Topic: Beekeeping

[Robert_Brenchley]

Not exactly a plant, but does anyone keep bees on an allotment? If so, I'd be grateful to hear about your experiences, and the official attitude to the craft.

[littlegem]

my brother keeps bees (not on an allotment though) he's been doing it for about 5 years (the last in a run of fads) he's now made a business of it, selling to local health shops and he's looking into the farmers market. Unfortunatly, unless u live in outer hebrides or something, you cant make organic honey, but still, your own is always the best. There are loads of websites for beekeeping, but if u want, i can ask my bro' about any specific websites he suggests.
p.s. until he started this, i never used honey, now i use it all the time, in drinks and cooking

[Robert_Brenchley]

You can't produce organic honey unless you live at least 6 miles from anyone using chemicals on plants. At the same time, you're allowed to put chemicals into the hive, and still call it organic. Considering the poisonous stuff which is used to control mites, that's ridiculous.

[honeybee]

Ahhhh thats interesting.

My dear old Mum used to always ask me what constituted to honey being organic?

She would drive me mad about it, asking,and her questions often made me wonder myself.

So its interesting to read the explanations, pity its too late to tell my dear old Mum the answer to one of her life long puzzles :'(

[DeniseK]

Not exactly a plant, but does anyone keep bees on an allotment? If so, I'd be grateful to hear about your experiences, and the official attitude to the craft.

No-one has bees down here at our site in Amersham, but I've just bought one of those bumblebee boxes and a mason bee box for the garden and am waiting to see when we get our first resident...

[piers]

Hi, I'm just about to start keeping bees on my allotment in Boston Manor, London. Hives are in place, and I've joined my local beekeeping society who are going to provide me with two swarms.
Re. the organic question. No, allotment honey is never going to be pure organic. But more importantly, in my book, is the fact that you can guarantee that the bees haven't been fed cheap white sugar to bulk up their production, or treated with harsh commercial pesticides. And in terms of their nectar source being dirty, I once met a beekeeper in New York - who told me bees burrow so far into the flower that the nectar they're using is actually very clean. And seeing as cities have no real commercial agriculture in their environs, they're possibly even cleaner places for bees than the so-called countryside.
As a final reason to keep bees on allotments, think of the benefits to the fruit and veg harvest!

[Robert_Brenchley]

Urban bees often do better than rural ones these days. What are you going to use for varroa control? No need for fluvalinate, which is very persistent in wax, and harms the bees as well as the mites. Mites are rapidly becoming resistant to the stuff anyway. I use Apiguard, which is basically thymol; it's obviously a poison but at least it's not persistent. Only drawback is that it's temperature dependent. Don't use it in midsummer or in winter. I also have a strain which has been bred for partial mite resistance, and I have a colony on small cell, which is complicated but everyone who's tried it agrees that it enables the bees to resist the mites. We'll see. If you need any advice, do ask. Here are a couple of websites:

http://www.beesource.com/

http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/irishbeekeeping/?yguid=12343609

[Berty]

I kept Bees in Manchester. First he first couple of years the bees were quite benign and produced exquisite honey. They then became crossed with an aggressive strain which made it impossible to go near the plot much less the hives. My plot neighbours were attacked as well. Bees are great if you have the right strain. Inner city bees have a fantastic selection of nectar sources which are mainly flowers. This gives highly scented honey. I move my apiary to a more rural setting which resulted in a drop in the quality of the honey in terms of structure and taste. I put it down to  monoculture farming.

Interesting my friend had hives a short flight from a sweet factory. They made cough lozenges. The bees must have been collecting from the factory because the hive and honey within was strongly flavored with Menthol... Nice though.

[Berty]

On Attitudes:
The allotments in Manchester did not rule against. The allotments here in Leicestershire do.

A hive full of bees buzzing around in the afternoon sun puts almost everybody off regardless of the nature of the bees.

You also need time in the middle of the day to attend your hives. If you have one hive you will soon have two... and then three. An old fella told me that and he was right.

[ellkebe]

Berty, out of interest (this is a fascinating thread btw!) what needs doing to them in the middle of the day?

Ellkebe

[Robert_Brenchley]

All you had to do was requeen those nasty bees; surely there must have been a local beekeeper who could have helped. That's what got bees banned here, and there's no need for it. I have a thick hedge round my plot, so it's a case of out of sight, out of mind. I just take care not to open hives when the neighbours are about; you can do it any time the bees are flying, or even when they aren't if you have to. You open them for all sorts of reasons; to check on progress, look for swarm preparations, check for disease, treat for mites, etc, etc.

