13 Bees Blog - beekeeping adventures in France

Make Mine a Pint!

Tue, 19 Mar 2019 14:37:53 GMT

Why access to drink is vital...

As we approach the Spring Equinox (and with it, a 'Worm Moon' apparently!) the longer days mean that we are seeing more and more of our bees as they venture out to inspect the lay of the land. Obviously locating forage as soon as possible is important as the queens will be laying and brood (baby bees) need to be fed. Finding water is every bit as key to the colony's survival as sources of pollen, so we always advise that you put out some water for your bees. This needs to be in a shallow container, ideally with various items such as leaves or pieces of wood for the bees to stand on to ensure that they don't drown while drinking. We diligently do this in our apiaries, along with placing pots of damp soil near the hives (the bees can suck the moisture from the earth).

However, you know the saying "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink"? The same is true of bees; I have never actually seen any bees drinking the water that I carefully put out for them. The ingrates. Instead I find them around my watering can and the chickens' saucers. Their favourite drinking den, though, is the poor tortoise's water bowl.....who knows what it is but they love it! The important thing is that, like all living creatures, they need water to survive and so if you keep bees, please ensure they have access to a safe supply. If you don't keep bees, you can still do your bit to help them (and keep them from clustering around your swimming pool!) by putting out a pot of damp earth or a shallow saucer of water with a pebble or leaf in it. Cheers!

Someone's hungry....

Sat, 16 Feb 2019 18:53:06 GMT

Reassuring "proof of life" in our hives

We all know that the winter months can be quite nerve-wracking for beekeepers: will the bees survive? are the hives insulated properly? do they have enough stores to see them through to the spring? We do what we can, placing foam inside the roofs, or installing quilt boxes, and we heft the hives to calculate the amount of honey they have left, but we don't really know what's going on inside. On sunnier warmer days a few bees may venture out to see what forage is around (and to have a quick poo!) and it's heartwarming to see pollen being taken into the hive at this time of year.

I was especially encouraged though to see "proof of life" (or at least proof of stores being raided!) when I slid out the bottom board of one of our hives today. As you can see in the photo above, lines of wax cappings have fallen from the frames where the bees have been uncapping the honey stores, showing that they have been accessing the food in great quantities. I have to be vigilant that they don't run out of food too soon and so have added some extra candy over the feeder hole in the crownboard, but I am happy to know that there are a lot of bees in this colony and they are all actively feeding. Fingers crossed for the next few weeks!

Steamy Windows!

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 12:11:44 GMT

Our heavy-breathing bees

At the beginning of November we replaced the crownboards on our hives with 'quilt boxes', essentially hessian-based boxes containing dry straw in an attempt to combat any damp-related issues over the winter months. It's been found that bees breathe out a substantial amount of moisture which is trapped within the hive, condensing and causing problems such as mouldy crownboards. Damp living conditions are not good for any creatures, bees included, so we decided to trial this method of dealing with any potential problems.

The weather this winter has been a real mix of very cold, wet and windy, with some lovely sunny mild days thrown in - there hasn't been any snow as yet in our part of the Charente, but we've had some hard frosts. Visual checks of the hives show that all seems to be well with our bees so far (fingers crossed that continues), the candy is being eaten, wax cappings are in evidence on the boards under the hives showing that they are consuming their stores, and on warmer days some foragers are out on the early snowdrops and mahonia blossoms.

Most telling, though, is how damp the straw in the quilt boxes is! One of our hives in particular must have either a very strong colony living in it or all the bees are heavy breathers, as the straw in this quilt box was extremely damp. This was quickly and easily replaced with clean dry straw but it's really interesting to note that the moisture from the bees' breath (and from the warmth of the hive) has been captured in this way. It's good to know that instead of condensing on the inside of the crownboard and then dripping down onto the bees, it has been soaked up by the straw. We're pleased that this experiment appears to be working, and we look forward to greeting our hopefully healthier bees in the Spring.

Bonne année!

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 16:19:44 GMT

Looking forward to beekeeping in 2019

Happy New Year! Even though it's chilly and grey outside, we've been busy planning for this year's coming beekeeping season. It's been fun looking at all the photographs of the course attendees who visited in 2018, as well as it being great to see pictures of busy bees and blue skies. Each pot of honey we have is sunshine in a jar, and we can't wait for Spring to arrive so we can work with the hives again.

Regular readers of this blog, as well as people who have visited us, will know that we have a major problem with Asian hornets. It would be fantastic if we didn't see them ever again, but we have to be realistic and are prepared to start trapping them and generally dissuading them from preying on our bees. Attendees on our courses last year will have seen first-hand what a nuisance the hornets are, and what a real threat they are to our bees. As a result of our experiences we have decided to share what we have learned, and to offer practical sessions on identifying hornets and their nests, and on the different methods of trapping them. We would love for these courses to be unnecessary but unfortunately, due to the rapid spread of the hornets across Europe (and possibly the UK in the next year) we know that they will be a lot of use to other beekeepers, new and old.

As well as the 'Get to know your enemy' (!) sessions we will again be offering a selection of beekeeping courses this year. If you are thinking about becoming a beekeeper but aren't sure what it entails, then we have afternoon taster sessions where you'll find out what bees need and how you can help them, together with practical sessions involving learning about the equipment and how to use it, culminating in time at the hives where you'll come face-to-face with our bees. Refreshments are included, as is all the protective clothing and equipment - just bring your enthusiasm!

If you have decided that you definitely want to take up beekeeping then we can help! Our residential and non-residential 3-day and 5-day courses cover basic theory along with plenty of 'hive-time' to build up your confidence on working with bees. Both courses cover the same topics but the longer course allows for more questions to be asked (and hopefully answered!) as well as a little more time with the bees. For the fully residential courses all meals are provided, and lunches are provided on the non-residential courses.

There's lots more information about our courses on our website, along with the prices and available dates. It's essential to book - just call or email us - and, as bees are living creatures, please understand that we have to be flexible if there are any issues around weather or their health/temperament. We look forward to seeing you here at 13 Bees in 2019, and are excited to meet anyone who wants to know more about bees!

Asian Hornet Update

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Thu, 06 Dec 2018 13:31:40 GMT

A summary of our 2018 efforts to combat the hornets

It's the first week of December, quite cold and damp, and due to the leaves falling we now have a better chance of spotting hornet nests. Granted, they are empty of hornets at this time of year, but at least we can find them. Given the heavy predation we have experienced over the past few months, and the numbers of hornets we have successfully trapped, we knew that there was a nest fairly close to our hives, but we were unable to locate it in time to destroy it. We finally spotted a nest last week - on the other side of the river, but in reality only about 700m from our property. At this time of the year most of the 'ordinary' hornets have died off, but the queens are looking for places to over-winter - log piles are favourites. On a few days recently the weather has been mild and so there are still some hornets flying around, looking for a last meal...what they typically find is me perfecting my backhand stroke with a badminton racket.

As regular readers will know, we've tried many things this year to protect our bees from the threat presented by the Asian hornets. The aforementioned badminton racket is a favourite but unfortunately unsustainable as we can't stand in front of our hives all day every day. Bottle traps baited with a sweet 'n' sour liquid mixture have worked fairly well, although the number of other insects (European hornets, wasps and butterflies) trapped as well as the Asian hornets is a shame. Vita sent us some experimental sticky traps, which are exactly as they sound - cardboard sheets covered in a very strong glue. The struggling insects caught in the glue attract others and these were extremely effective when we placed them next to some honey frames - the hornets flocked to the frames and then were caught on the sticky traps. We had to observe these closely though and bring them in at night because when we didn't, other larger creatures (mice and gecko lizards) were also caught on the traps, which we found unacceptable.

So, did anything work? Well, I'm pleased to say 'yes'! The 'mesh cone' trap featured in the above photograph, has trapped over 700 hornets since September, with another 30 or so in the past month, all of which look large enough to be queens. This is especially good news - if we can trap/kill the queens then there won't be any to build new colonies next spring. We baited the trap with some honeycomb which attracted lots of different insects, all of whom except for the Asian hornets were small enough to escape (the lid and sides are made from old plastic queen excluders) - perfect for our requirements, no collateral damage (or 'by-catch') and lots of hornets.

As well as trapping hornets, we attempted to deter them from hawking around the hives in the first place. Hornets are attracted by the scent of a hive, and so we tried to mask this by daubing vapour rub underneath the landing boards/entrances of the hives. If nothing else, our apiaries helped our sinuses...! This seemed to work a bit in that any hornets were slightly confused by the strong smell of menthol, but it soon wore off.

