And just like that, it is December, and things are starting to look festive! We will be launching our Annual Winter Sale on Wednesday 28th December online, and then over the phone from Tuesday 3rd January. 

As we look into the new year, we will be getting ready for our first show of 2023, which will be a new one this year! We will be at The Beekeping Show at Telford International Centre on the 25th February. We expect it to be a very well attended and successful show with all the main traders from the UK and Europe. Here is a snippet from the press release:

The Beekeeping Show is an entirely new, independent one-day trade show on the UK beekeeping calendar, established and organised by a team drawn from across the UK beekeeping industry.

The show promises to be a first-class, not-to-be-missed annual event for visitors and exhibitors alike, with the specific aims to:

• interest beekeepers of all types, scales and experience
• attract comprehensive representation of the UK manufacturers and suppliers
• welcome the return of European suppliers to events here in the UK
• develop the show into an internationally recognised trade event with exhibitors drawn from around the globe.

Our longest serving employee, John Edwards, bought this newspaper clipping to our attention this week. It was from the Lincolnshire Chronicle on the 18th December 1970. Pictured in the clipping is Mr. Leslie Thorne and two of his employees making rolled beeswax candles to supply to the general public during the power crisis at that time. All three of them still have relatives working for Thorne today! Leslie's daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter run the company now, and both Valerie's son, and Gwendoline's niece, work in our Engineers department. It is great to see that 52 years on, beeswax candles are still as popular as ever!

Please be aware that we get a huge amount of orders during our sales and shipping of orders may be delayed. Also, as the weather turns colder, please be aware that we will hold back orders with foundation if the temperature drops below freezing.

Equipment Focus

Fondant Aid

A new, ingenious little device. No more slicing at packs of fondant with blunt hive tools. Simply push the sharp edge into the plastic wrapping - give it a twist and remove. Remove the little circle of plastic. Then reverse the fondant aid and insert the longer spikes into the fondant. The spikes release the bag slightly from the fondant giving the bees more access.

Available in singles or bags of 10.

Ask the Expert

What do I feed my bees, and when?

The age old question of what to feed and when is asked time and time again.  All colonies are different but the answer below may be of interest to beginners and experts alike.

In the past the English black bee would happily survive the hardest of winters in a 10 frame standard brood box, on about 30 pounds of honey. The more vigorous hybrid strains available today require more in the way of sustenance.

An average colony without brood requires about 300g of honey a week. If they are still brooding, this figure will more than double to around 700g a week.

Disturbance of the colony will more than double the rate of consumption for that week, so it is best to leave well alone.

Colony condition.                  honey g/week.

No brood & disturbance           <300 g

No brood but disturbed            ~700 g

Brood & no disturbance.          ~1 kg

Brood & colony disturbance.   ~1.5 kg

The colonies requirement changes as the winter progresses. The lowest point is the brood less period in December/January. The nest then starts again for the following season.

Month.     Stores total  

Oct            4 kg     

Nov           2.5 kg      

Dec           2 kg          

Jan            2 kg    

Feb            2.5 kg       

Mar            2.5 kg  

Apr            3.5 kg       

Total         19 kg

On average 20 kg of stores should be adequate to see a colony through winter. (This is always dependant on the weather; unseasonably mild years like 2015/16 cause the bees to be more active than usual, consuming stores at a much higher rate than if they were clustered properly.

Overfilling the colony with stores can cause the Queen laying issues in the spring, so they can have too much of a good thing!

The best way is to assess the stores in the combs the bees are to be left with. Allow a count of 1.1kg per full capped BS super frame, 2.2kg per fully capped BS brood frame, and 3.6kg per BS 14”x12” frame. Having assessed the weight of stores in the hive, you may / or may not need to feed.

Bees will take sugar water throughout August into September (2:1 Sugar to Water) while they have the warmth and bees to drive off the water and process the supply. When they stop taking feed in this form (usually mid-September temperature dependant) they will often take inverted syrup (practically honey) for another month until around mid-October. 

