A Triumph!

Well this is excellent news! I hope it gives the cause to ban "neonics" further momentum and that other retailers will follow suit and remove these products.

The customers of Wickes and B&Q are most likely to be sub-urban dwellers and not farmers, but in terms of the impact, I think this is huge.  Are Wickes and B&Q discontinuing sales because of their environmental beliefs? I doubt it!  It's much more likely they stopped selling the products because their customers don't want to buy them. I'd bet it is a purely commercial decision; they are simply no longer making profit from them.  But hats off to the environmental lobby for making them commercially non-viable in the domestic environment!

All we need now is the major agricultural wholesalers and distributors to follow suit.   

Branding!

It's been a continual niggle, trying to keep tabs on all my equipment. Is it mixed up with my stuff at the gardens, or with Susan's? or is it in Eugene's yard? Finally I came up with the answer to my problems. Branding!

I mentioned this to my brother James sometime last year and James, being James, threw himself into the project and came up trumps at Christmas.  It was a loose specification. I wanted a copy of my tattoo to be the "mark" on my equipment. I simply took a photo sent it to James and let him get on with it.

It took a while, and several prototypes, but I think you'll agree the results were worth it. There will certainly be NO confusing my equipment now.

Oh, if anyone out there wants a bespoke branding iron just contact me through the blog with details of what you'd like and I'll pass it on. A price will be provided based on the complexity of the design! You'll love it I promise!

Pre-Stained Woodenware

Stained Woodenware

My tattoo!

Queen Rearing

I've not been that busy over the winter, but I have started to prepare some mating boxes for rearing my own queens! I intend to try (in a small way) to breed my own queens from whatever local bees are out there.

I was caught out in the late fall last year, when I tried to re-queen a hive but couldn't find anyone with any queens available. When I did finally did get hold on one, I found laying workers had established themselves in the hive before I could install the new queen. And as if this wasn't enough, the replacement queen I got hold of died the day after she arrived!  I ended up having to kill off this hive; my FIRST EVER loss!!!

As a result of this mess, I have decided to try some basic queen rearing. I've bought a couple of mating boxes (I call them my Pershing Boxes) and my intent is to take frames with swarm cells from my colonies (as and when I find any?) and install them in the mating boxes. I hope by doing this I'll be able to prevent both swarming but I will also be able to "bank" a few queens and have them on hand should I (or any of my beekeeper neighbours come to that) need them later on in the summer.

Completed Mating Box

I think there will be a good chance any queens I rear will have genes from good hygienic local stock as there are so many Beekeepers in my immediate area, and most of them got their bees through the EMBA.

It will be an interesting experiment to perform and I hope easy to manage. I don't want to get into grafting eggs, I just want an easy way to rear queens that anyone else feels they can copy and have fun with. With luck I'll be able to report back to the club in the fall and we might even have a simple model for swarm control and queen rearing that we can spread throughout the club!

First warm days of 2013

Friday was warm. About 18C (65F). So it was a great day to check on my hives.

I dropped in first on the two hives I have at the Botanical Gardens. As I hope you can see from the video both hives were very active and the bees were even bringing in some pollen; probably Witch Hazel.

Next stop... home and my hive in the back garden was similarly active. The two hives that are just down the street (these were "weak" going into the winter) were also buzzing! I was a little surprised to see how active they were, but I have to say I'm really happy about them! These three hives of bees had also found some pollen, but this time there was some yellow in with the grey.

Finally, my last stop, was my porch and my observation hive. This was hardly active at all and I only saw one or two bees flying. That was it! I guess given this was the smallest hive (and was given the least amount of autumn feed) it probably has the smallest chance of making it through winter. However, on Saturday morning it seemed to be much more active, so I do hold out some hope it will pull through as well!

It's great to see my bees again. I'm beginning to get very excited about the new season of beekeeping!

Should I go and buy an accelerometer?

This link is really interesting and I suppose we will all now have to go out and buy accelerometers!  There has been really serious issue with weak hives this year in the UK and so if there is a way to help ensure hives remain strong this is great! The really interesting thing however is the timing.  The researchers say they can tell 10 days in advance that a swarm is going to occur.  So at what stage in the development of a new queen is this?  Well by my reckoning if a hive swarms just before a new queen emerges then the process is identifiable at about 6 days into the development of a new queen i.e. a day or so before a queen cell is capped.

So get in and remove queen cells early if you want to stop a potential swarm!  I don't think this is particularly revolutionary as we've known removing queen cells stops swarming - so long as the queen cells are uncapped. Removing capped queen cells will not stop the process. But what could be interesting is the development of a device that can positively identify swarming behavior, without a beekeeper having to go and disturb a hive.

New Blood!

I got the chance to look through my two bee hives at the botanical gardens yesterday, and I also got the chance to show them off to two potential (and wonderfully enthusiastic) new beekeepers; Megan and Shannon.

The weather was lovely - fine warm and dry and really quite unseasonable.  The bees must have thought it was late summer and behaved wonderfully. Even the queens came out to sun themselves and put on a show; I haven't seen them for ages!!! Anyway, it all looks quite well organized going into the winter and I shut up the hives feeling quite optimistic about their prospects for surviving the coming cold months.

I wish I hadn't been so complacent about the weather and had gone straight back and looked at my bees in my back garden.  I thought that the weather would hold for today, but sadly it's been windy and has rained! I'll have to hope that next weekend is fine.

Who are Megan and Shannon?  Two students from Washington University who are keen on keeping bees.  They form part of a surprisingly large group at the university who have just started to research beekeeping and who are looking into the possibility of maintaining hives on campus. They clearly brought out the best in my bees and enjoyed the chance to get up close to a hive.  It's really exciting to see such enthusiastic new people getting involved and I can't wait to see what ideas and thoughts they can bring to urban beekeeping.

Holidays are coming!

The holidays are coming so I'm putting together some gift bags!  A bottle of Honey and a Massage Bar.  There are four "flavours" of Massage Bar this year; Unscented, Orange-Vanilla, Black Amber and Lavender, and Ylang Ylang.  Of course all smell lovely (even the unscented one!) and really there is nothing mutually exclusive about using massage bars and honey! Trust me!

However, for those of you that aren't that experimental, my bars this year come in a tin.  This means they can be kept in a draw either at work or by the kitchen sink and they can be used as hand cream/barrier bars - they're fabulous like this too!

I hope to be selling some at the local farmers market in Kirkwood as well as in a local Kirkwood store "Cornucopia".  And there will always be some for sale from the front porch!  I have even taken my first "bulk order" of 8 gift bags for this Christmas!! So hurry and place your order before the rush!

Gift Bag contents!

Some lovely local beeswax!