Our other deterrent was to use a hive muzzle (see previous blogs for an explanation of what this is) - this didn't really work as intended in that the hornets quickly adapted and started hawking underneath the muzzle which is where the bees were. We still think the muzzles are a good idea, they just need some improvements. We are going to tie string or ribbon, or maybe long grass, to the bottom of the muzzle so that there's a sort of curtain hanging underneath it; the bees will be able to access the hive through the 'curtain' but the hornets won't have space to hawk. We are also going to affix the muzzles to the hives much earlier in the year so that the bees have a chance to get used to them before the first hornets appear.

Despite 2018 being the worst year yet for hornet predation that we have experienced, we are hoping we have done enough to help the bees survive the winter, and we are ready for next year's onslaught. From spring 2019 we are offering 'Asian hornet awareness' courses alongside our usual range of beekeeping experiences, so if you are an aspiring beekeeper or already keep bees but haven't yet met this challenge, do get in touch and come and meet the Asian hornet face to face. Hopefully you will then prepared and will know what to expect if ever you have to deal with this very real problem.

13 Togs for 13 Bees!

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Thu, 22 Nov 2018 17:50:30 GMT

Wrapping up for winter

November is here and with it the first frosts of the winter; from 23c a couple of weeks ago, we are now experiencing lows of -6c overnight. Thankfully we'd kept an eye on the forecast so knew the cold was on its way - that and the fact that the cranes have started flying south!

Most beekeepers know that it's damp, not cold, that is the problem for bees over the winter months, and we certainly noticed some of the crownboards on our hives last year showing telltale signs of damp patches. Like the majority of living creatures, bees don't do well in damp houses, but apart from providing the hives with ventilation via the mesh floors, what else can we do to keep them dry? I was puzzled as to how the rain had got in last year, but have recently discovered that the dampness is caused by the bees themselves. As we know, a healthy cluster of bees requires around 20kg of honey stores to keep it fed over winter. The bees generate warmth by digesting the honey and using the energy it gives them to flex their wings, giving off heat and keeping them snug. Obviously moisture is produced by the bees' respiration but who knew it was this much? - almost 14 litres of water is produced from the consumption of 18 kilos of honey (or 3 gallons from 40lbs in old money). This moisture rises in the hive and gathers on the underside of the flat crown board where it cools and can drip dangerously back into the hive.

So, how to stop it or minimise it? Well, the Warré hive has a 'quilt box' above the frames and under the roof, a clever little design that absorbs any excess moisture in the hive, so we decided to adapt this idea and apply it to our other larger Dadant hives.

Kevin duly shut himself into his workshop (aka the Man Cave) with a determined glint in his eye, emerging a few hours later with four perfectly-built quilt boxes, complete with feeder holes for the Christmas fondant. Briefly, to explain, he cut down some old super boxes, tacked some sacking across the bottoms, fastened a piece of plywood with a covered hole in it across the centre and cut away the sacking from this section, then filled the resulting box with loosely-packed straw, keeping the feeder hole area clear. Off we went to the hives where we took away the crown boards, and, in an attempt to stop the little darlings from sticking the sacking to the frames with propolis, placed a queen excluder over the top of the frames. Then we put the new quilt boxes in place and topped them off with the roof. Tra-la!

2018 has been a tough year for the colonies in France due to the predation of the Asiatic hornets (we are still catching them, around 30 this week) but with a bit of luck our bees will at least stay warm and dry this winter.

Thanks to all our readers and a special 'bonjour' to Susan James :)

A word to the wise...

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Thu, 09 Aug 2018 11:17:41 GMT

Why apiary siting is so important

Last night we had a humdinger of a thunderstorm with lots of lovely much-needed rain (can't believe I'm saying that, especially after such a damp winter!), so this morning I went out to check all was as it should be in our apiaries. As you can see from the picture, these two hives, complete with colourful beach brollies, are fine, and luckily just out of reach of two fallen trees! This is theory put into practice - when siting your apiary, there are lots of things to consider, one of them being trees. Yes, they provide shelter from the wind and shade from the hot sun, but if your hives are under them or too close then they are at risk of being hit by falling branches (or whole trees).

If you'd like to find out more about apiary siting, then why not sign up for one of our beekeeping courses where we cover this topic in detail, tailoring it to your own situation?

Results of Muzzle Test

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Thu, 09 Aug 2018 11:05:00 GMT

Update on Asian Hornet control

A few weeks ago we fitted two of our hives with custom-made 'muzzles' to provide our bees with a safe 'hornet no-fly' deceleration area. The thinking behind the muzzles is that the hornets won't enter the zone inside the mesh as they don't like to feel trapped, and this gives the bees a safe space in which to decelerate as they approach the hive.

The bees didn't particularly like the muzzle and instead of flying through the mesh they either hesitated in front of it, like a nervous hurdler, or flew underneath it. Either way meant they decelerated before getting to the muzzle thereby negating any benefit it offered as the hornets were just grabbing the bees outside the muzzle.

We then noticed that the hornets were adapting quickly to this new obstacle and started to hover beneath the muzzle, just where the bees were flying. The bees were also gathering on the wire, easy pickings for the hornets. The only advantage to all of this was that the hornets were much easier to whack with a badminton racket as they were confined to being in one small place.

Given that the muzzle seemed to be hindering the bees and making bee-catching easier for the hornets, we have now removed them from the two hives, and are relying on our racket skills and several traps baited with sugar water and beer. The hornets are still lured by the traps, but are learning to avoid anything large that swishes a racket around - they definitely fly away when we approach. This makes me think that some kind of automated whirling scarecrow might be the next experiment....watch this space!

Hateful Hornets

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 18:13:35 GMT

Protecting our bees

One of the most immediate threats to our bees is the Asian hornet, vespa velutina, which first came to France in 2004 and has since spread across most of the country, wreaking havoc amongst apiaries. A single hornet can devour 50 honeybees in a day, so a nest of several thousand hornets will make short work of any bee colony. They are a real nuisance and every year I practise my backhand by whacking as many of them as I can with a badminton racquet.

However, clearly that isn't the answer, so I also put up traps and try and spot the hornets' nests. Beekeepers are an inventive lot, though, and so various ideas are being tried out. The latest is the hive muzzle and our local Bee Club recently organised a workshop session for members to make these, a sort of bread-bin shaped cage which fits over the front of the hive. The mesh is deliberately the size it is so that bees can easily fly through it but hornets would rather not. (They shy away from anything smaller than their wing span). The idea is that the bees have a safe space in which to decelerate as they approach the hive entrance; typically this space is where the hornets catch their prey, by hovering in front of the hive and pouncing on bees as they slow down.

We fitted two hives with muzzles and watched carefully to see what effect they would have. Of course, the ungrateful bees were not happy with our interference even though we insisted it was for their own good. Soon enough we noticed them flying out and away through the mesh; not that bothered after all, then?! So far so good...but wait a minute, what was this? Returning bees, instead of flying at full speed and slowing down once inside the 'safe' area, approached the hive from underneath the muzzle, slowing down to land on the wire and then walk into the hive. Err, girls, that's not what you're supposed to do....sure enough, clever, ever-adapting Evil Hornet spotted this and changed position. Instead of hovering in front of the hive, the hornets moved to underneath the muzzle, just where the bees were gathering. We have to doff our imaginary caps to the hornets; they are able to quickly adapt to a new situation, keeping us on our toes and wondering what on earth to do next.

We've taken the muzzle off one of the hives so that we can compare it to the one with the muzzle - does having a muzzle make it easier or more difficult for the hornets to grab the bees, or is there no difference? The jury is still out, but we now have three methods of dealing with the threat - the muzzles, the traps and my badminton racquet!

Newbies

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 16:07:10 GMT

13 Bees welcomes a new colony

Last weekend we spent a few hours doing one of our favourite things - rehoming a nest of bees! These beauties had built perfect leaves of wax comb from the lintel of a bedroom window, between the glass and the shutter. The owner of the house wasn't that thrilled at having them there but, fair play, she didn't want any harm to come to them either, which is why she asked us to remove them. It was a fairly straightforward operation involving two ladders, a sharp knife, some frames and a number of elastic bands, and luckily the bees were calm and compliant. Given their colour, we think they are apis mellifera ligustica, or Italian bees - very orange (I prefer the term 'ginger', naturally...) and hard-working. They had been in situ for about five weeks but had already built six leaves of comb and were filling them with pollen and nectar. We spotted the queen bee in the centre of the nest and carefully moved her into the new hive, along with two leaves of comb filled with larvae and sealed brood. We then moved the other bees with the stores into the new hive too, and left them alone for a few hours.

