The sun arrived in London last weekend reaching highs of around 20°C and not a cloud in sight. It was perfect timing for my friend Marina to visit from Malmö, Sweden, and for Emily and me to shook swarm our bees.
On Saturday Marina, who is allergic to bee stings, went for coffee with Italian friends at Notting Hill, while I hopped on a bus to Stockdove Way in Perivale with instructions from my Swedish friend not to come home ‘all bitten’.
Blue skies at the apiary were a contrast to last week’s rain, when Emily and me had spent the afternoon blow torching hive boxes and getting frames ready for this year’s bees. Each spring we give our bees a clean brood box and fresh frames for the year ahead. It is like spring cleaning the house when the warm weather comes to clear out clutter and freshen the home.
Me blow-torching hive equipment to kill off all nasties. I didn't burn down the apiary but there were a few 'interventions'.
Bees naturally live with lots of different bacteria, viruses and fungi (just like people), but when the numbers of parasites rise above manageable levels this can cause problems. Changing the brood comb regularly helps prevent the build up of disease such as European foul brood (EFB), American foul brood (AFB) and nosema.
There are two methods of replacing the brood comb:
- Shook swarm: bees are literally shaken into a new hive with fresh foundation and the old brood comb and unhatched bees are burned. The shook swarm gets rid of everything (including the varroa feasting on unhatched winter bees) and starts the year with almost no disease in the colony.
- Bailey comb change: a gentler version of the shook swarm, bees are gradually moved into a new hive by encouraging the queen and her colony to climb up into a clean brood box frame by frame.
A picture of health – our bees were looking healthy and not much sign of varroa. It seemed a bit extreme to subject them to a shook swarm this year.
While chatting over tea and munching on Sarah’s lovely homemade ginger biscuits, Emily and me had a change of plans and chose to do the Bailey comb change instead of the shook swarm. With not much varroa in either hive, it seemed unnecessary to destroy all the unhatched brood.
That decided, we lit our smokers and went to open our hives for the first time this year. First, Queen Rosemary’s hive, our biggest colony going into winter, whose bees had been seen flying home with lots of bright yellow pollen in the past few weeks. Little faces peered up as we lifted the crownboard and a few bees buzzed curiously around our veils, but as usual this lot were pretty chilled and didn’t need much smoking. We found and caged our queen to keep her safe as we worked.
Queen Rosemary safely caught in Emily's queen cage. We put this frame aside to avoid damaging the queen during the comb change. Emily also re-marked Rosemary with a white dot, which makes her easier to find.
Emily and me were unfamiliar with the Bailey comb change method, so John kindly talked us through. John Chapple, beekeeper to the queen’s bees at Buckingham Palace, is a very experienced beek – he has a beard – and is a really good mentor to new beeks.
We put a clean brood box with new frames and foundation above the old brood box. Dummy boards were placed beside the brood nest in both the bottom and top brood boxes to encourage the bees to move up into the new box.
The method works because bees are naturally inclined to climb upwards and to fill empty spaces with honeycomb. It’s what they do, and it is understanding this principle that also helps beekeepers to manipulate bees to make surplus honey.
Me pointing to a dummy board (a plain wooden board) next to the last frame of brood in the bottom box to 'close' the nest and encourage bees to climb up. The same arrangement of frames is made in the top box.
Rosemary's hive now has two brood boxes for the Bailey comb change to be carried out over the next few weeks, and a third shallow super box on top to put a feeder with syrup under the roof.
John told us what the bees would do next: ‘They will climb up and find the new frames, and start to draw out wax comb. In a week or two, you should find the queen and put her in the top box with a queen excluder between the two boxes. The bees in the bottom box, including newly hatched bees, will move into the top box to join the queen.’
Hopefully, if all goes to plan, the bottom box will be removed and the old frames burned (the safest way to dispose of hive equipment). We’ll put the top box with the queen and nest on a new floor with a clean queen excluder, crownboard and roof above. A new hive for a season of flowing nectar ahead!
Happy to see our bees but the inspection of Rosemary's hive showed that all was not well...
I was so happy to see our bees again, but all was not well in Queen Rosemary’s hive. Our inspection showed signs that the queen may be failing: there were very few eggs and Emily noticed drone brood (male bees) in the middle of frames where there should be worker brood (female bees). Emily and me will have to check the situation over the next few weeks and decide what to do.
