Beelines - August '25

We are sad to be informed of the passing of LLEBKA member Joseph John Bee and we send our condolences to his wife Sonia and family. ‘Jack’ as he was known to all of us will be missed. I recall meeting Jack for the first time. It was 20th August 2023 at the home and apiary of Keith and Rhian Bunning. Jack introduced himself as a beginner beekeeper and as we got our smokers started, expressed surprise when he learnt that few of us at LLEBKA treated our bees against the varroa mite. Although this ‘non-treatment’ was contrary to information given to Jack on a ‘bee-course’ he had attended, Jack was completely happy to keep his bees treatment free. And Jack’s bees were great! This was clear to all who saw Jack’s bees the following summer on the lovely day of 16th June when we were welcomed to the home of Jack and Sonia. Jack was always interesting to listen to. I think I have chatted with Jack at most meetings and I shall miss those enjoyable discussions.

Watching busy bees at their hive entrance can be mesmerising. I experienced that earlier this afternoon. It is the last day of July and I went to lift the hive’s crown boards to check all is well with the supers; i.e. do any need another? Luckily all seemed okay, which is just as well as all our supers are out on hives. If a hive is brim full with bees (and honey?) the only option now is to shuffle a super from a less full hive. It was the middle of the afternoon, the sun was warm and the bees were really very busy. I knelt by a hive and watched the frenetic activity for a few minutes. There was certainly pollen being delivered; little loads of a light-coloured slightly green khaki brown that could be from heather. In contrast a few bees had large loads of a prominent quite bright orange colour; this is likely from common hawkbit an often unnoticed yellow flower, not unlike a small dandelion on a long thin stalk, that can be prolific along roadside verges. During the summer many plants have yellow and orange coloured pollens and so using colour can only provide a guess. There was also a lime green pollen being brought in; that is an easier identification at this time of the season - it is meadow sweet, which is abundant this year in damper areas. I also spotted just one load with a striking slatey-blue colour; unique, I think to the greater rosebay willow herb. The majority of bees, however, were arriving back at their home with no pollen, and we can presume that these were mainly delivering nectar; approximately 25 milligrams at a time, load after load, after load…(a metric teaspoon of water is 5000 milligrams). Many of these bees had clearly been visiting Himalayan balsam flowers. Don’t these flowers have an amazingly efficient pollen distribution system? To gain the flower’s nectar the bees have to tunnel to the depth of the orchid-like flower with its rather fearsome dragon-like entrance and, of course, in doing so they get coated in the male, pinky-white pollen. And we all recognise the evidence - the whitish heads of the returning bees. The bees do try to remove the pollen from their heads but this often just leaves a ‘mohican style’ head ornament! Some bees collect this pollen, but most seem to concentrate on the nectar.

Do bees have a memory? Of course we know bees learn where the entrance to their hive is and memorise messages from ‘dancing bees’ to guide them to nectar sources. From a recent observation we think there may be ‘more’. On 10th July a beekeeper collected a nucleus colony from us. The experienced beekeeper was happy, for his own convenience, to collect the nuc in the middle of quite a warm day. It was understood that this would leave a lot of flying bees behind. There was not a neighbouring hive for the bees to relocate and so we placed a skep on the vacant spot to receive the returning bees; a skep used many times to collect swarms and therefore having a ‘bee-odour’. The plan worked and by late evening the skep had a melon size collection of bees clustering in the skep - rather more than we had anticipated. We took the skep with the bees to our out-apiary and shook the bees out in front of an occupied hive. As it was now dusk the bees had little option other than ‘to ask nicely’ if they could enter and join the hive’s colony. The bees did this; but not before they did something else! To understand the ‘something else’ you need to know that the nucleus colony had developed and raised a new queen while sitting on the same stand, adjacent to the hive to which we had now taken the remnant bees. The nucleus colony had been removed to be nearer to our house 13 days before being collected. The bees we shook out did not go straight to the hive entrance; they flew up off the ground and went straight to where their nuc entrance had been until 13 days previously! This behaviour was quite clear. Of course, there was no nuc box on the stand and within a few minutes the bees were walking the short distance along the stand to, and into, the hive. What should we make of this? To us it demonstrated a ‘retained memory’ that had not been ‘over-printed’ by the learning of the nuc’s new site entrance on its new site.

We have now finally got round to checking that all our colonies are queenright. This applied particularly to some splits where we had not confirmed the presence of a new queen. We had four of these to check and just one had failed. There probably was a queen in this colony but the only brood present was drone brood. The drone brood had likely been from eggs laid by a queen as the pattern of the sealed brood was relatively organised and compact. Although a fairly full brood box of bees, we consider it now rather too late to try and raise a new queen with these bees. From introducing eggs into the hive it is a minimum of 4 weeks (3 days for eggs, 5 for larvae, 8 for a queen pupa; plus 14 days [minimum] for the new queen to mature, mate and begin egg laying). And it can be 5 weeks, or even more, before the new brood is easy to find and identify. Asking a new queen to start to build-up sufficient winter bees in September is not impossible but we consider this to be risky. Another consideration is the availability of drones to successfully mate with a new queen; many colonies have now removed all their drones. A few colonies may supersede their queen in late summer. These colonies, however, will have the advantage of existing worker brood.

Although not impossible, the chance of colonies swarming is now remote. Having checked our colonies are queenright and the chance of swarming is minimal we will probably not inspect the brood boxes until next season. We can now largely leave our bees alone and look forward to collecting supers and, hopefully, extracting lots of honey!

There is a topic that might well contradict the statement made in the last sentence - Autumn feeding. Do we - and do you - want to give your colonies a supplementary feed of sugar syrup/fondant to your colonies? More on this in the next BeeLines.