A Fluffy New Baby Bee!

Sunday 27th July

I've been trying to get this on camera for a while now - a bee's first steps from hatching out!
As you can see, she is quite grey and fluffy. This disappears very quickly and will get rubbed off in a few minutes.
Another beautiful day for opening the hive and the bees were much calmer today - I think it was the cramped conditions as much as the gloomy weather that was aggravating them before.
They haven't made much progress with building wax in the super yet - we found they'd only just begun on this one frame so far.
You can see that these frames are far shallower than the brood frames we've been using so far - you can see why that is in this picture:
A brood frame like this with masses of sealed honey is incredibly heavy and awkward to lift and rotate freely to check both sides. This much weight can also cause the whole honeycomb to drop straight out of the frame if the wax gets too warm - one of the house bees' main jobs on hot days like this is to try to cool everything down!
One thing which is noticeably different from the last inspection is the amount of propolis (also known as 'bee-glue') in the hive. This is a thick, gummy antibacterial goo which has tree resin as its main ingredient. It is sticky like soft toffee and bees make it to stick everything together.` It could be that a fine source of tree resin has just become available nearby or maybe the bees have felt a chill wind and decided to spend a day sealing all the cracks up!

These 'before and after' pictures show how they tried to glue the queen excluder into place.
We found Amidala quite easily again today (although she only has a tiny speck of her red blob left!). She is visible in this next picture - in the top right, about a third of the way down.
Looking at these pictures it seems hard to imagine there being more bees required but this is still not a full hive!

Building Upwards

Tuesday 22nd July

Now that the bees have built right across the brood box it's becoming quite cramped in there, and also they are having to store all their honey reserves in cells which the queen needs to lay eggs in.
We added a second box to the hive this morning. It's not as deep as the brood box and is known as a 'super' {from the Latin, meaning 'above'}. These shallower frames are used only for storing food, not eggs, so it's going to be much easier for us to judge exactly what supplies they have in stock.
We put a queen excluder between the brood box and the super. This is a large metal sheet with holes all over it. These holes are precisely large enough for the worker bees to pass through but too narrow for the queen. This has to be in place before supers are placed on otherwise she'd get up there and lay eggs in there too!

(These photos are clearly bee-less. I've had to use photos from a while back when I was originally building the hive - the bees seemed a bit agitated today so we didn't hang about taking photographs).

I've also removed the rapid-feeder for now. Once they've moved their supplies upstairs we'll be able to judge how large their honey reserves are.

Population Explosion!

Sunday 20th July

Another sunny Sunday for opening the hive again. I had removed the rapid-feeder last night so I could give it a good clean out so I had it ready to replace today, filled up again.
I don't think they'll need it for much longer - you can see in this picture that they've built up the wax all the way up to the end frame now.
The photo of this last frame shows clearly what the wax-building process is. Practically all of this frame is just the thin sheet of pure beeswax which I fixed in there originally (there is a hexagonal pattern pre-stamped on it to encourage them to make uniform cells - they would do a pretty good job of this themselves but it wouldn't be quite so straight and regular). This original sheet is so thin that through it you can even see the shadows of bees which are on the opposite side.
As you can see, they have just begun to build up the cells with their own wax and will continue to build them up until each cell is as deep as the wooden frame. They do this on both sides of the frame and each side can often look entirely different if they are using the cells for storing different things.
They are sometimes reluctant to start work on the outer side of the end frames (that's the side not visible in the photo) so I flipped this frame 180 degrees before I put it back in. Once they've built this up I can be sure of an entirely full brood box all the way across. Any expansion from here will be made by placing empty frames above these ones.
It is becoming far more crowded in the hive and it's harder to see much other than thousands of bees scurrying around. Thankfully we've now had a few weeks learning from watching a small colony so we're getting better at spotting things quickly and even pushing the bees out of the way with our fingers if necessary!
Something very obvious on this frame is that large raised cell in the centre of all those other empty ones. This one is a drone cell - a male bee. Because these cells are larger than those of the females they are easy to spot as they stick out quite a bit higher. Also, they take a few days longer to hatch which explains why this one is still there when all his sisters around him have climbed out and started work already! (There's one in the centre left, just sticking her head out for the first time).
Something else we spotted straight away is that Amidala has managed to remove her red spot! She's clearly visible on the photo above (you'll know the queen bee when you see her - she has a huge dark abdomen). It could be that my paint blob hadn't dried enough last time so we decided to try again.
Of course it could be that the authentic 'bee-paint' I'm using is just so non-toxic that it's just licked stright off by the bees - it does look and smell just like the kids' poster paint (but in a tiny nail varnish style pot and about a thousand times more expensive!)