John, who was inspecting another hive at the apiary, brought over a frame of bees to show us. ‘What can you see?’ he asked. The frame was filled with drone brood, but John wanted us to look at the bees. The bees were small like workers, but their large beady eyes revealed that they were drones whose growth was stunted probably from being hatched in worker cells. Drones can’t look after themselves or future brood, so a hive with a drone-laying queen will collapse. ‘It’s all doomed,’ said John.
John shows us a frame of bees from a 'doomed hive'. The queen is only laying drone brood – you can see the raised domed-shaped cappings of drone brood in the middle of the frame.
Happily, Queen Lavender’s hive told another story. Our baby hive is flourishing – the queen is laying a healthy pattern of worker brood and the bees are building up honey stores. We carried out a Bailey comb change on this hive too, and fed both colonies with sugar syrup to help them along.
Winter bees feasting on sugar fondant under the roof in Lavender's hive. We took away the fondant and replaced it with sugar syrup for spring.
Lavender's hive is flourishing with lots of flat capped worker brood on the comb waiting to hatch. The pink rings show normal-sized drone bees (they have big beady eyes and fat bottoms) and the green ring shows a smaller worker bee going about her business.
Lavender, who is Rosemary’s sister, had a ride on my thumb after a new beekeeper, Rosemary, spotted the queen basking in the sun on the crownboard sitting next to the hive!
Emily kindly sent me this photo of Queen Lavender hitching a ride on my thumb back to the hive. Two workers are attending to her. Image © Emily Heath
I feel very honoured to have had a queen bee on my thumb, because they are notoriously shy.
On Saturday night the clocks went forward and British Summertime started. Sunday was another gloriously sunny day, so while our bees were out foraging Marina and me explored the local nature reserve just around the corner from my flat.
Then we climbed the hills at Northala Fields before stopping for ice cream. A wonderful weekend in spring, as Marina would say ‘It doesn’t get much better than that!’
A beautiful path of daffodils.
A tasty daff for bees to munch!
From the top of the first hill at Northala Fields – a local council project to construct four hills next to the A40 and surrounding nature reserve. This old bit of wasteland is now filled with families playing and people walking every weekend.
Useful links
The National Bee Unit has useful advice about replacing comb here, scroll down to ‘Fact sheets’. Many beekeepers also like the David Cushman method of Bailey comb change, which you can read here.
Emily’s posts on our Bailey comb change go into further detail about the method:
Exams over – and the Bailey comb change begins…
Lavender on the loose
Mrs Apis Mellifera 
Great post and photos. I hadn’t heard of the Bailey comb change method so I’m off to check out the links.
Thanks, Natalie! Check out Emily’s posts too as she discusses some more theory behind a Bailey comb change. Good luck with your spring bees! 🙂
Everything sounded very familiar, and then I realized you were Emily’s hive partner!
Glad to have found your blog. Hope everything works out with the sick hive. Just one small request: Please remove that pretty scarf next time you’re using a blowtorch!
Marty at http://www.beezations.com
That is funny! Yes, Emily and me share the same bees – it is so nice to have a hive partner that I even wrote a post on it (https://missapismellifera.com/2011/10/23/10-reasons-to-have-a-hive-partner/) Our strongest hive has gotten sick all of a sudden (proving winter to spring really is the most treacherous time for our girls) and we are having more experienced beeks check it out this weekend. Whereas our baby hive seems to be growing very strong, so unpredictable!
Ah, the scarf! That explains why the other beeks were in doubt of my blow-torching skills and kept trying to take the torch away from me! 😮
Interesting information! It sounds like you’ve got a good mentor helping you. No matter how much I read on blog posts like yours and other web sites, I keep learning new things. Thanks for sharing, especially the pictures of the drones in Rosemary’s hive. Good luck getting that one back online.
The new beeks at Ealing are so lucky to have really brilliant mentors and all who are so generous with their knowledge and experience. I’m also lucky to have a great beekeeper as my hive partner! You are right, there is always something new to learn about bees.
Excellent piece, I hope your hive recovers. Great pictures, particularly of the queen. Our bees are out and busy, the boxes are humming- nothing makes it feel more like spring.
Thank you! Queen Rosemary is only one year old, a young queen, so odd that she is failing already. Hopefully, she’ll get a second life in spring or the bees may replace her. I know what you mean, the first sight of a bumble bee popping out of a daff means spring is here. Glad to hear that your ladies are doing so well! 🙂
That’s a really interesting post. I’m seeing some hives in Sussex on Sunday… now inspired to take a camera along! Re those mounds by the A40 – mysterious, but clever use of that space. One was used in an episode of (I think) Spooks, as some sort of sinister lair or secret HQ… ATB RH
I always wondered what was under those hills… Torchwood, perhaps.
