The bees are well and truely back to work! We would like to a say a huge thank you for all your orders already this season, there has been a colossal amount. We are working our very best to get these orders out as quick as we can, orders with foundation and frame parts are taking up to a week to dispatch. Smaller orders will leave us within a few days. We appreciate your patience at that busy time.

We have been taking part in No Mow May here at Head Office. We know it can feel like a difficult concept for gardeners, the “unkept” lawn, but there are many bonuses, not just for honeybees but for all pollinators and wildlife. So as No Mow May comes to an end, here are some photos from our gardener, including a beautiful Bee orchid!

Equipment Focus

Manual UniMel

A three frame stainless steel tangential manual extractor. This extractor will take all size frames apart from 14"x12", Dadant Deep, Langstroth Jumbo and Commercial Deep (16"x10").

Manual operation with a robust stainless steel cage with a split two part plastic lid with legs that lift the extractor 300mm from the ground.

£230

For a video showing how to use and load a similar model see below:

Ask the Expert

How do I know when it is time to re-queen?

Queens are without a doubt an integral part of a honeybee colony - without one the rest of the bees are doomed! Honeybees are very capable of looking after themselves, but there are instances when you may decide that for the good of the colony, it is best to intervene and introduce a new queen. This could be either a virgin or a mated queen, depending on what you have available at the time, the state of the colony and why you are re-queening in the first place.

The reasons for re-queening are numerous, in part due to the complicated nature of bees themselves but also your style of beekeeping and what you would like to achieve with the colony. Below are some ideas as to why you may decide to requeen:

• Temperament. Has the existing queen started producing bees which are not as friendly as you would like or that they used to be? With some strains of bee, over generations the queen can start to produce bees which are more and more aggressive.
• Poor brood pattern. There should be plenty of worker brood in a nice, oval shape over several frames with stores around the outside. Is the brood pattern patchy and inconsistent? Is there drone brood where there should be worker brood? If so, the queen might need replacing.  
• Drone layer. Unfortunately, queens sometimes fail and start laying only unfertilised eggs, which become drones. If this happens, we call her a drone laying queen. This is not something you can fix and she will have to be re-queened quickly if you want to save the remaining bees.
• Overall plan for the colony. If you want high production, you will need a young, vigorous queen. If you want a calm colony, you need a strain of bee which produces calm bees.
• Swarming. Has she swarmed before? If she swarmed last year, she is likely to swarm again this year. The older the queen, the more likely she is to swarm.
• Queen cells. Once the bees start making queen cells, they are looking to make a new queen.  You may not want to breed from the existing queen, or you might want to make sure there is little to no gap in brood rearing.
• Size. Does she look small and runty? This is not always an indicator of health or productivity but if she is also not laying well or at all, she may be a virgin or not properly mated.
• Damage. Is she damaged/injured? This doesn’t necessarily mean she is going to be no good, but it depends on the time of year – at the start of the year it may be best to requeen in case she doesn’t lay well through the season, or the bees attack her. If she’s damaged at the end of the year, there are fewer drones to get mated with so you would probably have to leave re-queening until the beginning of next season.
• Comparison with other queens. Is the colony much less productive, more prone to viruses/disease or more aggressive than others in the apiary? You may want to replace her.   
• Performance. Look back at records of the previous year/s and see how she has performed – is her productivity declining? Are the bees getting more aggressive? Has her colony been suffering from sacbrood/chalkbrood?
• Colour. Is she the wrong colour? This sounds harsh but some people find certain queens difficult to spot on a frame, which can be infuriating when trying to find her for important manipulations. It is often very tricky to find dark queens.
• Accidents. If the queen is accidentally squashed or the bees ball her to death, she will need replacing.

This list is by no means exhaustive, but as you can see, there are plenty of reasons why you may choose to re-queen!

May

This month has been very exciting and busy, as May usually is. After a slow start, the weather really picked up and we have seen the beekeeping season kick off. However, as we enter June, it looks like we have taken yet another dive into some depressing temperatures for the time of year, so we are finding beekeeping a bit stop-start this season.

The cold weather at the start of the month has meant that some of our frames, particularly the larger sizes of the 14”x12” have not been drawn out properly. As you can see, some of the bees have made a bit of a mess of the foundation here. That said, most of them, like this one, have been drawn out well and we have seen a lot of brood and stores filling them up.

It is always nice to see the queens, even if that is not what we are looking for. She gives us reassurance that all is well (generally!) and here you can see a lovely queen we managed to get a photo of.

May is always our busiest month as we do artificial swarms and take off nucs. That is not to say we haven’t had any rogue swarms, we have, but not that many so far this year. Sometimes it seems it is almost inevitable that some will swarm, regardless of what the books say and what we have done to prevent it.

The nucs we take off at this time of year tend to be ones on British Standard frames that you would find in a National or WBC hive. As the season progresses and the bees have chance to draw out even more comb during warmer spells, we find we can take off more 14x12 and Langstroth nucs than we can earlier in the season. We don’t run as many of these types of hives but we are looking to increase year on year to provide nucs for beekeepers who prefer to use those hives.

In June we will continue to do our swarm control and take off nucs, however we anticipate a slightly slower month, especially as it comes to an end. We always keep in mind the June gap, where we may need to keep an eye on the honey flow and feed if necessary.

You are invited to a unique celebration of all things Bee!