The Varroa Mite

Wednesday 16th July

The health of honey bees has had quite a bit of media attention recently and this little fellow in the photo whom I found in my hive today is probably the main reason for such concern:

"VARROA DESTRUCTOR"
The name may sound like a massive exaggeration for such a tiny mite but the damage they cause does justify it.

The varroa {pronounced "va-ro-wa"} mite's entire life cycle takes place inside the hive. The adult varroa, like this one, lays its eggs on the developing bee larva before it is sealed inside the cell. They lie hidden here alongside the growing larva until the cell is sealed by the house bees. At this point the juvenile mites hatch out and attach themselves to the developing bee larva. By the time the adult bee hatches about a fortnight later (often poorly grown and sometimes with deformities because of the parasitic feeding) several adult varroa mites emerge with it. These mites attach themselves to adult bees, feeding off their bodies and further weakening them, making the whole colony extremely vulnerable to all the regular pests and diseases which they can normally cope with.The cycle continues like this and the mite population can grow massively faster than the bee population because several mites hatch out with each bee.

Unfortunately varroa mites have recently become completely endemic in this country, meaning there is not a single colony in Britain which does not have some level of infestation. The same is true of Europe, the USA, Asia and practically every other part of the planet so I'm not the least bit surprised to discover one mite in my colony.

I found this one because I have a 'varroa floor' installed on my hive. It is basically a false floor, made of wire mesh instead of solid wood. The holes in the mesh are too small for bees to pass through but if I place a tray smeared with vaseline under it I can monitor everything which falls off the bees inside the hive.
Usually it's just lumps of pollen which get dropped (that's what these dark lumps are in the photo) and flakes of wax (the orange dust visible) but its main purpose is so that any varroa mite which gets brushed off cannot climb back up to attach itself to another bee.
It is estimated that 10-20% of the varroa mites can be removed just by using this method throughout the year. That's not nearly enough to actually reduce the number of mites in the hive (they reproduce much faster than a rate of 110-120%!) so it isn't a solution to the infestation but it does help and also means that I can accurately monitor just how bad the infestation is.

There are methods for treating the colony to actively reduce the number of varroa mites but doing that right now would actually inconvenience the bees more than a mild infestation of varroa would. All I plan to do now is to keep monitoring the level and plan for treatment later in the year.

Population Increase

Sunday 13th July

Yet another sunny Sunday - perfect weather for an inspection again!
As you can see, the bees have started spreading right across the brood box but there are still two and a half untouched frames on each side (they have filled 7.5 out of 12). I wont let them build upwards until they've spread all the way up to both end frames.
We were in a bit of a hurry today but just had a quick look through to check that all's ok. It's clear that the population has massively increased since last week. It's hard to estimate how many bees there are but it felt noticeably 'busier' than this time last week. You can see some bees about to hatch out here - the wax covering the cells has thinned as the growing bee nibbles its way out.
Our Amidala is clearly a hard-working queen - she's laying eggs in every available space. There are even a load in this piece of brace comb which I had to slice off because it was overhanging. It seems a shame to destroy healthy eggs but leaving them would make the colony less productive in the long run. Besides, they're not entirely wasted - it's good to be able to show them to friends and family! It's not easy to see them unless the light and angle are ideal - they look like minuscule grains of rice, standing on one end.

Marking the Queen

Sunday 6th July

Beautiful weather again this morning and with heavy rain forecast for the afternoon we were keen to get out to the bees as soon as possible today. It was rather cloudy so these photos aren't as clear as I'd like but the queen is there on this next picture - I was taking a photo, just of the frame, and then spotted her immediately afterwards!
Once I'd pushed all the other bees out of the way I put a queen cage over her to stop her from scooting off. I didn't even consider picking her up with my fingers - apparently it isn't hard but I'd rather practise on less important bees first!
Once she was pinned in place it was easy to dab a blob of bee-paint on her back and officially christen her - Queen Amidala, long may she reign in peace and prosperity! We waited about a minute for the paint to dry then let her toddle off again. If you look closely at this photo you can see some 'baby' bees just hatching out. Above the queen there are a few cells with the wax covering slightly broken and there are little bee noses poking out! The queen was busy laying eggs in some of these recently-vacated cells when we spotted her so they can only have been empty for a couple of hours at most.

An interesting thing we noticed during this inspection was this fabulous comb sculpture attached to the bottom of a frame. This clearly shows why it is necessary to give the bees that thin layer of beeswax sheet in the 'empty' frames: Natural comb (also known as 'brace comb') may look beautiful but it is very hard to lift out without damaging it. I had to slice it off before I put the frame back in.