We have had another extremely busy month! Orders with labels on are still taking approx. 10 days to despatch, but all other orders are now taking a few days to despatch.

The Directors were delighted to attend the Bees for Development Garden Party this month, which was attended by The Queen herself. Pictured here is Paul Smith, Managing Director, meeting The Queen. Read more about the event from Bees for Development themselves further on in the newsletter.

Equipment Focus

Cold Uncapping Tray & Frame Holder

The Cold Uncapping Tray & Frame Holder is a large capacity unheated double tray in high density polyethylene with a 1.5” nylon valve fitted to the lower unit. The top tray has 4mm perforations for rapid draining of cappings. The stainless-steel frame holder takes approximately 13 British Standard Frames across the tray or 10 Langstroth/MD down the tray prior to extracting. When the holder is in use there is still ample room to uncap using the wooden bar supplied. We have found this indispensable in our own uncapping.

Each tray is 30" long x 18" wide and 3.5" deep.

Ask the Expert

ApiLifeVar Questions & Answers

ApiLife Var is based on essential oils and treats honeybee colonies against varroa mites. It’s highly efficient and you do not need an extra space (an eke) on the hive to use it.

How does it work?

ApiLife Var releases its active compound by evaporation. The thymol accumulates in the hive air until reaching a “therapeutical concentration”. This means that it kills the mites, but does not harm the bees. This concentration is quite low: between 5-15μg thymol in each litre of hive air. This concentration is about 10x lower than theconcentration that would harm the bees.

When do you treat honey bee colonies with ApiLife Var?

ApiLife Var is a spring/summer treatment. It can be used with temperatures between 15-30°C. The best results occur with temperatures between 20-25°C. Try to do the treatment in the morning or evening, avoiding the hottest hours.
The treatment has to be done without honey super.

How do you use ApiLife Var?

In each sachet you will find two strips. Take one strip per colony. Cut or break the strip in 2-4 pieces and place the pieces on the top bars of the frames. Put them in the corners of the hive, avoiding the direct contact with brood nest.
Leave the strips in the colony for a week and replace it with a new strip. Each colony should be treated this way four times, so the complete treatment takes four weeks.
Tips for use:

- remove the entrance reducer
- treat all the apiary at the same time to avoid robbering

Can you use ApiLife Var in organic beekeeping?

Yes, the active ingredient is thymol, which is allowed in organic beekeeping.

Why are there more essential oils than thymol in ApiLife Var?

ApiLife Var has four active compounds: thymol, camphor, levo-menthol, and eucalyptus oil. This mixture takes advantage of specific properties ofessential oils: When they are solid, liquid or gaseous. For the treatment, a constant therapeutic concentration in the hive air is key, the evaporation, therefore, must be constant and reliable.
Pure thymol is solid until 49-51°C, so much higher temperatures than under treatment conditions. Both solid and liquid thymol can pass into the gaseous stage, which is needed for the varroa treatment. However, the release from the solid stage is not as constant as when it is in its liquid stage, especially at cooler temperatures.
Mixtures of essential oils are different: the melting point of the mixture is much lower than the onefrom the single substances. This means that a mixture of essential oils is at its liquid stage at cooler temperatures than the single components of the mixture.
ApiLife Var takes advantage of this: In the strips, you can see a mix of solid crystals and liquid components. The mixture remains at a constant balance between the two stages. This means that it is released constantly and reliably over a longer period and is more independent from external temperatures.

June

We’ve seen some pretty hot weather this month and the bees have loved it! With all the water in the ponds here at Thornes, we never really have to worry about the bees getting thirsty, but we do often struggle with the June gap. This year though we have seen a rather small June gap and now there are lots of wildflowers out for the bees to forage on.

As we said last month, we haven’t seen that many swarms this year but we were in the apiary for this one. Once the bees stopped swarming, they settled on a hive – it was a pretty big swarm! Obviously, it was all collected up and hived properly once we’d finished the photoshoot.

This month we have also had exciting things taking place in the apiary, as we have hosted the training and assessment days for the BBKA Honey Bee Health Certificate. The participants have been involved with talks and used the bees here in our apiaries to carry out tasks pertaining to their course for example Bailey Comb changes. This has been on top of continuing to provide nucs for customers so it has been a busy and involved time for us.

As always at this time of year we have huge growth not just in the wildflower area but also the grass surrounding the hives. If the grass is left to grow too tall, it can hinder the ability for the bees to access the hive easily, so we have strimmed the grass round the hives. It not only keeps the entrance clear, but also reduces the risk of any dampness growing inside the colony.

We are also beginning to see the first wasps out and about in the apiaries. Here you can see a fight between a wasp and a honeybee taking place. Unfortunately, the bee came off worse in this scenario. It is something we see every year; we always see loads of wasps but we do have traps and will start reducing the entrances down once we see a few more.

It has been a busy month but next month should be slightly calmer (I feel like we say that every month) as we should have fewer nucs to take off. As mentioned above we will keep an eye on the wasp situation and if we feel it necessary will reduce entrances. We are also hoping not to see any more swarming and are looking forward to the bees continuing to build up over the summer.