We returned at dusk and were pleased to find that all the flying bees, the foragers, had relocated the queen and had gone into the hive; there were no bees left on the lintel. We scraped off the remaining wax from the shutters, put an entrance excluder on the hive, and carefully loaded it into the car. The next morning the bees awoke to their new home in our wildflower meadow here at 13 Bees, and soon adjusted to their changed surroundings. Welcome, Newbies!

Plant A Pot!

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Mon, 28 May 2018 17:08:15 GMT

Our partnership with Hozelock

We all know that bees in general, and honeybees in particular, are having a tough time of it these days, what with the loss of natural forage, pesticides, inclement weather conditions, and enemies such as the varroa mite and hornets, so it's good to hear about ideas that will help them. Hozelock's campaign to encourage people to 'Plant a Pot' is one that we wholeheartedly endorse, as it's good for pollinating insects and humans can have fun too! You don't have to be an expert gardener, or want to have your own hives, but if you plant up some flowers then you are immediately helping bees and butterflies. Hozelock has set up a special web page where you can pledge to plant a pot, and when you enter your details your name will go into a free prize draw and you'll have a chance to win a variety of great gifts such as gardening equipment, plants, and an opportunity to stay at 13 Bees and learn a bit more about our busy buzzy friends. Go to www.plantapot.info to learn more - Happy Planting!

Bees' Day Out

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Sat, 14 Apr 2018 17:05:56 GMT

Foire de Printemps at the Ginger Cat Brewery

On Monday 9 April we took a frame of bees with some stores out of one of our hives and slid it very carefully into our observation hive. We then took it along with a Warré hive and various other props to display on our stand at the Ginger Cat Brewery's Spring Fair. It was a typical Spring day, a drop of sunshine, more drops of rain, some clouds, a fair chunk of blue sky...but lots of people braved the weather and turned up to see what was going on. We joined creative and crafty exhibitors to present an interesting mix of activities and things to buy, along with, of course, the delicious home-brewed ales from our hosts, the Ginger Cats themselves!

We thoroughly enjoyed talking to the courageous folk who approached our stand, some slightly nervous at seeing the bees through their glass window, others curious as to what was going on. An observation hive is just as it sounds, a clever box with glass sides into which you can place a frame of bees. There are ventilation holes but otherwise it is a safely sealed container, making it ideal for observing these fascinating insects.

If you missed seeing us and our bees at the Spring Fair, why not sign up for one of our afternoon taster sessions and come and see what all the fuss is about for yourself? All our course dates are now on our website, so don't be shy!

An observation hive is a clever piece of kit, essentially a narrow box with glass sides which holds a Dadant brood frame, ensuring that the bees and comb can be viewed without the need to wear protective clothing.

Slurp!

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Mon, 26 Mar 2018 17:13:15 GMT

A couple of days ago the sun was shining and the ambient temperature was actually in double figures, so I wandered into the garden to have a look at the hives. What a wonderful sight, lots of bees flying in and out of all the hives, several loaded down with bright orange pollen. The loud steady thrumming noise reminded me of busy summer days in the apiary, enough to make any beekeeper smile. I decided to feed some sugar syrup to one colony, a boost to help grow numbers, and I committed the cardinal sin of spilling a few drops on the crownboard. Just as I was about to clear up the mess (it's important to maintain apiary hygiene to avoid ant infestation or the spread of disease) I noticed I had a 'helper'...hmm, one bee who just couldn't resist a good old slurp!

Candy - with a side order of plastic!

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Tue, 20 Mar 2018 11:11:28 GMT

When bees get the munchies...

Due to the ever-changing weather, this Spring we are faced with some interesting challenges. The odd warm sunny day means that the bees kick into production overdrive and instruct the queens to start laying eggs. New babies mean lots of new mouths to feed, so the foragers take every opportunity to fly out and find pollen from crocuses, daffodils, heathers, mahonia etc. Unfortunately there have been more cold wet days than sunny warm ones which means the bees can't go out food-gathering and there is a danger of the new brood starving.

So we ordered some special feed called 'candipollen', a mix of sugar candy and pollen, which arrived in 1kg plastic bags (a kilo of candy in a plastic bag, not ridiculously heavy plastic bags...). We slit a small opening in each bag and then placed one per hive over the feeder hole in the crownboard. Normally it will take around a fortnight for this amount of feed to disappear...but there are a lot more bees in the hives now and they are hungry! During the weekly check I was greeted with the sight of a very empty bag when I lifted the roof off one of the hives - the picture above shows that, not only did the bees eat all the candy, but that they'd started to chew the sugar-coated plastic bag too! Don't worry, they won't have eaten it - it's more a case of them tearing off bits to lick clean and then chucking out the plastic shreds. While the weather continues in this vein we are still feeding them, and crossing our fingers that we can stop before our bees develop Type II diabetes...!

Housework...

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 11:22:30 GMT

Spring-cleaning hives

The cold wet weather continues so the bees are still tucked up inside their hives - what is the beekeeper supposed to do with all this downtime? A spot of house(hive)work is the answer, a chance to really clean up all those old frames and collect any wax that can be re-used.

The first thing was to cut out any old honey and pollen stores and drop these into a pan of boiling water - the heat separates out the wax from the stores and the resulting soupy liquid is poured into a bucket and allowed to cool. The wax then rises to the top and sets like a lid which can then be taken off and filtered again, and the remaining liquid can be put out for the bees to pick over when the weather improves.

What's left on the frames is typically some old used comb and the task is then to separate out the wax from all the bee poo and dirt. Last year Kevin ingeniously devised a steamer using an old plastic hive and a wallpaper steam-stripper. Simple in concept and extremely effective, we put the frames of old comb into the hive, plug in the steamer, and watch as the wax runs out at the front of the hive. After half an hour or so we are left with frames full of waste and a bucket of wax. What's fascinating is that the waste stays in the shape of the comb, as in the above photo. We then filter the wax a couple more times to get out any remaining impurities, then store it carefully for use later in the year for our candle-making workshops.

Our belief is that we owe it to our bees to re-use this wax - it costs them a great deal of effort to produce it so it would be wrong to just chuck it out because it's dirty. By spending a bit of time cleaning the frames, we harvest the wax and provide them with some lovely fresh frames in the spring. If only the rest of the housework was as much fun!

Let it snow!

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Tue, 06 Feb 2018 15:31:45 GMT

Winter's here...

Well, the weather forecast yesterday said it would be "very cold with the possibility of snow showers" and it was right! Overnight the temperature fell with a resounding clang and we awoke to a 'winter wonderland'; in other words, a lot of the cold wet white stuff. Kevin reckoned it was only "a light dusting" but that was before he ventured outside and realised it was laying fairly thickly. Even though the common belief is that you can leave the bees alone during the winter months, I still worry about them, and so out I rushed (if you can rush in wellies) to check on them. It's important to clear any snow away from the entrances - sometimes it's so bright and white that the bees mistake it for sunshine and, even though it's chilly, they still try to fly out, but they don't get very far.

As you can see from the picture, the melted circle of snow and ice on the hive roof reassured me that the bees are clustering and keeping warm. We've helped them a bit by putting a thick layer of foam under the roof, but the bees are now snuggled up together within reach of the food. They act similarly to penguins, huddling together and taking turns to be on the warm inside or cooler outside of the group. They do this within touching distance of their stores (plus the candy that we placed above the feeder holes) so, unlike penguins, they don't have to go too far for a meal.

Pretty as it is, I'm not a big fan of snow, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Spring comes soon and the only concerns I'll have then will be swarm management!

Bee Prepared...

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 16:39:40 GMT

What to do while waiting for Spring

I admit it: my 'gardening room' aka The Woman's Workshop, is less 'garden' and more 'beehive' at the moment. In amongst the over-wintering geraniums and pots of cactii are three full hives plus 13 supers, two smaller hives (cutely known as 'ruchettes' here in France), a bait box, a dozen queen excluders, crownboards, metal roofs, and over 100 frames with and without wax foundation, plus several litres of sugar syrup and kilos of candy, all ready for the coming beekeeping season.

I'm feeling a bit smug as, for once, I actually feel prepared. This time of year is a tricky one for beekeepers (and the bees); the weather is hit-and-miss with some cold snaps, currently a lot of rain, and the odd gloriously warm sunny day that makes us hopeful for an early Spring. Why is it tricky? Well, it's too cold to start inspecting the hives to see how the bees came through the winter, but it's not cold enough for the queens to have stopped laying. This means there are probably lots of new bees appearing, lots of hungry mouths to feed, and if the winter stores aren't plentiful enough and the foragers can't get out to go food shopping, so to speak, the colony will starve. The bees may have survived the winter, only to die in February.

