The Beeholder, January 2009.

We all get the quarterly Gwenynwyr Cymru, Welsh Beekeeper, as part of our MBKA subscription. Those of us who do not speak Welsh were missing out on the Welsh articles. But Welsh learner Margaret Franklin has submitted a translation from the Winter 2008 edition. Read her translation opposite and get inspired about what a learner can do. Margaret and husband Eric were the organisers of the MBKA raffles and were particularly good at getting good prizes and prizing money from our pockets.     (Ed)

Extracts from Ceredigion Notes by W. I. Griffiths

Translated from the Welsh by Margaret Franklin

This article was written after Mr Griffiths had seen the film ‘The City of the Bees’ and he compares the attitude of financiers who fill their own pockets to that of the bees who work solely for the survival of their colony.

The season this year has made me realise that I don’t know a lot about what’s going on in the hive even after half a century of experience. They or I have made the strangest mess this year. It started about the middle of summer after returning from holiday and learning from Meiron (the little helper) that there were several stocks preparing to swarm. My usual routine is to move the queens from those hives and if they are young to keep them in a nutshell queen cage. If they are old then destroy them between finger and thumb; no sentimentality in the world of beekeeping. While going through every stock I search in detail for queen cells and leave two that are open. I emphasize the open each time – ensure as well that there is a good larva maggot with enough queen food in each one. Make the survey, of course, without turning the frame upside down, so as not to drown the larva in it’s food. This is only part of the preparations. It is necessary to come back in six days to see that there are no other cells started or even closed. By now the queens in the two cells will be near to hatching and if everything is looking good then cut the weaker of the two cells out. The reason to make a second inspection of the queen cells after six days, is that there will be eggs and young larvae left in the hive after choosing the two original cells. The bees will often have prepared other queen cells by using these larvae and eggs. It is important to remember the ability of the hive to produce sealed queen cells within four days through using larvae three days old – so a stock can swarm within four days after losing a queen. This can happen often when cutting out cells is used as a way of restraining swarming. Perhaps the queens from these cells will not turn out very well – but who knows? Having done all of this very carefully I expected to see the queens laying after a fortnight – but nothing at all. Three times eggs and young larvae were put in a number of hives but with no result. Every time the stocks were opened they were complaining noisily – proving that things weren’t good. By mid-August they had weakened quite a bit. There was a little spring honey in some of them and I decided to take this before the other bees started to rob. It was impossible to clear the bees with Porter escapes and after brushing and brushing they were still sticking to the frames. I must confess they were in a bad temper – I have noticed that bees are always in a bad temper if things aren’t good in the hive.

Towards the end of August, one fine afternoon, one of the few we had, I noticed that a number of the queenless hives were busy carrying pollen from water balsam. After opening them I realised that each one had brood. The queens, raised secretly, must have taken over a month to mate and start laying. One even had a sealed queen cell and I couldn’t see anything wrong with the eggs or brood. I don’t know how good the mating and fertilizing of each one was – only time will tell.To crown everything a lot of them have got a problem with food for the winter. Hive after hive, specially the weakest are not prepared to take syrup. This is containing Fumidil B this year to lessen the problem with Nosema Ceranae. I must confess that this is a lot easier to mix than the one we had in the sixties and early seventies. A lot of us used it at that time as Nosema was a problem. We’ve had a fairly quiet period since then until this Ceranae has come recently. I don’t think that the Fumidil flavours the syrup but somehow or another the food is taken very slowly by a number of the hives – to make things worse, the chemical within a fortnight of being mixed, looses a lot of its strength. Candy fondant will have to be fed to those that are weak. ‘Book wisdom’ says that we shouldn’t feed candy but I don’t see any problem as nearly every nuke with five frames has worked well on it for years. To me the purpose of candy is to save winter food by feeding them from now until Christmas, rather than to use it to rescue colonies at the start of the year. If it is used now the weather is not too cold to collect water to soften it and this will save the little food that is in the hive for the colder weather in January and February. On the whole the bees don’t store candy as they do with syrup but rather use it from day to day. Because of this it’s important that the candy be placed as close as possible to the food (or the bit of food) that’s in the hive not on top of the crown board. The reason for this is obvious enough. While the weather is fairly warm the bees tend to collect around the candy but if the weather turns cold they will cluster in the place where the candy is but fail to use it because it is too cold to fetch water. If the weather continues cold for long they will often be too far from their natural food and thus fall between two stools.

In my opinion we need to rethink the time we feed before the winter. Most of us expected to start feeding in September and to finish in the course of one month. That was in a time when the temperature was a lot lower than nowadays. There were periods of frost before New Years Day with the ground completely solid until half way through March – and this without mentioning thick snow. By now the winters are open enough to feed throughout the period – perhaps as well as often the bees can’t live on stores that have soured because the syrup fed was too weak and so couldn’t be capped to keep it edible.

By now it is time to prepare the Society’s programme for the winter. Something that is getting harder and harder every year from what is heard from some secretaries of our societies. It is so important for everybody to be a Society member not only to learn from others but also to share their experiences with those who are learning. By now we need all sorts of drugs to keep bees healthy and we could save a few pennies by buying in bulk and then sharing out.

From Gwenynwyr Cymru, Gaeaf 2008