Her Majesty The Queen creates a buzz at Bees for Development’s Bee Garden Party Fundraiser

It was a hive of activity at Marlborough House Gardens on Wednesday 14 June for a garden party to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Bees for Development. Attended by The Queen, Her Majesty met with the charity’s beekeeping partners from across the world, honey producers, artists and long term supporters. The Bee Garden Party featured many activities including a Bee Art auction with contributions from celebrities and artists including Charles Mackesy, Richard Long, Grayson Perry, actors Hugh Bonneville, Martin Clunes, Dame Emma Thompson, fashion legend Dame Twiggy and the world’s top honey bee ecologist Professor Tom Seeley, and other of the charity’s supporters. The event was hosted by Charity Patron and BBC Radio 4 Presenter Martha Kearney and TV presenter and bee enthusiast Gyles Brandreth with celebrity auctioneer Charlie Ross adding fun and hilarity to the proceedings. Guests mingled with Prue Leith, Elaine Paige, Esther Coles and Jane Horrocks, Patron Kate Humble, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeremy Vine, Tayshan Hayden-Smith and Danny Clarke at the star-studded garden party whilst enjoying champagne, mead, honey-infused cocktails and canapés all to a musical backdrop of singing, steel bands and a brass dectet! The event raised a staggering £87,000 enabling us to continue our work helping the world’s poorest people to build a good living from beekeeping – creating income to send their children to school, while enriching the environment too.

For more information about the work we do or to make a donation www.beesfordevelopment.org

Bees for Development Global Team Field Trip

Bees for Development travelled to West Wales, Aberystwyth on Friday for a visit to David Wainwright’s honey factory. A great opportunity to spend time with our global partners from Ghana, Philippines, Trinidad & Tobago, Zimbabwe, India and the USA sharing knowledge and skills. Our visitors have spent a week with us discussing strategy, promotion of nature based beekeeping and closer collaboration in making life better with bees.

- Jenny Handley and the team at Bees for Development

The video from the 2022 lecture series due for release Friday 7th July 5.15pm UK local time is Jeff Pettis’ presentation on ‘Global Beekeeping’.

Bees are managed in various ways around the globe.  We tend to think of the European honey bee as the “bee”.  In fact, many other types of bees are managed, and we will explore some of the diversity of bees and how humans manage them.  Starting with hunting and gathering all the way to commercial beekeeping.

You can find this, and many other interesting videos on The National Honey Show YouTube channel.

If you’ve never been to the show and are wondering what goes on there, there are also several short videos on various aspects of the show, including judging, and the skep making workshop - filmed live from last year’s show.

Of course this coming show is our centenary celebrating 100 years since the first show held at Crystal Palace in 1923. There will be special centenary entry classes, which you can find in our schedule of classes.

Eric Tourneret, the bee photojournalist’s exhibition of spectacular bee photographs, and many of our exhibitors will be planning special items and displays. It’s going to be another great show.

Look forward to seeing you at the show at Sandown Park Racecourse, Esher, Surrey, UK
26th to 28th October 2023.

Book Review

‘The Cavity Compromise - A Sustainable System’

by Adrian Quiney

Published by Northern Bee Books, 2023

ISBN: 978-1-914934-52-0

Paperback, 86 pages, £14.00

This very enjoyable book begins with the author describing his journey into beekeeping, and the progression of his adventure. He has a nice way with words, and his adventure begins like so many of ours, starting out slowly, beginner’s luck, getting some education, and getting “bee-fever.” I really appreciated his starting out right up front with a graph showing his successes and failures as percentages over the years. He humbly shares his failures and discoveries, and we can see that his ideas have merit by his growth.

In this book the author is describing how he took management cues from Mel Disselkoen and Michael Palmer and combined that with Dutch Drone Trapping techniques. He came up with a system that allows treatment-free beekeeping and still produces honey crops and overwinter survival by timely splitting and moving between 10-frame deep boxes and 5-over-5 Palmer brood factory nucs. One of the nuggets I gleaned from this book was that mites can out-reproduce bees when a colony can raise nine brood cycles without interruption. This makes the timing of brood breaks of supreme importance.

I read with interest how he learned “biotechnical” mite control, what we call Integrated Pest Management, or IPM. Especially interesting was his description of Dutch Drone Brood Trapping, which I had never heard of. I don’t want to give it away here, but learning this technique is worth the price of the book. This creates a special way of splitting colonies, and doing so at the right time allows full-season mite control.

Mr. Quiney also has good reasoning as to why wintering in 5-over-5 nucs makes sense, and his success rate is very good in this type of hive. He has dialled in his expectations of what parent and daughter colonies can produce as far as the honey crop and bee populations, so that he manages them properly to maximise their capabilities.

With success rates like his in Palmer nucs, buying replacement bees can become a thing of the past. As he so aptly states, mites that endure constant treatments in commercial settings and survive are not going to be controlled with miticides, and the viruses out-ofstate bees bring with them are risks we would be better off avoiding. His overwintering survival rate of colonies in 10-frame boxes still isn’t great, which makes me think that some more tweaking of timing of manipulations will be needed. It might also have something to do with the way he equalises colonies in fall.

Nevertheless, these ideas have great merit, and the way the author describes the bee biology that makes things work along with his reasoning means that we can take his ideas and adapt them into our own methods and climates.

- Reviewed by Tina Sebestyen (American Bee Journal, June 2023)

Rand

Monday to Friday - 9am to 5:30pm

Saturday - 9am to 3pm

Windsor

Monday to Saturday - 10am to 5pm

Scotland

Monday to Friday - 9am to 5pm

Saturday - 9am to 12pm

Stockbridge

Tuesday to Friday - 9am to 5pm

Saturday - 9am to 4pm

Devon

Monday to Saturday - 10am to 5pm

Friday 11th & Saturday 12th August - Thorne of Scotland Sale Days

Saturday 2nd September - Thorne of Windsor Sale Day

Saturday 16th September - Thorne of Stockbridge Sale Day

Saturday 23rd September - Thorne of Devon Sale Day

Saturday 7th October - Thorne Open and Sale Day at Lincolnshire Head Office & Factory

Thursday 26th - Saturday 28th October - National Honey Show - Sandown Park Racecourse, Esher, Surrey, KT10 9AJ