We've been hefting our hives on a regular basis, the gradually decreasing weights informing us that the bees are eating their way through the stores of honey they had back in October/November. Out of 10 hives we've had to provide extra food in the form of candy and sugar syrup to just three, so we're pleased that the others were adequately stocked. It feels like it's been raining all year so far, but there have been one or two days where the bees have been able to fly out (mainly to have a poo!) and to collect any early pollen. The mahonia, japonica, crocuses (crocii?) and heathers are all blooming so there is food around for them, but it's no good being there if rain and low temperatures mean that they can't get out to collect it. This year I am not taking any chances; last year we lost one colony at the beginning of March and I am determined that won't happen this year. It was very upsetting as this particular colony had come through the winter fine but then the bees were trapped inside with not enough pollen for all the new brood and they starved. What's different for 2018? I am armed with kilos of pollen candy, a mix normally used to boost the Spring growth of colonies, and I will slap this over the crownboard feeder holes if the weather turns awful next month!

The answer to the question "what do beekeepers do in winter?" (other than keeping their fingers crossed that their colonies are still alive in the Spring) is "get everything ready". This brings us neatly back to why we have so many boxes stacked and waiting - before we know it we'll be managing swarms, splitting colonies, adding supers, and we don't want to be caught out, having to race across rural France to buy new equipment at the last minute. That's why we have it all ready now - cleaned frames, plenty of foundation, supers and excluders scraped free of propolis - bring it on!

We're in the News, sort of... France Magazine 'Learning Holiday's feature

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Sun, 12 Nov 2017 16:20:33 GMT

Please forgive the self-indulgent nature of our blog today as we're pretty pleased to have been picked out for France Magazine's feature on learning and experience holidays in France. Read it here...

It's great that experiences beyond the 'parachutes and bungee jumps' traditional things to do are being included and in particular that lots of the places featured are centered around the environment and de-stressing - key drivers for us, anyway. For us, experiences and related breaks away are about creating amazing and unique memories so who fancies being surrounded by 50,000 bees and having their photo taken?

The feature got us to thinking about what our ideal experience breaks would be and we couldn't come up with a short list of less than about 20 so I think we'll need a time machine to make our bucket list... what about you? What would be on your bucket list of experience breaks? It's great there is so much choice beyond sitting on one's bum all day on a beach!

It's also great to see our good friends at Astrofarm included for their stargazing experiences which are amazing. And to see our neighbour Fred front and centre in the headline photo... he knows which one he is underneath that suit :-)

Stings!

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 16:53:25 GMT

To bee or not to bee....

We are often asked about stings - do we ever get stung and does it hurt? The simple answer is that if you keep bees you will get stung at some point, so yes, we get stung every now and again (usually I am stung when I am not actually working with the bees, I'm just doing something like hanging out the washing!) . Yes, it hurts, but not too much and not for very long. We wear tried-and-tested suits that keep out 99.9% of stings, so most of our stings are received when we're not wearing all the protective clothing. Given that we are often surrounded by up to 30,000 bees at any one time, one or two stings isn't too bad!
On the whole our bees are fairly docile and good-tempered, but every now and again they turn a little more defensive than usual. This can be if we are stealing their honey, or if the weather is turning stormy, or if they are just fed-up of being bothered by us once again....this is what happened with one of our colonies last week. They were especially grumpy and let us know that they weren't overjoyed to see us - the picture above shows just some of the stings that Kevin received on the edge of his veil. Thankfully none of them got through the mesh and he was fine, but it was definitely a case of 'suffering the stings and arrows of outrageous fortune' (apologies to William Shakespeare!). Bees don't sting lightly - it's a big decision for them as they lose part of their abdomen when they sting, which means they die. It's always sad to see this many stings in our suits or gloves because it means that number of bees have died. With this colony we realised that they were not in the mood and so we beat a hasty retreat, thereby saving us and them!

Time for beddy-byes...

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Mon, 09 Oct 2017 16:29:19 GMT

The season's final hive inspections

Weather-wise it's been a tricky year for the bees, who have struggled to gather enough nectar to cap over as honey to see them through the winter. At the end of July things seemed to be going well with the super boxes filling up nicely. Then we had a cold spell and a lot of rain in August and the bees couldn't get out to forage. Of course the queens were still laying and so the colonies had lots of hungry new mouths to feed, which meant they turned to their stores. When we looked at the beginning of September almost all the nectar had gone, eaten by the hivebound bees! It was a bit disappointing for us as we were looking forward to a good harvest but, to be fair, the honey DID belong to the bees so it was theirs to eat...
We were joined by some keen new beekeepers and put them to work checking our colonies to ensure they are in a fit state to go into winter. The picture above shows a healthy frame full of bees, stores and brood, so all seems well in this particular hive. We carried out mite counts and decided to treat some of the colonies for varroa with Apiguard, trays of thymol which will kill a large proportion of the mites that are on the adult bees. Our apiaries now have a strong smell of thyme around them!
As we did take some honey from a couple of the hives, we also had to check that we'd left enough for them to eat over the next few months. Typically a colony needs around 20kg of stores to see it through the winter. Checking the frames we could see that a lot of them are full of honey and nectar, but a couple of the colonies were quite light when we hefted them, so we will need to feed them with sugar syrup in a round feeder. Hive hefting is just that - you lift the hive with one hand and if it feels nailed to the ground then they probably have enough food. Anything less than that then it's best to give them a top-up.
Our final checks are also to ascertain that each colony has a queen to see it through to the spring. We spotted queens and/or evidence of a queen (eggs!) in all but one of our hives, so we are going to check once more and if we can't find her we will have to unite the queenless colony with a queen right one close by. Hopefully we can do this soon to give the bees a chance of surviving.

And they marched in 2 by 2 (well not quite...)

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Mon, 07 Aug 2017 08:56:15 GMT

We've joked about it, written about it and shared a few photos but here is a video of the bees actually doing it! Marching themselves into a new home... and by the way, when will the bees start reading the same books as the rest of us? Don't they know that the end of July is not the time they should be swarming?!? :-)

Click on the photo or the link to watch and enjoy - and do tell us what you think.

Just Desserts

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Thu, 20 Jul 2017 16:17:18 GMT

Honey cake recipes

Our afternoon beekeeping taster sessions incorporate a short break for tea and cake, which seems to go down so well that I have decided to share the recipes here (I serve either the cake shown in the picture above, or small beehive cakes). The cake in the picture is a Honey Lemon Cake made in a Nordicware Honeycomb Pull Apart Cake Pan - yes, it's American...The tin can be bought on Amazon or from Lakeland, which seems to be cheaper than going to Nordicware direct - or you can just use a large cake tin of your own! The beehive tins are also from Nordicware, but you can use bun trays with silicone or paper cases.

Honey Lemon Pull Apart Cake
Ingredients:
375g self-raising flour
1.5 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
0.25 tsp salt
250g softened butter
300g caster sugar
4 eggs
2 tbsp finely grated lemon rind
190g sour cream or natural yogurt

Glaze:
3 tbsp honey
50g icing sugar
2 tbsp lemon juice

Method: Heat the oven to 175c, and grease and flour the cake tin. In a medium bowl combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. In a large bowl beat the sugar and butter together until blended then beat the eggs and add these, mix well. Add the flour mixture, sour cream/yogurt and lemon rind and mix well. Spoon the mixture into the prepared tin and bake for 45-50 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean. Cool for 10 minutes in the tin and then turn out onto a cooling rack. Meanwhile, make the glaze - combine all the ingredients in a small pan and heat gently until the sugar dissolves and the glaze is warm. Brush the cake with the honey glaze.

Honey Beehive Cakes
Ingredients
125g polenta or cornmeal (maize flour)
125g plain flour
0.5 tbsp baking powder
85g sugar
0.5 tsp salt
120g milk
2 small eggs
2 tbsp melted butter
25g honey

Glaze:
25g icing sugar
1 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp honey

Method: Heat the oven to 180c. Grease and flour the beehive moulds or put paper/silicone cases in 12 bun tray.
In a medium bowl mix all the cake ingredients together. Pour the resulting batter into the moulds or cases and bake for 15-20 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the cakes comes out clean. Allow to cool and turn out onto a plate. For the glaze, warm the ingredients together in a small pan until the sugar dissolves, then brush over the cakes.

