Noticed our first frog spawn today. This was in an old water filled pit next to our beehives. Several large trees and shrubs were cut back last year to let in more light and the whole area looks much healthier.

Today was our first chance to look into our bees. With the cold winter so far, there has been very little sign of activity at the front of the hives. We went into the winter with two hives but one was quite weak. We discovered a nosema infection which we treated but possibly too late to allow them to build up strength before the cold weather.

The other hive was very strong and had plenty of late himalayan balsam honey left on. They seem to be doing well but we gave some additional ambrosia feed today. This picture is looking through the ‘rapid feeder’ into the brood frames below.

With just one hive this year our focus will need to be on increasing this colony rather than honey production.

Lancaster Beekeepers’ Association held their annual honey show on October 17th 2009. For the first time it was an all day show and was open to visitors in the afternoon. Forrest Hills bees did very well this year with a first in both the dark and light honey sections. We also took a first prize for our wholemeal bread and our picture of a bee with a varroa mite on it (shown in an earlier post) won 2nd prize in the photography section.

This year was a poor ones for queen bees. Two of our hives successfully produced new queens but both failed to survive their mating flights and so the hives were left queenless. We reunited them with our other hives so are now down to two. These are both doing very well and have a lot of bees!

We have taken a small amount of honey off but have left them plenty. Although this recent good weather has seen them very active in bringing nectar and pollen both from the himalayan balsam and ivy.

A varroa mite can be clearly seen on the bee in the bottom right of this photo (taken last week). We regularly monitor for varroa and treat it at this time of year with ‘apiguard’ and then later in the year with ‘oxalic acid’.

Our weakest bee colony was recently under constant attack by wasps. In the photo a group of guard bees protects the entrance as wasps try to get inside to gorge themselves on the honey. In August, wasps are no longer fed in their own nests so try to get sweet food wherever they can, causing a nuisance to people and bees alike. The bees were defending well and we helped them by making their entrance slot even smaller so it needed less bees to defend it.

Our honey entry took second place at Garstang show on Saturday. There was some confusion about which category to enter as we only managed to take the honey from the hive the day before the show. It turned out to be darker than expected! Lots of other categories that we might try for next year including candles, moulded wax, cut comb honey and displayed frame.

Lancaster Beekeepers were well represented in all categories and also had a popular stand selling honey and other products and with a demonstration hive which attracted a lot of interest.

The queen in one of our hives is not doing too well (probably failed to mate properly last year when the weather was so bad and is laying erratically) so we decided to re-queen the hive using the ‘Snelgrove’ method. This uses a special board with several doors which allows you to move the bees to different parts of the hive. Some of the bees make a new queen which hopefully mates successfully and begins laying properly. The older queen is then kept in another small nucleus hive as a back up.

All the 5 Lancaster entrants passed their basic bee exam!

This month’s Lancaster bee keepers association meeting was a guided walk and talk about plants for bees, held at Yealand manor.

Thistles flowering this month attract lots of bumblebees. This is a red-tailed bumble Bombus lapidarius and a buff-tailed Bombus terrestris. Lots of information on the bumblebee conservation trust website.

Four members of the Lancaster Beekeepers Association came to Forrest Hills for a practice session led by Richard Wilson in preparation for their exam with the regional bee inspector Ian Molineux. This is the Basic Beekeeping exam which covers handling of bees, use of equipment, bee diseases etc.

Since our last bee blog we ended up with two of our four hives queenless. To remedy this we put a frame of fertile eggs from the other hives into each. The bees then ‘make’ a new queen from an egg. In the centre of this picture is a queen cell from which a new queen emerges after a few more days. Unfortunately one didn’t work so we are now down to three hives. The others are doing well though and bringing in lots of nectar and pollen.