Halfway Through the Varroa Treatment

Monday 25th August

It's been strange to leave the bees alone for a whole fortnight after a long summer of checking them every weekend. We didn't know what to expect inside but it turned out everything was pretty much unchanged since our last inspection - I suppose the treatment must really slow them down!
The bees have emptied the tub of Thymol gel and spread it all around the hive. It doesn't smell of much to me, slightly like the liquid goop inside a cough drop. It seems to be doing the trick though - instead of finding 8 - 10 dead varroa mites each week there were well over 200 lying on the floor today!
Nothing else seemed any different, they hadn't even done much wax-building apart from this:
It's a bit frustrating - a whole sheet they've only just begun to build on and one of them thought it would be a good idea to plonk a big old queen cup in the middle. These are often called 'play cups', and considered to be a bit like practise for making a real queen cell.
This picture above shows something interesting the bees do during every inspection. Those bees on the front porch with their bottoms in the air are also fanning their wings furiously but standing still. They are sending out a scented homing signal to any bees which may have been left outside the hive during the inspection. The house bees are not experienced fliers yet so can easily get lost if only a few feet from the hive so with all these bees on the front entrance sending out a strong pheromone signal there's a good chance that any stray bees could easily find their way back again. This system also works in an apiary with many hives because every colony has their own scent, as unique to them as a fingerprint!

Chemical Varroa Treatment

Sunday 10th August

A sunny day but very gusty. Not ideal conditions for opening the hive but we have an important job to do today - the chemical treatment against the Varroa mites. The weather seemed to be affecting the bees' mood - they were definitely not happy today. They don't normally sting unless they have to - instead they fly hard at your head or buzz angrily in front of your face. If it weren't for the necessary treatment today we probably wouldn't have bothered carrying on - it's not much fun inspecting a colony that actually would prefer you to just go away!
Anyway, it just so happened that there were a number of unusual things to see today so it all took a while. There are two new things to see on this frame:
The first thing is easy to spot - a queen cup - in the top right:
I hope this isn't anything to be concerned about. The bees make this super-sized cell to grow a new queen. This means that either they want to swarm (the current queen leaves with half the bees and half the honey, leaving the remaining bees to grow a new queen) or they're not pleased with their current queen and want to raise a new one to kill the old one. The queen doesn't lay a special queen egg - the worker bees will just take a regular egg from another cell and grow it into a queen by feeding it nothing but royal jelly. This super high-protein diet means the difference between growing up to be a regular female bee with a six-week lifespan and being a queen bee, living for over four years! Anyway, whatever their motives are, it's too late in the season to allow this to happen so I cut off both the queen cups I saw today.
The second thing isn't so easy to spot from a distance - a fully-grown drone bee:
This guy is huge! He dwarfs all the female bees, even the queen would look a bit weedy next to him! He has these vast oversized eyes and huge wings because he has only one job in life - to spot a virgin queen bee about 50 feet up in the air, catch her, mate with her, then fall back to earth dead!
Anyway, on to the treatment. Early August is the time beekeepers normally do their chemical treatment against the Varroa mites. The reason for this is that the treatment does taint any honey in the hive and by now the honey harvest should be all over for the beekeeper - any honey stored from now on is strictly for the bees!Of course it's not possible to use anything too toxic or insecticide-like for fear of damaging the bees - what we use is Thymol. I'm not much of a scientist but I believe it's similar to the stuff you find in decongestant lozenges. What happens is that the container of Thymol gel is put in the hive and the hive is then sealed up (as much as is possible - you have to leave a small hole for the bees to get in and out!) for two weeks.
Inside the hive the fumes knock out all the mites and it doesn't harm the bees (though it does affect their productivity as they rely on scent to communicate).
Unfortunately this treatment can only affect the exposed Varroa mites - any inside the sealed cells still are completely unharmed. This is why the treatment has to be on for a number of weeks, so that all the mites still unhatched have time to emerge and then be killed by the fumes. I put the pack on then closed up the hive, reducing the entrance hole to its smallest setting. After a fortnight we'll repeat the whole process and then (in theory, at least) every single Varroa mite will have hatched out and been done in by the Thymol before it has a chance to lay any more eggs.

Not a Wax Moth!

Sunday 3rd August

We thought we found evidence of a nasty beastie in the hive today, shown in this picture:
That straight line of empty cells in the middle looks suspiciously like the damage some nasty tunnelling grub (a wax moth larva) would cause. These pests are everywhere that honeybees exist but shouldn't normally be a problem right in the middle of a strong colony during their busiest season - the army of house bees here would normally turf any unwelcome visitors out straight away. This level of damage would be a sign that the colony is not able to keep up its housekeeping duties.
We found the exact same pattern on the next frame too and it was soon clear that it was actually nothing to worry about at all - it's just the foundation wire being not quite bedded properly in the wax. It can be seen protruding slightly at the bottom of the cells here:
It means the queen had a look inside and decided it wasn't suitable to lay an egg in - big relief!
We've still not spotted any drones yet but there must be a few around. We keep seeing a few drone cells about - this is a row of them all stuck on the bottom row of a frame:
There was yet more propolis all over everything today. We had a good attmpt at scraping as much gunk off as possible but I'm pretty sure we'll find it all back again next time!