Bon appetit!

The Young Pretender

Thu, 13 Jul 2017 15:22:46 GMT

Supersedure in action

After all the fun and games we've had this year with queenless colonies and trying to encourage our bees to raise new queens, imagine our surprise when we found a supersedure cell in one of our hives. This is a special cell containing the pupa of a new queen bee, and is different to when the bees make swarm cells. For one thing, it is usually found on the face of a frame rather than along the sides and bottom of the frame, and there is usually only one rather than lots.

Supersedure is when the colony makes the decision to replace its existing queen, and it raises a new one to take her place. The reason is usually because the bees have detected that the queen is getting too old, running out of viable eggs and/or sperm, or is weak in some way. Quite often scrub queens or emergency queens are replaced once they have done the job of getting the colony through whatever sticky situation they found themselves in. Some gratitude, eh?! The existing queen in this particular colony is quite small and so is probably an emergency queen. Little does she know that her work is almost done....

An existing old queen will quite often live alongside the new queen for a short while until she has mated and has started to lay. As this supersedure cell is not yet sealed we have a few more days to wait until we meet the new queen, and it will be interesting to see what she's like. Watch this space!

Bonjour, Your Majesty!

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Sat, 03 Jun 2017 11:13:19 GMT

Introducing a new queen

It's been an exciting week as our new 'Frère Adam' queen bee was delivered in the post - the poor postie must have wondered what on earth was going on when the small cardboard box she put in our letter box started buzzing! We'd decided to buy a new fertilised queen to re-queen one of our hives rather than try to persuade the bees to raise a queen from donor brood, mainly because we want to change the temperament of this hive. It's become decidedly grumpy in recent weeks, so the best way of changing this is to introduce some new genetic characteristics. Frère Adam, or Brother Adam/Buckfast bees are supposedly calm and good-natured, so we're hoping our new queen will produce lots of new bees with a similar outlook on life.

We searched online for a French bee-rearing company, found one and then, in a typically French way, had to download a form and send it together with a cheque in the post....our queen then promptly turned up a few days later! She was in a small plastic cage, accompanied by a few worker bees who were taking care of her. She's not very big, more orange than we expected, and marked with a yellow dot to indicate that she's a 2017 queen. She'll be easy to spot!

The cage had slots in it, and was plugged with a lump of candy. All the books we have say 'put the queen in the hive'...er, yes, but how? Good old YouTube....one suggestion was to put an elastic band around a frame and wedge the cage under it. It seemed to be the most workable solution, so that's what we decided to do. However, having searched high and low for a big-enough elastic band to no avail, we used some frame wire. We wrapped this around one of the frames in the hive, wiring the cage in next to some sealed brood, and gently lowered the frame back in. The theory is that the candy plug will be chewed through by the bees in the hive, eventually releasing the queen; during the time it takes to do this they will have tasted and smelled the queen and hopefully accepted her. If we just dropped a queen into the hive then the bees would kill her as an unknown intruder.

We will leave the hive alone for 48 hours, then remove the cage (provided they haven't already built wax around it or propolised it into place!), and will check in a few more days to see if the queen is alive. With a bit of luck we'll see some eggs and larvae and know that she has started work. Watch this space for an update...

Colour Me Bee-autiful!

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Sat, 27 May 2017 07:48:07 GMT

The many shades of pollen

What a busy month May has been! Even the weather hasn't rested on its laurels, keeping us guessing as to what mood it will be in each day, but after several days of cold drizzle, summer appears to have arrived with a bang. The bees haven't been idle either; they've not been making hay while the sun shines but instead have been out foraging for pollen to feed the thousands of new bees that are emerging in the hives.

The colour of pollen is purely down to the plant that provided it and recently we've seen cells full of bright orange pollen from dandelions. However, we had a bit of a surprise when we inspected our newest hive the other day; it's in a different part of the garden and clearly the bees have decided to ignore the hawthorn and gorse that the other colonies are currently visiting. The pollen being stored in this hive (see the picture above) is a strange purplish/dark-grey colour which sent us straight to the Pollen Identification cards (available from IBRA, the International Bee Research Association) where we were reliably informed it is probably 'phacelia'. This is none other than the wild tansy that we have growing in the meadow, so maybe the pollen is from there....or is it from the field beans being grown in the allotments on the other side of the river, which also provides grey/mauve pollen? We can only be sure by tagging our bees and we weren't that keen on getting that involved...! We're just happy that the baby bees will have something to eat this month.

Walking Bees!

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 10:51:11 GMT

How to break a behaviour pattern...

During the last fortnight, when carrying out our hive inspections, we noticed that one of our colonies had a large propensity of drone brood and not much else. This usually means that instead of a queen laying the eggs, the majority of which would turn into flat sealed worker brood in an even pattern, there were laying worker bees in the colony. Worker bees are able to lay eggs as they are female and have ovaries, but as they cannot mate they can only produce drone bees, males, and therefore the colony is doomed. They lay in an inconsistent pattern, and the sealed brood looks distorted as the cells expand to accommodate the drone larvae. We couldn't find the queen, or any flat sealed brood, so drew the conclusion that the colony was queenless.

The last time we had a queenless colony we were able to correct this by uniting them with another colony given to us by a Bee Club colleague, but this time round the 'proximity rule' means we are unable to unite our own colonies. This rule is about moving bees - you can move them three metres or three miles, either just next door to where they were or a long way away. Anything in between, e.g. 100 metres, and the bees will become disoriented and lose their way home. So, that option isn't open to us. The next way to requeen a colony is to persuade them to raise a queen from some donor eggs, and this is a tried and trusted method. The only issue we had was a bunch of laying worker bees who believed they were little princesses - why would they want to raise a queen when they were quite happy laying themselves, thank you very much?!

The harsh reality is that we had to remove the laying workers before putting in the frames of donor eggs, and so we spread a white sheet over a ramp in front of the hive then shook out all the bees onto this sheet. Bees will naturally walk upwards and towards the dark, so the majority of the bees set off up the sheet back into the hive, leaving the disoriented laying workers behind. It seemed cruel but...in the meantime we removed a couple of frames of unwanted drone brood and replaced them with donor frames from a thriving colony. Now is the waiting time - with a bit of luck the bees' behaviour pattern has been broken and they are back on track to raise a new queen from the eggs they've been given. In a couple of weeks we'll know if our therapy has worked!

Bees Welcome Here!

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 11:16:21 GMT

Placing Bait Boxes

Last week's sunshine and warm temperatures meant that we were busier than usual with our bees. The first inspections of the year revealed that one colony had not survived the winter; it was the weakest one, so it was sad but not a surprise to lose it. We cleaned the hive by blow-torching the wooden brood box, burning the frames and washing the plastic floor, and will filter the wax for candle-making later in the year.

The other colonies however are thriving, so much so that we took the decision to split one of them, moving the queen and three frames of brood, food and bees with her into another hive. Those left in the original hive had already started to make a new queen, evidenced by cells containing royal jelly. We left them with one cell, breaking down the others, and will leave that colony alone for a couple of weeks to allow the virgin queen to emerge, mate and begin to lay.

We also decided to put out some bait boxes - small hives with just a few frames of foundation in them, liberally sprayed with 'bee charm', designed to attract any swarms that happen to be in the neighbourhood. Bait boxes are also a safety net of sorts - we may catch our own swarms if we've missed any queen cells in our hives! A friend from Bee Club, Tony Dixon, made us two superb bait boxes, which we then hoisted up into a couple of trees at the top of our garden. (When I say 'we' I mean Kevin aided by my dad, Alan, while I looked on and mum, Vera, took photos..!) We'll check these regularly and hopefully will add some more bees to our collection. Luckily the new hives we bought last week are now painted and ready to receive their first inhabitants.

Retail Therapy

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 13:36:24 GMT

Are hives the new shoes?!

Question: What does a beekeeper do when the weather is awful?
Answer: The same as anyone else - he/she goes shopping!

In just a matter of days the 'false Spring' has disappeared and the temperatures have plummeted from 21c to 6c, and the rain clouds appear to have taken up residence over our garden. The bees have beaten a hasty retreat and are clustered once again in their hives, sending out messages that they'd really appreciate some more sugar syrup in the feeders, please. Having cleaned all the equipment and made our plans to manage swarm behaviour, there was only one other thing to do: buy some more hives ready for all the new colonies we'll hopefully have in a couple of months.

Given that our bees have come through the winter, and are growing quickly (all the pollen being carried in when the sun was shining means that in all likelihood the queens are laying), we will be splitting the colonies and raising new queens in April. We therefore need somewhere for them to live!