If they still require feed at this point you will have to resort to fondant on the crown board.

I have a hook/eyelet fitted at the back of the hive floor, allowing a luggage scale to be hooked on to the hive. This gives an accurate weight of the hive/bees/stores in total. From this I subtract the weight of the stores (I assessed above) giving me the weight of the bees and hive. If at any point in the spring the weight drops close to the empty weight I put on fondant.

Weekly monitoring of the floor insert lets you know what the bees are doing, without disturbing them. Clean the floor inset off. Next week pull it out and check it. You will see cappings in rows on the floor showing where the bees are in the nest, and that they are still feeding. Clean off and replace, repeat... If the hive weight stops dropping and the litter on the floor insert stops, you may have set Ivy in the comb that the bees can’t use, and they could be starving, in which case further intervention may be required.

In the spring stimulate with a weak syrup, (1:2 sugar to water) suggesting a nectar flow, the water helps the bees clean out old cells ready for the build-up. You can also stimulate with a pollen supplement to really get things going.

- Bob Loades

Blog

November

This month has been a dreary one! You wouldn’t know we had such a hot summer here with all the sodden ground! You can see from these pictures that it is not ideal beekeeping weather (or really ideal weather for anything!). It is really wet under foot in the apiaries thanks to all the rain we have had recently but you have to look on the bright side and think that the bees at least have something to drink.

We have checked the English feeders we use on the hives to make sure that they had taken all the syrup we gave them before our trip away last month. They were all empty and as the bees have started to cluster, we placed fondant over the hole in the centre of the crownboard so that they don’t have far to go to get some food. Over the other hole we placed the now empty feeder upside down, just in case the bees feel inclined to clean it out.

With heavy winds probable, we have started to strap up the hives to stop hive parts being blown across the apiary (which has happened before!). This time of year, we find it is always really damp and so we have checked under the roofs and on top of the crownboards to make sure there is no moisture building up there. So far so good, but with the bees doing less and less inside the hive, it is important to keep an eye on dampness as this is more likely to harm the bees than cold.

Next month we will be keeping an eye on stores, feeding when necessary and also considering an oxalic acid treatment.

Book Review

‘The Mind of a Bee'

by Lars Chittka

Princeton University Press 2022

Hardback - 260 pages

£25.00

The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka offers a fascinating tour of the highly complex brains and minds of bees. Chittka is professor of sensory and behavioural ecology at Queen Mary University of London. He writes in US English, and he begins 11 of the 12 chapters with a quote from a famous writer on bees. The text is illustrated with photographs, tables, and diagrams which are well executed but are, sadly, lacklustre in appearance on the page.

In every chapter, Chittka weaves together older and recent investigations. Thus, he charts the history of all the important discoveries made around bee intelligence that are the foundation to present day research and new knowledge. He shares details too about the lives of scientists, such as Karl von Frisch, who made discoveries about honey bee colour learning and dance-language communication at a difficult time in Nazi Germany. Although the book is mostly about the work that Chittka and his team have carried out, it is clear that they have relied heavily on the findings of other scientists to help them place the pieces of the complex jigsaw of bee cognition in the correct places. Chittka’s scientific work has been carried out mainly with bumble bees
living in laboratory settings, but he has also conducted research with honey bees in the field.
There is an introduction to each chapter and a review at the end which is helpful for keeping track of each topic. This facilitates systematic note-taking. We learn that a bee’s brain has a million nerve cells compared with 86 billion in human brains, but that the bee nerve cells are complex, highly-branched structures resembling a mature oak tree and that each cell makes connections with 10,000 other nerve cells. A bee must learn and remember so much when she works as a forager: where to find good sources not already depleted, and how to skilfully work the flowers of different species to take full advantage of what is on offer.
Chittka dispels the myth that worker honey bees are cold blooded and explains why they like drinking warm nectar and how they can learn to associate the colour of flowers with nectar temperature and can predict nectar temperatures based on past experiences.
The anatomy and physiology of a worker bee’s brain and sensory systems are described in good detail. Likewise, for a bee’s learning process including information about acquisition and recall. The topic of pain is covered and we learn that, like us, insects have receptors that register tissue damage and pain but that alarm pheromones flood their nervous systems with built in painkillers making them perhaps unaware of injuries.
The big question around sentience and consciousness is addressed towards the end. The author tells us that “consciousness is a state of awareness that enables animals to live not just in the present but also to have access to the past and the future”. Chittka’s work shows that bees can imagine images of mental shapes and they demonstrate intelligent behaviour with evidence mounting for a simple form of consciousness.
This book will be useful for scientists and readers who are studying biology, animal behaviour, neurophysiology, and evolution. However, the lack of a glossary for the scientific lexicon, may make this book a challenging read for people without a scientific background. So, it is not an easy bedtime read, but it will reward beekeepers who read it closely and carefully.