Look forward to seeing some photos of the Sussex hives!
I read with interest your method of changing the combs. I have never heard of doing it that way! I just opened up my lone surviving hive yesterday and it is humming away, but to my dismay no brood or queen evident! I ordered a new queen right away but she is 2 weeks away.
I hope your new queen, or old queen, turns up soon. Sometimes queens are very good at hiding and eggs can be difficult to spot, but if there is no larvae or capped brood either then it’s possible that the queen might have died over winter. If the colony starts to get small before the new queen arrives, you could transfer them to a nuc to keep them warm and fed.
Emily and me will need to check on Rosemary to see if her laying picks up and if she can still make workers. We may have to order a new queen too or we might put a frame of eggs and young larvae from our other hive into Rosemary’s and see if the bees raise a new queen.
You know, I never knew that bees needed ‘spring cleaning’. Sounds like you had a great weekend and the weather looked like it was lovely.
We are in Autumn now (still, it was 25 degrees C today) and daylight saving ends tonight YEA!!! I liked it better when it only went for 4 months. The sun hasn’t been rising until after 7am.
The bees seem to really enjoy getting new comb for their brood each year, I guess it must be like when we get fresh sheets on the bed and it feels so lovely!
In summer, there can be around 50–60,000 bees in one hive and new bees constantly pupating and hatching in brood comb cells. Each bee that hatches leaves behind a little cocoon that nurse bees must clean out before the queen can lay another egg in that cell. They are fastidiously clean, but with so many bees hatching by the end of the year the brood comb can be almost black and, of course, will have a build up of some disease. It’s lovely to see fresh gold comb being drawn out in spring.
I have mixed feelings about daylight saving. Not nice to lose an hour’s sleep, but so lovely to have lighter evenings on the walk home from work! Autumn is beautiful though 🙂
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This is such a great post Emma, I love all your photos. Will be interesting to see what they’ve done with the foundation today. (I really hope they’ve done something!).
This month’s BBKA news has an article on the failing queens problem by Roger Patterson, it seems people all over the place are noticing it.
Thomas thinks queens may be failing because of varroa treatments like oxalic acid – because its accumulative effects are not healthy for bees. It doesn’t matter for winter bees who die in spring, but the queen needs to live longer and varroa treatments might accumulate in their system over time. Of course, Rosemary was only one year. Or it could be varroa mites generally weakening the bees, as you say. I guess more research needs to be done, I’ll read the BBKA news too!
Great post & fab pictures…
Just off to collect my new smoker from the post office and then will check the hive for the first time after the Shook Swarm…
Should be good as there’s loads of activity; I need to remove the queen excluder from the bottom as I don’t want to lose any pollen that destined for the brood…
See you soon,
Sara
http://www.HenCorner.com
Just saw this comment this morning – sorry! So busy the past few weeks. Interesting meeting on Saturday – drones and queens! Looking forward to seeing pics of your Omlet hive!
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Fascinating and enjoyable. Consider me educated in apiaries now. I shall never look at a jar of honey in the same way again.
Thank you, I hope you enjoy honey even more!
Very interesting. I’m scared bees but I like comb honey.
Our bees are nice ladies not stingy, but I am bit scared of stingy bees and wasps 😉 Glad you enjoyed it, comb honey is delicious.
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Lovely read. Some of your phrases really clarified some aspects of bees I hadn’t really thought about. Interesting that yoru queen was on teh crown board – I do try and check always but every time it is OK you are less likely to check the next time so worth having a reminder why it is always better to be safe than sorry. And I am useless at spotting queens. I think my aim for this year may be to improve my queen spotting. I don’t think there will be much of a honey harvest this year and I am going to put some of mine in very small 1.5 oz jars with a crocheted skep on as a marketing tool. I need to make a pattern because others on my project need one – I just do it by instinct.
Tricia
Thanks, Tricia! Our bees teach us things all the time and Emily and me are lucky to have such experienced beekeepers at our apiary who are always happy to help. I am terrible at spotting queens too and it doesn’t help our apiary is a bit shady, but I look to see what the bees are doing on the frame as they often clear a path for the queen and also turn to face her, so they often give her away! Emily and me went to a talk about honey last year and got advice about marketing – people prefer the traditional, homely-looking labels because it makes them feel that they are getting a natural product. We put our honey in those mini jars last year as cut comb piece and they were very popular, probably will do the same this year from the one frame that we’ll get – unless there is a heatwave in June and July 😉
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