Kevin spent several hours researching all the companies who provide hives, complete or in kit form, and narrowed down the choice to a couple of competitively priced firms. Then we had to sit down and take a deep breath when we looked at the delivery charges. Ok, hives are heavy but seriously, that much to bring them to us?! We worked out that we may as well travel to collect them ourselves and so earlier this week when "il pleut comme vache qui pisse" (polite translation: raining cats and dogs...!) we set off on the 2-hour drive to a supplier near Poitiers, and bought what we could fit in the car. As you can see from the photo above, we got a lot in - four complete hives: brood boxes, floors, supers, crown boards and roofs...now we just have to paint them ready for their new residents. Luckily my parents are visiting next week - guess what jobs we have in store for them?!

Make Room!

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 14:56:27 GMT

Building a new apiary

At this time of year, with the temperatures rising and the sky achingly blue, thoughts turn to spring cleaning, but the sight of dust motes in sunshine doesn't have me reaching for the vacuum cleaner....instead I flee out into the garden to see what's going on there.

Our bees are reacting to the warm weather the same way we are, out and about, stretching their legs (and wings), and I swear they are smiling - we've all had enough of the rain, thank you very much. I'm pleased to say that the bees seem to be thriving, taking lots of yellow pollen into the hives from the crocuses that are springing up all over the meadow.

Pollen usually means that the queen is laying, so the colonies are increasing in size, and that all points to the urgent need for more hives. When bees run out of room they look for somewhere bigger - before you know it, half of your bees can be swarming off in search of new accommodation! This year we plan to steal a march on them and split our colonies before they decide to zoom off on their own accord, but that means new hives and somewhere to put them.

You'd think we'd have plenty of space with three acres but you can't just plonk hives anywhere. The positioning of an apiary is key to the well-being of the colonies, and to the general safety of any humans who happen to be nearby...So, Operation Bramble commenced at the weekend as we attacked a huge section of wild brambles, the idea being to cut them back to create a space where our new hives could face south and were protected from the wind by trees behind.

Kevin was armed with 'man tools', a petrol-powered brushcutter and evil chainsaw, while I was the whirling dervish with a pair of shears. The picture above may not look that impressive but the cleared space is the result of three days of hard labour. We now have a clear site for our new apiary and are awaiting delivery of our new hives. Watch this (cleared) space for an update!

Wait for it....

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 12:52:15 GMT

When Spring isn't quite Spring

I admit it, I was fooled by the warm sunshine, the cherry blossom and the cranes returning from their winter feeding grounds. Here it is, I thought, Spring at last, and delightfully early. Don't be fooled, warned a friend, this often happens, then all of a sudden it's winter again. Surely not, I thought, as I enjoyed a Sunday pint outside, soaking up the welcome rays. The bees were clearly of the same mind as out of the hives they came, shaking the winter blues off their wings, exploring the world in 2017. It was wonderful to see them again and to see them so active - in no time at all they were foraging for pollen, carrying back heavy loads of bright yellow grains. Aha, they found the mahonia and yellow crocuses!

It's still a bit too chilly to open the hives for a full inspection, but I have exchanged the candy feed for sugar syrup to give them a boost, and they are now happily slurping this. On one of our hives I was very surprised to see the queen on the candy as normally she'd be tucked away in the midst of the colony. She soon disappeared back into the hive but it was gratifying to see her, large and clearly healthy.

That period of balmy Spring weather was short-lived as soon enough we were plunged back into winter, with strong winds, lashings of rain and low temperatures. Not for the first time did I think how much I would hate to be a sailor in these conditions...! Checking the hives after a particularly stormy night, just to make sure that none had been blown over or hit by falling branches, I was concerned to see one of the lids had come off. The crown board had a centimetre or so of rain on it, but the bees were still busy inside the feeder as if nothing had happened. Phew!

The combination of good weather followed by a wet couple of weeks probably means that by the time the sun next appears the bees will be fed-up of being cooped up inside, so we have to be ready for potential swarms. We have bait boxes and spare hives ready, and hope that we won't lose any bees - fingers crossed that we'll be able to split the colonies before they beat us to it and decide for themselves. Watch this space!

Get Ready For Spring!

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 17:01:39 GMT

Here's a snippet from our latest monthly update for the lovely people at French Entrée on what's happening in the hives in February...

"It’s been a bitterly cold couple of weeks in the Charente, but the returning cranes reassure me that we’re now heading towards Spring and better weather. Given the amount of icing sugar our bees have been consuming this winter, I am expecting them to emerge into the sunshine with fat tums. They’ll be thirsty too so I’ll be putting out water for them, taking care that they won’t drown in it. Saucers of water with bee-rafts (pieces of floating wood) and plant pots full of soil sitting in small pots of water (the soil soaks up the water and the bees can take the moisture from the soil) are ideal. It’s at this time of year that bemused owners may observe bees drinking at the edge of their swimming pools; they’re not fussy. ".... Read More (external, SAFE, link)

Let us know what you think :-)

Brrr!

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 17:02:55 GMT

JJJanuary in the Chilly Charente

It's been extremely cold here, minus temperatures every day for over a week, so of course our heating took the opportunity to break down...! Luckily we had plenty of wood to burn and duvets to snuggle under, plus I dug out recipes for 'stick-to-your-ribs' meals, so we managed to cope. It was quite shocking to see sheets of ice floating down the river in front of our house; we half-expected to see polar bears on them, it was that chilly. Each day has been beautifully sunny too, with the frost sparkling prettily in the garden.

Most people think our bees are hibernating at this time of year, and it's true that they are less active, clustered together in the middle of the hive, maintaining their warmth and consuming their stores. However, on sunny warmer days they are inclined to venture out, to stretch their wings and have a poo - well, they've been inside for a long time! The problem with the current weather is that yes, the sun is shining, but the air temperature is far too cold for bees. The sun reflecting off the frost dupes the bees into thinking that it's warm enough to go outside, but they don't get very far before the cold air kills them. As you can imagine, it's really sad to be clearing dead bees from the hive entrance.

The bees are also eating a lot to help them maintain their strength (see previous blogs about candy-feeding), and it's important that we ensure they have enough supplies. Regular checks are vital. One of our hives is getting through quite a bit of candy, around 500g a week, so I expect to see some fat bees in the Spring! The photo above shows one bee from this hive catching some rays at the weekend when I was replacing the candy; she clearly valued a spot of sunbathing. It's heartening to see healthy bees at this time of year; I can't wait for the warmer weather to arrive so I can inspect the hives fully to see how they've fared over the winter.

Happy New Year!

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 11:48:33 GMT

Treatment Time

2017 already....! January is cold here in the Charente - lots of sunshine and frost, with consistent minus temperatures, the ideal conditions for treating our hives for varroa mite. Varroa destructor is a mite that breeds in sealed brood cells, feeding on the larval blood, and if it doesn't kill the developing larvae, it emerges with the hatching bee. Varroa can be tolerated by bees in small quantities, but they are dangerous to colonies in that they can trigger viruses that lead to serious deformations, such as shrivelled wings. Basically they are bad news for bees, and beekeepers the world over have to battle with this pest.

There are various treatments on the market, but because the mites breed in the sealed brood cells, they are almost impossible to reach until they hatch as adults and the damage is done. The ideal situation would be to dispose of them before they gain a foothold in the colony, and this is where the cold weather does us a favour. At this time of the year the bees are pretty much in 'lockdown', huddled together in their winter cluster, and the queen has stopped laying, or is only laying a few eggs instead of the thousands that she produces in the spring. This means that there is very little brood (eggs and larvae) so there is nowhere for the mite to breed. The only varroa in the hive are already on adult bees.

The most effective treatment is oxalic acid, a dangerous substance that bees can tolerate in small doses but which is fatal for varroa. Up until recently the application method was by trickling the acid over the frames, a difficult procedure which also means having to open the hive and potentially chilling the bees. Thankfully some bright sparks have developed a way of sublimating the acid powder i.e. heating it directly into a vapour which then re-solidifies as it cools. The vapour wafts its way through the hive, killing and dislodging the mite from the bees, and the cooled crystals are then cleaned out by the bees.

That's the theory....so yesterday, while others were out enjoying Sunday lunches, we donned our beekeeping suits and scary-looking respirators, and set off to the apiary with a 12 volt car battery, baggies containing carefully-measured doses of crystal powder and the W Heath Robinson-esque heating pan. Why the respirators? Well, oxalic acid is used to remove rust from engines, so it's not too good for lungs if breathed in...!