- Ann Chilcott, Scottish Expert Beemaster and author of www.beelistener.co.uk

How to use Oxybee with a dosing gun

Véto-pharma have been working to find different and practical ways to apply Oxybee when treating the beehives against varroa mites. The video below shows how to use Oxybee with a dosing gun. 

There are just a few days left in our Big Give Christmas Challenge week of fundraising - why not extend a gift to families and communities who can benefit from the good thing’s bees bring?

We want to help many people in northern Ethiopia, who need the sustainable income that bees can bring. Young people like Tiringo have learned to keep bees with us and are now harnessing their power to create a rural livelihood and restore biodiversity.

Right now, any gift you can make to Bees for Development will be DOUBLED through The Big Give. Today, up until noon Tuesday 6 December, every £1 you give will be doubled.

Our fundraising week is halfway through, and we are just over half-way towards reaching our total... You can make double the difference today!

Please help us to train more young people - beekeeping provides them with a livelihood for life.

- Jenny Handley

The National Honey Show

The 2022 National Honey Show had the usual stunning display of honey entries, plus exciting and inspired wax, craft and confectionery entries, well worth a visit just to see and admire all of these. We hope it will encourage you to have a go yourself, and encourage the younger generation to join in as well.  You can browse the usual classes on our website, and there will also be special centenary classes next year, so do look for next year’s entry schedule around Easter time.

The first of the videos from the 2022 lecture programme, 'Bees that Survive Varroa' by Jeff Pettis, President of Apimondia, is now available to view on The National Honey Show YouTube Channel:

Further lecture videos will be released at 5.15pm (UK time) on the first Friday evening of each month. You can set YouTube to remind you, and while waiting for the next video browse the extensive portfolio of ‘how to’ videos and lectures from previous shows.

Richie filming Eric Tourneret talking to Chris Parks at the skep making workshop, National Honey Show 2022.

This year, we continued the venture we started last year, of bringing you videos live from the show. We started with Bob, our Chairman walking through the setting up on Wednesday; Enid, our Judges Referee talked about the judging as it was happening on Thursday. Each day brought a new aspect of the show to share with you, including a visit to the skep making workshop by Eric Tourneret, whose incredible bee photography will be on display as a special centenary exhibition at next year’s show. Many thanks to Richie Litchfield, borrowed from the team videoing the lectures, for sharing his expertise so that you can still view these videos on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and we will also add them to The National Honey Show YouTube Channel.

We hope you will enjoy all the videos, and look forward to seeing you at next year’s special centenary show: 26 to 28 October 2023 at Sandown Park Racecourse, Esher, Surrey, UK.

Upcoming Events

28th December - 23rd January - Thorne Winter Sale, Online and over the phone

25th February - The Beekeeping Show* -  Telford International Centre, Shropshire, TF3 4JH

25th March - Welsh Beekeeping Association Spring Convention, Royal Welsh Showground, Builth Wells, LD2 3SY

21st - 23rd April - British Beekeeping Association Spring Convention, Harper Adams University, Shropshire, TF10 8NB

*not to be confused with the British Beekeeping Show (formerly known as BeeTradex) which we will NOT be attending

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