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Happy New Year! We hope you have all had a lovely festive season, and are ready for the new year. Our Winter Sale kicked off just after Christmas, and we have already had a huge amount of orders. If you are yet to shop, you still have time, the sale will be running until Monday 23rd January. Bear in mind that sale orders are taking longer than usual to despatch. Please be patient.
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We can now confirm that we will be attending the Ulster BKA's Annual Conference at Greenmount, Antrim, next month on the 17th and 18th February. We will also be attending the brand new The Beekeeping Show, which will be held on the 25th February at the Telford International Centre in Shropshire.
We will have a full range of equipment to browse at both shows, including new pieces of equipment.
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As usual you can order for collection from the shows, including sale items. If you are new to beekeeping, then come and speak to one of our team who will be happy to help and advise. Also, don't forget to bring along your beeswax to swap for fresh foundation!
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Equipment Focus
Model Hives
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These model hives are perfect for demonstrations, training and exhibits. Made at our factory in Lincolnshire, from Canadian Western Red Cedar, they are half the size of the normal hives.
The National hive comprises of a floor with entrance block, brood body, two supers, crownboard and metal covered roof. It is complemented with the inclusion of several half size frames.
The WBC hive consists of a floor, lift and porch with entrance slides, two further lifts and roof.
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Ask the Expert
What are castellated spacers?
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Castellations are metal strips with a number of slots, that can be used to accurately space the frames in your National or WBC hive. This article describes how the 9, 10 or 11 slot castellations may be used in a National hive.
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Castellations are generally used in supers and not in brood boxes. Beekeepers mostly prefer to be able to slide the frames up and down to where they want them and so choose runners.
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However, supers do not need to be inspected as often or as in depth as brood boxes. Castellations are therefore useful because they keep the frames locked in place at the correct bee space.
When you insert foundation wax into a hive, you need the frames close enough together that the bees draw it out nicely. They tend to make a mess of any foundation frames that are spaced too far apart. If you have Hoffman super frames (SN4s or SN5s), you should be able to fit 12 frames in your super, which is a good initial spacing for foundation. You can also stretch to using 11 space castellations when inserting foundation into your super, which means you can fit 11 frames in a box. The frames are slightly further apart from each other, but the bees should still be able to draw the foundation out properly.
Once the bees have drawn the foundation out, you can space them further apart. So, at the end of the season, for example, when you have uncapped and extracted your honey, you can space the frames on 9 or 10 space castellations, i.e. further apart between each frame. This means the bees should draw out the wax even further into the gap. You should then be able to take off more honey per frame and therefore per box, without using any more equipment. In fact, you will be using fewer frames.
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December
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December is normally a fairly quiet month and this one has been no exception. The bees are really hunkered down now, not wanting to leave their warm, cosy hives and who can blame them. It has mostly been dreary and wet here in Lincolnshire, unfortunately typical for this time of year! However, we did have that extremely cold snap where everything froze and we thought we were in for a really cold and hard winter. We thought that actually this might be a good thing for the bees as they would cluster properly over a long period of time and be ready and raring to go come spring.
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However, over Christmas things warmed up so we took the opportunity to get out and check on the stores inside the hives. We found that the bees were mostly still clustered, like the one in the photo, but that a lot of them needed feeding again! We feed fondant at this time of year as we find the bees take it a lot easier than syrup and it is also much less messy.
Another small job has been to double check that no treatments have been left on the colonies as this is a huge contributor to developing mites that are resistant to treatment. We hadn’t, but it is always a good idea to check!
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We mentioned last month that we would be considering an oxalic acid treatment in December but with the weather being as it was, so mild and then so very cold, we held off. Early January is still a good time to treat, and we like to make sure the mite numbers are knocked back early on so that the bees have a good spring build up. We will probably use Oxybee as this is very easy to use and apply, but we’ll decide for definite at the time.
January will therefore be time to do our varroa treatment but also to start planning for the year ahead. The beekeeping season seems to come around so quickly when the start of the new year arrives, and we like to be prepared (somewhat!) so we anticipate that this will also be a month of planning.