The process went without a hitch - the powder was put on the long-handled pan which was then inserted into the hive via the entrance, and the battery was connected. A foam barrier was placed in the entrance, and the pan was left in place for three minutes. Wisps of vapour emerged from the back of the hive, so we knew the sublimation part was working. The pan was then disconnected and removed and the entrance was blocked up again for around 10 minutes to allow the vapour to dissipate throughout the hive. This process was repeated for all five hives. We placed boards under each hive and a few hours later removed these to see what had dropped onto them. A few dead mites were apparent, which was good news on two counts - the only good mite is a dead mite, and the fact that there were only a few meant that our bees weren't too badly infected in the first place.

Smiles all round - plus we too survived the experience! Hopefully this means that our bees will emerge in a couple of months, healthy and raring to go. We're looking forward to seeing them again.

Seasonal sweeteners

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Tue, 13 Dec 2016 15:43:07 GMT

Winter feeding

December is here and we are enjoying bright, crisp days. Lots of frosty mornings, brilliant blue skies and sunshine, although the wind carries a significant chill factor. The bees aren't that thrilled as they can't fly in low temperatures. They stay huddled in the hive throughout the winter, only emerging to forage (and poo!) on exceptionally warm days. It's our duty to ensure they have enough food to last them until Spring, so each week I top up the feeder in each hive with either diluted honey or sugar syrup. Of course if we hadn't pinched most of their honey at the end of summer, this lack of food wouldn't be an issue! The bees take the syrup and store it close to the winter cluster - it's a bit like having a stash of sweeties under your bed, so you don't have to move too far to get a snack. Keeping them well-fed means that they will survive the winter and have a headstart in February/March when the queens will recommence laying eggs and the colony will grow in size. Foraging for supplies is hard work, so if they have plentiful stores already life won't be too tough for them. At Christmas they'll receive a special gift of candy too - a block of fondant sugar to give them an even bigger boost. It's a good job bees don't have teeth as they'd all be rotten on this diet!

None of your Beeswax (Candles...)

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 16:29:59 GMT

Where exactly does that old saying "none of your beeswax" come from? Actually we had no idea and a quick bit of web searching suggests that it could be nothing more than a simple substitution for "mind your own business"... boring eh?

We much preferred the urban myth definition that had 18th century women covering up smallpox and other scars using softened beeswax. When other people looked too closely they would cry "mind your own beeswax!" ie. stop looking at mine! But alas, there don't appear to be any actual facts to back this up :-(

Undaunted, we decided to share our beeswax over the course of two candle-making workshops this month which so far, have seen 12 lovely, creative people making their own beeswax candles and Christmas decorations here at 13 Bees. We teamed up with the very knowledgeable Paul Clark from Arbres et Abeilles (Bees and Trees) Nursery and Beekeeping, and who's been running candle workshops for several years, to offer four hands-on sessions in the run up to Christmas. And we're delighted to report that halfway through, everyone seems to have had a great time, filled their own beeswax goodie bags and learned a little about the amazing things bees do for our world.

For example, did you know that bees were originally kept commercially for their wax rather than their honey? Our ancestors hadn't really gotten the bug for sweetening everything and wax for clean-burning candles, polish for wooden furniture and other applications were far more important!

There are lots of fun and simple things that can be made from beeswax (although it takes a lot of work by the bees to make enough wax to be useful) and our guests all made a range of moulded, dipped and rolled candles as well as their decorations over the course of an afternoon - check out some of the pictures below. We've got two more workshops this year and more planned for 2017 so if you fancy trying your hand at making beeswax candles, just let us know :-)

Very proud of the other half this week...

kevbaughen@hotmail.com (Kevin Baughen) — Mon, 31 Oct 2016 16:02:51 GMT

It's not often I write as me but this week is an exception as I just wanted to share how proud I am of my better half's achievement...

Amanda has a feature reflecting on our first year of beekeeping in France in the latest edition of BeeCraft, the very popular beekeeping magazine. Reflecting back on that year now, it amazes me just how much we've worked through (whilst renovating our home) and just how much Amanda's passion for beekeeping and our bees is infectious. Not a week goes by where her energy doesn't inspire me all over again!

The article can be found here if you're interested to see what it's been like :-) (PS - copyright BeeCraft Magazine of course)

Well done Mrs B. and thanks for being that constant, positive energy in our French adventure. X

C'est cidre...not cider!

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Tue, 25 Oct 2016 17:45:09 GMT

Chestnuts, cranes, and...apple juice!

The summer festivals may now all be over but they have been replaced with 'automnales', autumn fairs where local communities gather together to press apples, roast chestnuts, and generally catch up on the season's gossip. We were very excited to note that there are several 'cider and chestnut fêtes' coming up over the next month or so, and we visited the first of these at the weekend.

Farmers and villagers turned up in abundance with trailers full of apples which they emptied into a huge skip and, load by load, these were fed into the enormous mobile press that had been set up in the middle of the village square. This piece of equipment certainly looked as if it had been in use for several decades, but it did the trick as buckets full of dark sweet apple juice poured out of the tap at the back of the contraption. These were swiftly decanted into empty lemonade bottles and ferried over to the drinks tent where they were sold almost before they could be stashed behind the makeshift bar. Two euros for two litres of delicious freshly-pressed apple juice - it wasn't quite the 'cidre' we expected, but it was wonderful and definitely worth the effort.

On the other side of the square was an equally ancient contraption, a huge long horizontal barrel, looking like an over-sized cannon, slowly rotating over a trough of embers. Sweet chestnuts were being shovelled into one end of the cannon by a man who clearly took his job seriously as the look of concentration on his face was intense beyond belief. The chestnuts were gradually shimmied to the other end of the barrel, roasting over the embers as they went, and a quarter of an hour later out they popped, red-hot and cooked through with a charred coating. Picking off the blackened casing resulted in burned fingertips for impatient snackers, eager to taste the crumbly chestnut inside - then off to buy more 'cidre' to wash it all down!

While munching and slurping to celebrate the end of summer, a loud 'chattering' noise in the sky made us all look up to behold the most amazing sight. Hundreds of birds were flying in a 'v' formation, calling to each other as they followed the river south. At first I thought they were geese but I was soon corrected by an elderly man stressing that they were 'grues!' or cranes, large waterbirds with wingspans of two metres. We'd been told about this event but hadn't yet witnessed it - apparently over 300,000 cranes emigrate biannually, back and forth, between summer nesting grounds in Scandinavia and overwintering sites in Spain and Southern France. Around 20,000 fly over our part of the Charente, an incredible number, so no wonder they are noisy when they pass by. Since seeing these birds fly over the market square, I've been aware of the noise of even more passing over our garden - they sound like a distant crowd of schoolchildren, bantering and arguing, getting closer and closer, but within a few minutes they have passed by and all is quiet again. I will definitely look out for their return because then I know Spring is on its way!

Harvest Festival

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Wed, 12 Oct 2016 11:52:24 GMT

Reaping the good life...

After weeks of high temperatures and blazing sunshine, autumn has suddenly arrived. We still have clear blue skies but it's goose-pimply chilly and flip-flops have been replaced with socks and boots, perfect for crunching through all the golden leaves that have appeared on the ground. Time to see what the bees have been up to...

In the past month we removed around half of the honey-filled frames from our hives, leaving the rest for the bees as winter stores, and managed to extract around 30kg of sweet amber nectar. Slicing the pure white wax cappings from the frames and watching the honey spool silently into the settling tank was a magical moment; we felt humble in the face of our bees' hard work, knowing that a single bee produces only a teaspoonful of honey in its lifetime. We put the sticky honey-drained frames outside for the bees to clean, along with the wax cappings, and after an hour or so were able to retrieve completely dry wax and frames to store away until Spring. We also cut some pure honeycomb, so delicious on toast!

Beeswax can be used for many purposes, but I decided to make some salve with it, given how many minor cuts, scratches and insect bites we seem to gather between us. Earlier in the summer I had infused sunflower oil with dried calendula petals, and so I melted some of the cleaned beeswax into the vibrant orange liquid, then poured the mixture into small pots and left it to solidify. Hey presto, the result was a pure salve perfect for chapped lips, skin rashes, burns, bites etc.

We rewarded the bees with a few litres of sugar syrup to feed them up in preparation for the winter months, and to ensure that, despite our plundering, their stores are adequate to see them through to next year.