Our Bee Garden Party Fundraiser is only two weeks away – come and join us on Wednesday 14th June 2023, 4 – 7.30pm in the beautiful private gardens of Marlborough House on the Mall by kind permission of HM The King. The party will be hosted by Martha Kearney and feature a live auction with Gyles Brandreth and Charlie Ross.  

Bee doodles and artworks are up for auction online from over 100 celebrities and artists including: internationally acclaimed author and illustrator Charles Mackesy; Turner prize winning artist, Richard Long; Coronation concert compere, Hugh Bonneville, actor Martin Clunes, British portrait painter Tai-Shan Schierenberg, fashion legend Dame Twiggy and Scottish actor Alan Cumming, Prof Tom Seeley and dozens of others. Alongside a prize auction offering glamorous treats and experiences, the Bee Art and Prize Auctions are now live at www.bees.org do take a look and start bidding.

The event itself will have a wonderful array of displays and refreshments including champagne, mead and honey cocktails, all to a background of fabulous music, entertainment and bee fashion. By celebrating all things bee, the event underscores the critical role that bees play in maintaining the environment. Immerse yourself in the beautiful surroundings while helping us raise much needed funds, enabling us to transform even more people’s lives through beekeeping.

To purchase tickets to this unique fundraising event please visit www.bees.org

RHS Malvern 11-14 May

We had a wonderful time at RHS Malvern last month with the ‘Bees for Development' garden winning gold. The garden was all a buzz with talk of bee friendly plants and planting suggestions. With visits from Alan Titchmarsh and Tayshan Hayden-Smith and featured on BBC2 Gardeners World, we couldn’t have asked for more. A huge thank you to the designers Rick Ford and Katie Gentle and Humble Bee Gardeners for their design, skill and hard work. Thank you also to E.H. Thorne for their beautiful hives on display in the garden.

- Jenny Handley and the team at Bees for Development

Are any of your young relatives interested and active beekeepers? Are you involved with any school or scout apiaries? Will you be attending any agricultural shows this summer? If so, do get in touch and ask for some of our leaflets for distribution. We have both leaflets about the special centenary show this year; and also leaflets to encourage entries in the junior classes, with illustrations from previous years and an entry form. Contact Val: publicity@honeyshow.co.uk

Our latest video release from the National Honey Show 2022 lectures is from Willie Robson's talk on" 60 years as a commercial beekeeper".

He has been a full-time commercial beekeeper, keeping black bees in the traditional manner producing oil seed rape, heather and cut comb honey as well as cosmetics and polish. Chain Bridge Honey Farm is presently trading directly into 500 retail outlets, selling products that are produced from their bees that are kept within 40 miles of Berwick - upon - Tweed in Northumberland, a harsh environment. Willie is currently experiencing difficult times with the bees due to queenlessness. In this wide ranging talk, Willie covers managing the bees using methods that many beekeepers will be unfamiliar with and may not be in books, hive manufacture, processing and marketing his products and the kind of bees that will survive and produce good honey crops in the area.

Have you explored our special, historic, centenary classes some of which present challenges and need some preparation – starting asap.  Members should have received Schedules by now, and together with entry forms the Schedule of classes can also be found on our website.

As well as the planned usual programme of interesting and useful workshops, we have a full (provisional – always check time and day beforehand) programme of lectures planned starting with Thursday morning:

Paul Jupp: “Meadow in my garden”
Randy Oliver: “Concepts in Varroa Management”
Andrew Abrahams: “The Colonsay Black Bee Reserve and Adaptive Traits of Apis mellifera mellifera (A.m.m.)”

The full programme will be on our website very soon.

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

Book Review

‘Steve Taber on Beekeeping’

From the archives of The Beekeepers Quarterly Vol 2.

Paperback: 77 pages

Publisher: Northern Bee Books 2015

ISBN 978-1-908904-88-1

£9.95

This slim but informative volume, derived from the archives of The Beekeepers Quarterly, brings together an eclectic collection of short articles across many different areas of beekeeping. Subdivided into sections, including ‘What do bees want?’, ‘Health and pesticides’, ‘Queen bees and breeding’, ‘Honeybee biology, behaviour and experiments’ and ‘Honey’ – there is something in here to appeal to everyone, whatever their beekeeping leanings.

Taber was a notable authority in the beekeeping world, working as both an academic and commercial beekeeper. He was an experimentalist at heart, and this comes across very clearly in his writing, with the experimental or empirical foundation of his understanding of beekeeping described in very digestible form. There are some items that are purely of academic interest, but which offer a perspective on the knowledge that we may now take for granted, and techniques that we use in day-to-day beekeeping without really thinking about how these things have come about. And interspersed with the beekeeping narrative are many short anecdotes that reveal Taber’s deep knowledge of the craft and its history.

There is a common theme throughout his writing – he is a clear advocate of working with the bees, and taking into consideration their needs and behaviours, rather than forcing practices that may go against their natural tendencies. As a US apiarist, it is only to be expected that Taber encounters and describes issues which are not as familiar in other places. The methodology that he recounts for reducing incidence of American Foul Brood is a case in point – and may cause a raised eyebrow or two for those in territories where destruction of AFB-infected colonies is mandated. Nonetheless, there is something to be learned in here for beekeepers at all scales of operation, from the hobbyist with a couple of colonies in the garden, to more commercial operators with upwards of hundreds of colonies. Overall, a good value short volume of bite-sized chunks written in way that makes it highly accessible for beekeepers at all levels.

Review by Lesley Jacques, Cheshire Beekeepers’ Association.

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