[wardy]

We had some bee keeping on our allotments and everyone welcomed them and were genuinely interested in them and their welfare, and the interaction with plants.  We had people coming to look at them and used to update the website with any interesting developments

Unfortunately our lotty guy is ill and has had to donate them to a bee keeping association. 

BTW  Ours used to feed on neighbouring lime trees  :)

[Berty]

Once bees become a problem that is when your popularity starts to drop. All hives have "guards bees" and operate an exclusion zone. The problem is that agreesive strains have a larger exclusion zone and act more agreesively when they find something that rouses their curiosity.

Re-Queening does indeed solve the problem however there is a period of time between recognising the problem, sourcing a new queen, introducing her and her prodgeny life cycle over taking the old queen's prodgeny. As you may know the life cycle of workers accelerates into mid summer when the life cycle is generally accepted to be about three weeks as a foraging worker before its death. So there is a transistion as the new queens bees become dominant and noticable which equally noticable once balance of power changes again with the death of the existing queen and introduction of the new queen. 

I would be interested to know how one restricts the hives virgin queens to mating with drones with only desirable traits. Queens also mate with many drones.  I find that the strain of bee is a matter of location and luck.

Re-queening is the usual route to change the trait of the hive. There are many strains of bees and they differ from area to area.

[Berty]

As for what one does in the middle of the day, essentially everything. Check the bees welfare, composition of the brood chamber, eggs laying and health of the queen, pollen stores, honey stores, unwelcome visitor from mites to mice and queen cell production and drone cell which is a prelude to swarming.

Mid-day to mid afternoon is normally the hottest part of the day. If it is hot most of the foragers are away from the hive so the population in the hive is much reduced. The bees are more docile when it is hot. The only thing I did not do in the middle of the day was to remove the supers. I left that to the late evening when the bees were less active. You can of course open the hive when you please but the accepted wisdom is that the warmer the air temperature, the less the disruption for the bees. You are dismantling their home. 

I too used to have very many people looking into my hives. They were always amazed at the complexity and organisation of the hive. Personally I still find bees keeping absolutely fascinating even after all this time.

I used to like just sitting and watching the foragers come ago, the guards checking the everyone in and out. The hive worker learning to fly and locate the hive its surroundings before transitioning to a foragers. The banks, of what I call, "Air Con" bees circulating air into the hive to cool it on the hottest days. There might even be a dust up when a Wasp tried to muscle into the hive. There is nothing quite a hot day watching the bees and the smell of a content hive.

I was not so lucky on my plot as my neighbour was phobic about bees. Everyone else was open to the benefits of bees.

[Robert_Brenchley]

The temper of a hive is determined by pheromones (chemicals used for communication) given off by the queen; a new queen will literally change a hive's temper overnight. Most nasty hives are due to hybridised queens; the answer is to have a native strain which will mate queens in worse conditions that Italian hybrids; these often fail to mate properly in bad summers. Raise queens early or late - I'm only waiting to have sufficient drones in the hives, and will be raising queens in the next 2-3 weeks, all being well. The chances are that they'll nip out for short mating flights, mostly with my own drones. If they hybridise, I can see that easily, since natives are black, and the hybrids have an obvious yellow stripe. If I don't raise queens from hives with mismated queens, I can minimise the amount of hybridisation without too much trouble. There's always the chance of the odd bad-tempered hive, but with several hives it can be sorted out in no time, either with a spare queen or by combining it with another hive after squashing the queen.

[Berty]

My view is that all bees are hybrids. There has been active breeding of bees for centuries. As an example read about Bother Adam at http://www.buckfast.org.uk/bees.htm. In fact I think it true to say that over the centuries more than one swarm has "escaped" from breeding experiments which has lead to the naturalisation of escaped swarms containing European strains. One must assume nature has taken its course in which hybridisation must have taken place. I think you will concede that one can not retain every swarm or cast and that mating with unsuitable partner is a distinct possibility. One can manage  the problem once it has been spotted.

Robert Brenchley started the thread on attitudes to the craft. I have passed on my experiences. Beekeeping is not an exact science although there are many experts. There is room for differing methods, see http://www.beesource.com/ for some interesting ideas on hives and differing experiences in which species, disease, pests, weather both long term and local together with the location all play apart to make the hobby so absorbing.

[Robert_Brenchley]

There's probably no such thing as a totally 'pure' native bee any more, but there are strains which are identical in form to museum specimens from before 1850 (when the first known imports occurred) and to fragments found in medieval digs. Italian queens are imported (along with others) in fairly small numbers from 1850 on, and in large numbers after the First World War, when there was a drive to get everyone onto Italians and moveable frame hives. Unfortunately, as I've found from experience, many of the hybrids around are just not suited to our climate here. Natives for me from now on!