Given how well our courgettes did this summer, we decided to dig an even bigger veggie patch and are now planning what we can grow in it - leeks, rhubarb, beetroot, carrots and parsnips get my vote (garlic can also be planted now but as I'm allergic to it, that's a big thumbs-down!). Tomatoes and potatoes have done exceptionally well in grow-bags (and were easy to move around and harvest in this way) so we'll repeat those next year too - we'll be living on ratatouille and mash this winter! It appears that we are making headway towards living the good life; now I just have to work on achieving a bottom like Felicity Kendall's....

Summer marches on and still no rain

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Sat, 03 Sep 2016 18:23:25 GMT

Whilst it would be nice to see a drop of rain to save us having to water all the flowers and veggies, looking at pictures of the UK today and all the rain, I think I've changed my mind.. After all, how can you look at a sky like this one, approaching 8pm whilst it's still warm and want it to change?!?!

What we do need to think about however, is how to get more of the rain we do get in Spring and Autumn into reservoirs that we can use somehow. The bees and the plants are thirsty and it seems mad to live somewhere that is so bountiful on the rain front at certain times of the year and then have to pay water meter charges for the intervening 4 months! But we don't have a well here at 13 Bees and there are only so many rain butts you can link to your drainpipes without it looking hideous.

So, we're after recommendations on how to collect our rainwater in a usable, green and not too unsightly way - all suggestions gratefully received.

Long Live the Queen!

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Wed, 24 Aug 2016 12:21:40 GMT

How to quash a revolution...

Some time ago we noticed that our very first colony of bees seemed to be without their queen (named Liz, naturally). We could normally spot Her Majesty roaming around on the frames of comb, or, if we didn't spot her, we knew she was in residence from all the eggs, larvae and sealed brood in the perfect hexagonal cells. However, with each weekly inspection we realised that she was definitely absent. Our French revolutionary bees didn't seem too bothered, but a colony without a queen to lay eggs and replenish the hive population will eventually die out. We don't know what happened to her but we knew we had to re-queen the colony and quickly, as worker bees only live for six weeks or so in the summer. Having said that, if they have no nursemaid duties to perform, they do actually survive for longer as they don't have to work as hard!

We took a frame full of eggs and larvae from one of our other hives and gave it to the queenless colony, heavily hinting as we did so that they may like to raise a queen from one of these new eggs. They had other ideas though and had clearly become accustomed to the easier lifestyle of flying around in the sunshine collecting nectar and having a few hours of waggle-dancing. A week or so later the queen cells that had been built had all been broken down again, so we got the message that they weren't in a hurry to crown anyone just yet. At least there were some new bees from all the donated larvae, but time for the colony was running out - the hive was full of old maids, all storing honey for a winter that they wouldn't live to see.

Rescue came in the form of a small feral colony captured in a bait hive by a friend from the Bee Club. We united these homeless bees plus their queen (about 3,000 of them) with our 40,000 revolutionary bees by placing them in a box on top of the queenless hive, separating the two colonies with a sheet of newspaper (actually the 'Times Literary Supplement' but wasted on them as they only speak French!). The idea behind this method is that the bees will chew holes in the paper and as they do so will get accustomed to the smell of each other, so that by they time the two colonies meet, they won't fight to the death. Isn't theory great?! Just writing this makes it all seem like an easy procedure, but moving sticky frames from a small box into a box on top of flapping newspaper, trying not to kill the precious queen in the process, was not as slick as the manuals make it sound. We managed it though and a few days later were encouraged to see small pieces of newspaper on the ground in front of the hive. The subsequent inspection revealed frames full of re-purposed bees, eggs, larvae, sealed brood and a majestic new queen marching around greeting her new subjects. Success - our colony is now stronger and ready to face the winter months. Hurray and long live the queen!

It's honey time!

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Thu, 11 Aug 2016 12:36:02 GMT

One of our favourite jobs of the year is here! After all the work, the reading and learning, the stings and the cleaning of gummed-up equipment, it is wonderful to see that first honey harvest of the year come to fruition.

So far, we've only collected 11 frames of honey (that's one single super and two extra frames on our French Dadant hives) but that's given us nearly 40 jars of amber-coloured, wild-flower honey. We know there has been some lavender in there somewhere too but not enough for us to count the honey as specifically "lavender" variety. To ensure that consumers aren't misled, all the percentages of honey contents are quite rightly-strictly controlled but that doesn't worry us as our girls have laboured to produce a honey we really like.

We plan on leaving the bees with at least some honey for winter so won't harvest again from the two hives we've already touched but we're looking forward to the end of August and collecting full supers (the half-depth frames with all the honey stores) from our other three productive hives.

Thankfully, we don't have much rapeseed or sunflower crops too close by which means the honey hasn't crystallised and should stay clear for a good while. Next job is to add some calendula and poppy seeds to the meadow we've created for the bees and see what happens in 2017.

Over the next few weeks, we'll share our adventures in making mead and healing balms from beeswax (well, be rude not to!).

Forget bee stings, it's the hornets that hurt!

kevbaughen@googlemail.com (Thirteen Bees) — Tue, 19 Jul 2016 11:07:33 GMT

The week after we posted about bee stings, Kevin had the misfortune to run into a small Asian Hornets' nest in the garden with our baby lawnmower!

OK, they are normally up high in trees or often in wood piles but not at this time of year, the height of summer. Regardless, they aren't supposed to make grapefruit-size nests in box hedges less than 50 cm from the ground (according to our book, anyway)... but, just like the bees, they don't read the same books as we do :-)

A quick attack by two worker hornets and then the queen resulted in a very fast-moving Kevin with a sting on his ankle before he fled the scene. So for the record, here's his exact words to describe what it feels like:

"Hornets are about 4 times bigger than honey bees and the bloody sting is about that much bigger too! Burns like a bast**d!"

After about 3 hours, the ankle still hurt and for another couple of days it felt like a twisted ankle... internal pain and swelling, believe it or not. So, lots of ice and elevation along with a daily anti-histamine tablet and after 5 days, everything is back to normal. Well, as normal as Kevin ever gets.

We love looking at Asian hornets and you can see from the picture above that they are quite ominous looking beasts who are generally only interested in catching honey bees for lunch. They arrived here in South West France a few years ago from the port at Bordeaux and prey on the local honey bee populations. Beekeepers in the UK are understandably a bit worried about them migrating north and hopefully they won't become a problem there, but for now, we'll carry on keeping watch over our girls and keep on setting the hornet and wasp traps to deter them (we've got a good recipe for traps for a future blog).

Movie-makers don't have to look far in nature for inspiration for their next 'creatures' do they?

When does a bee sting not sting?

Sun, 03 Jul 2016 18:20:52 GMT

It's not a trick question but I found out the answer this weekend...

We were pulling apart some feral comb (the comb the bees make themselves rather than the stuff they draw out from the frames we provide for them), the girls decided they would rather we left it alone. Hence, Kevin got stung right on the elbow but didn't feel it at all. The first we knew was the remainder of the sting embedded in his suit.

No pain or discomfort at all except for a small red circle on the joint... then the itching started. So, two days later, we're now calling them bee itches instead of stings; MAD!

Feeling weird following Brexit

kevbaughen@hotmail.com (Kevin Baughen) — Tue, 28 Jun 2016 18:28:13 GMT

So this weekend has been a bit strange...

The UK out of the EU and none of us here in France having a first clue what that means. Which is pretty much the same as folks in the UK we suspect. But on a lighter note, there were several other weird-weekend happenings here...

First up, we had to mow the bee-flower meadow but the bees don't like the big mower and (our fault) the ferns and flower stems were a bit long for it anyway. Up steps the little ride-on mower which is a lot quicker but even louder! So, bees not happy and actually decided to partake in a little dive-bombing practice on Kevin who was, after all, just trying to do them a favour by keeping their hive entrances safe and clear. Not one to be daunted, Kevin donned his bee suit and kept on rollin'.... although he did look like a pillock ;-)

Then England whitewashes Australia at rugby, in Australia!

Strange indeed :-)

Flowers, flowers and more flowers!

kevbaughen@hotmail.com (Kevin Baughen) — Mon, 20 Jun 2016 17:10:14 GMT

It’s amazing what a drop of sunshine can do

Three weeks of intermittent rain and hot sunny days saw the garden explode into flower in May! We'd never seen ornamental poppies so large and so productive with most of our plants offering up several blooms each this year. The bees had a grand time filling their leg pouches with bright yellow and orange pollen and spent hours each afternoon trolling around the garden looking for nectar (needed for the honey).

Which reminds us that we must find out if our bees actually like the poppies... no point them being there and just looking pretty :-) Or perhaps there is? Answers on a postcard please.