The Year That Was 2018 – and other matters
What a year it has been for our bees, from the arctic weather in February/march to the scorcher of a summer it was certainly a year of extremes. The upshot of it all though, is that it was a bumper year for honey harvest.
Like all beekeepers I waited anxiously for the temperature to lift enough so i could do my 1st inspections of the year. This time in advance of 1st inspection is always a worry. My hand was forced in an out apiary because something (i suspect a pine martin) attacked a nuc a few days after St Patrick’s day. You might remember the weather then, Ireland wins the grand slam in arctic conditions in Twickenham – wind chill factor of minus 8, actual temperature of 2 degrees. Fortunately the attacker didn’t get making too much damage, while the whole front of the nuc was damaged. The walls are thick and it only managed to increase the size of the opening by a few inches. Not ideal conditions to open a nuc so i planted a piece of plywood on the opening to reduce it as a temporary measure. I then waited a few days until temperatures lifted to close to 10 degrees and did inspection; thankfully everything was ok in there.
It was april 7th before i did my 1st full inspection on my colonies. All queens were present and laying. Always a relief. And so it is a relief at every inspection for the rest of the season to find laying queens, eggs and brood.
So what have i learned this year? I learned that its not true that a newly emerged virgin queen will go around the hive damaging any other un-hatched queen cells. Virgin queens can swarm leaving un-hatched queen cells intact. I have learned its not true (not always at least) that a hive with a resident queen will swarm when a queen cell is capped. I have found both quite happily co-existing a couple of times this year. I have learned that apideas and hot weather do not mix. I lost a number of apideas to overheating. One such was lost in a 20 min car journey where every bee died in that short time.
Swarming season is always a busy time. All my hives started queen cells in 2nd week of May. I moved the queens out of the hives making up nucs and moved them to my out apiary. I think that in future i will do it the other way around, moving out queen cell and leave the queen in place. Less potential for disruption to bee numbers. There is always the potential for things to go wrong then in the hives while waiting for virgin queens to get mated and safely home. One of my hives was queen-less for 6 weeks when the queen didn’t return from mating. Eventually i had to re-queen this hive with a queen i had reared in an apidea.
I mentioned above about moving the nucs with queens in them to my out apiary. I moved 2 of them back into my home apiary around 5 weeks after i had moved them out initially for ease of management. This was a few days before i had to re-queen the hive mentioned above. I did an inspection on all hives and nucs about a week after this. I discovered that there was no queen in one of the nucs i had brought home but around 8 queen cells. Then on inspection of the hive that i had re-queened i am looking for my yellow marked queen but no sign of her. I looked through again and to my amazement discovered a queen marked blue. This clipped queen had walked from the nuc 12 feet away into this hive, the hive i had taken her out of 6 weeks previously as part of swarm control and had obviously dispatched the resident queen. Its amazing to think this queen would have only seen the outside of this hive once before to know its geography while she was out mating 2 years previously (i know she should have been marked white but i didn’t have a working white marker in 2016) incredible instinct to find her way ‘home’
Wouldn’t life as a beekeeper be so much simple if the bees read the books we read but then they have been doing what they do for a very long time...............
BEEleive It or Not – some historical facts of interest..........
100 Million Years Ago - The earliest fossil evidence of bees found to date is preserved in a piece of amber found in a mine in northern Burma. It is believed to date back as far as 100 million years to the time when bees and wasps split into two different lineages. The fossilised insect appears to share features both common to the bee and wasp, but is considered to be more bee than wasp.
35 Million Years Ago - The earliest known fossil evidence of the honey bee (genus Apis) was found in Europe and is believed to date back 35 million years. However, it is widely believed that the honey bee first evolved in eastern Africa some 40 million years ago and spread northwards into Europe and Eastwards into Asia. Honey bees did not appear in the Americas, Australia or New Zealand until European settlers introduced them in the 17th century.
7000 Years Ago - The earliest known evidence of mankind’s interaction with bees were found on cave paintings discovered in Spain dating back between 6000 and 8000 years ago. Our Neolithic ancestors would have gathered honey from wild colonies of bees.
4400 Years Ago - Earliest evidence of bees being “kept” by humans. Illustrations from ancient Egypt show the use of hives as long ago as 2400 BC. Hittite scriptures recording the theft of hives were found in Anatolia (Turkey) dating back to 1500 BC. The Mesopotamian civilisation was first recorded as having kept bee in hives from at least 700 BC although their use of hives could have been much earlier due to records showing their harvesting of honey from as long ago as 2450 BC.
366 Years Ago – Bees introduced for the 1st time to America on the east coast by British settlers. It took another 230 years for them to reach the west coast.
1904 - Varroa mite first discovered (and described by Oudesmans) in Java in 1904. The first infestations of honey bees (Apis cerana) were found in 1958 in Japan with colonies of the Western honey bee (A. mellifera) believed to become infected around 1960-62 following their importation to the Philippines. It is found in the UK in 1992 and Ireland in 2003.
In Ireland beekeeping was an ancient and widespread craft. So much so that there was a full 20 pages of the Brehon Laws devoted to ‘Bee-Judgements’ recorded from the sixteenth century. These covered regulation in areas such as swarms, hives, nests and honey. Honey production was seen as very important to all local economies as this was an era before the production of sugar cane or beet.
We follow ancient footsteps, we carry on a proud tradition. The art of beekeeping is really working out how best to accommodate what the bees want to do themselves. As always they are the teachers. It should never be a question of ‘why’ they did this or that. The question really is what can we learn from it.
Signed – The BEEfuddled Beekeeper