decision to make. Whether to sacrifice the queen and hope that one of the new, virgin queens would be victorious over the others and find suitable drones to fertilise her. What happens is that the queen flies out of the hive high into the air in search of drones to mate with. If successful, she returns to the hive to begin laying and the colony continues with its new queen. However, that's not a guaranteed outcome, so we felt it better to take a second option, splitting the hive to create a false swarm.

We found the queen easily (she is marked with a white blob to indicate that she is a 2011 queen) and moved her frame into the new hive, placed to face the opposite direction to the original hive. We then picked out some frames of brood, pollen and honey, in effect to give her everything she would need to build a new colony. We then shut that hive over and will leave it to get on with its own business for at least two weeks.
We then went through the remaining frames, leaving only the best looking queen cells. Hopefully, nature will take its course and we may end up with two hives. We'll find out what's happened in two or three weeks. Until then we leave well alone and just wait.
The worst scenario is that we end up with no queens and not a lot of bees. The middle scenario is that the two half colonies are not strong enough to survive as two, in which case we reunite them.

For the moment, fingers stay firmly crossed.

Overall though, it was fantastic to get the chance to look through the hive with the benefit of an experienced eye and we were very, very grateful indeed.

Blue Eggs and an Immaculate Smallholding
Then it was time to keep an appointment over in Donnington, where we had arranged to visit some fellow smallholders to have a nosey around and to purchase a dozen Crested Cream Legbar eggs (the blue ones) to go in the incubator.

Roger's smallholding yesterday was a smallholding on a shoestring, making excellent use of pallets, old bath tubs, second hand polytunnels and cardboard boxes. A smallholding which had evolved organically and very successfully. Today's smallholding was equally impressive, but it couldn't have been more different. Immaculately tidy and organised it was certainly ready for its opening to the public on 17th June as part of the National Gardens Scheme.
NGS - Garden

Colin and Janet concentrate on rare breeds and have their own website, well worth a look.
http://www.thehawthornsrarebreeds.co.uk/

Prize for cutest animal of the day had to go to the day old pygmy goat, though it was a close run thing with the various punk-haired chicklets and the family dog.

 

Once again, thanks to Colin and Janet for extending a warm welcome to us.