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There has been a special treat this winter with extra lecture video releases. Just before Christmas, Grace McCormack’s lecture: “What we can learn from wild honey bees” was released and next Friday 13th January, at 5.15pm local UK time, Dara Kilmartin’s lecture on Bee Vision and its adaptation to key visual tasks will be released on our Youtube channel.
In the lead up to the centenary show next October we will be releasing some of the live social media footage from the 2022 show as YouTube videos, so look out for those as well. They include an introduction from Bob our chairman, a chat with our Wax Chandler sponsors, a visit to the skep making workshop, and our Judges Steward, Enid’s commentary on the judging in action on the Thursday morning.
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So do plan your visit to next year’s show at our wonderful venue, Sandown Park Racecourse. The venue has a strong environmentally friendly engagement with their vast grounds. As you can see in the photo of the main entrance driveway, they have underplanted replacements for diseased trees with heather which had been covered in bees in the autumn. And there are more interesting plans for the future.
If you want to get involved and have a few hours or half a day to spare, please volunteer as a steward, we need you know more than ever for the 2023 show, please contact Bill: chiefsteward@honeyshow.co.uk.
Look forward to seeing you 26th to 28th October 2023.
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Happy New Year - The year ahead is a very special one for Bees for Development as we celebrate 30 years of supporting beekeepers in the world’s poorest nations. Watch this space for ways to be involved and hear about our very special plans for this year.
Why not make Bees for Development your charity of choice for 2023? Beekeepers are indeed generous supporters of our work and we could not continue without you! Please do get in touch if you would like to become more involved.
Tremendous thanks to all of you who supported our Big Give Christmas Challenge. We raised £50,000 which was match funded to an amazing £100,000! These significant funds allow us to scale up our work with chronically poor young people in Ethiopia - making life better with bees.
- Jenny Handley and the team at Bees for Development
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Book Review
‘Honeybees Vision – Recent Discoveries’
and
‘How Flying Bees Pilot – and other Arthropod Wonders’
by Adrian Horridge
Published by Northern Bee Books 2021
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Beekeepers might well find these fallow months an appropriate time to engage in some research into the anatomy of arthropods and perhaps even more specifically into the compound eyes of the Honeybee.
Professor Adrian Horridge has had a long career in scientific research and a large part of his research was concerned with all aspects of the arthropod compound eye. He has carried out hundreds of hours training bees and testing them to see what features they really detect and his recent discoveries reveal that bees see neither colours nor shapes of flowers.
Although this is a relatively short and compact summary of his recent findings it is an intense and powerful synopsis of his work describing his research on how and what bees see and he compares and discusses it with previous research in this area by Carl von Hess and Karl von Frisch. In his companion booklet, ‘How Flying Bees Pilot and Other Arthropod Wonders’, Horridge explains how Honeybees detect relative positions of their nearest objects by a system called ‘parallax’ when their eyes move, just as an astronomer plots star distances from changes in relative position as the earth moves, and this allows then abundant information for flight. Parallax is the displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines. One example of this is the way we see trees move very slowly as we watch them out of a car widow whereas electricity poles move very fast.
In explaining the relevance of understanding how insects pilot Horridge suggests that we use parallax to reveal our 3D world every day and that robots, drones and self-driven cars need the same information. According to Horridge, ‘if we are to develop a lightweight flying car, a pair of headlights and a rear-view mirror will not be sufficient. Parallax is in the instruction manual for 3D piloting and we would be stupid to ignore the well-adapted animal visual mechanisms that provide new ideas far into the future’.
References for all Horridge’s accounts and research contained in these books can be found in ‘The Discovery of a Visual System’ which was published in 2019. You can also find out more information on his website: www.adrian-horridge.org.
Both collections are available from Northern Bee Books for just £9.95 and £9.50 respectively and will appeal to those seeking to advance their learning about specific
Honeybee sight and flight abilities from an academic perspective and also to those wishing to understand how this research might be applied to their everyday beekeeping knowledge and even perhaps into further fields such as engineering.
- Review written by Jacintha Cloney for An Beachaire, January 2023.
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