Beekeeping course

We ran the bee keeping day here last Sunday where we covered bee keeping as a hobby and gave the participants the opportunity for some practical experience. Below are the notes I used for the day

Equipment
Hives:
Bee Space: this discovery enabled the design of the modern moveable frame hive.Rev Langstroth discovered that inside a hive a space of 35mm would be respected as a pathway by the bees, a smaller space would be filled often with propolis and a larger space would be filled with comb. So by keeping a bee space between frames we can ensure that bees will respect the space and usually not build comb between the frames. Leaving the frame separate so they can be removed and replaced at will.
Top Bee space hives: these have a bee space above the frame bars which keeps the top bars clear of comb and propolis making them easier to remove.
Langstroth: used worldwide by the vast majority of commercial beekeepers, usually top bee-space 10 frames per box.
National: most common hive in UK smaller than Langstroth and usually bottom bee space, 11 frame per box.
WBC double wall hive using national frames,pretty but inconvenient to work with,

There are numerous other hives which are all based on the same theme some smaller some bigger but in truth the bees don't care the main thing is to keep to one type of hive in your operation.


Queen excluder keeps the queen laying in the brood area, keeping the rest of the boxes for honey.
Brood chamber : boxes kept for queen to lay eggs and raise brood
Supers : boxes used to collect honey, can be full or half depth.

Hive tool: metal tool used for prising hives apart and freeing frames in the hive.

Smoker: stainless steel or copper are available, I always choose on with a guard which prevents burns and damage to other equipment
Smoker box: If you are travelling to your hives it is a good idea to keep your smoker and hive tools in a metal fire proof box,

Protective equipment: Plan on the minimum of a good bee suit, gloves and suitable boots, working bees knowing you will not be getting stung too much. Stings can still get through but good equipment keeps this to a minimum.

The bee colony comprising Queen 1 (usually) drones several hundred summer only, workers 15 to 60 thousand. and during the season eggs and brood at various stages.
Swarming when the queen and most of the older bees leave to found a new colony, taking most of the foraging force and resulting in a much reduced harvest.
The aim of the beekeeper is to build the colony as large as possible to get a big foraging force and to avoid swarming to maintain the work force.
to reduce swarming we need to keep a young queen in the hive and give as much space in the brood nest to allow the queen to continue laying.

To have young queens you must practice some form of queen rearing, see later. to maintain space in the brood nest you can split the colony early in spring, keep adding preferably drawn comb into the brood nest or run on a double brood box system.
The principles are have a young queen in the hive and maintain laying space in the brood chamber.

Queen Rearing/swarm control

Regardless of the number of hives you run it will be important to raise your own queens. A supply of young queens is one of the best safeguards to reduce swarming.
Methods
Artificial swarming: Involves splitting the hive in two, one half with the old queen the other with brood and eggs with adhering bees placed to one side. They will raise a queen, once she is mated the two halves can be reunited or a new colony started.
Walk away splits. A simplified version of the above, the hive is split in half with equal brood in each half, the splits are placed close together so they share the old site and as a result the flying bees. The queen-right half will continue as before while the queenless half with set about raising a queen.
If the above methods are used after drones are seen in the hive and before swarm cells are seen then you have a good chance of preventing swarming.

To raise larger numbers of queens some form of grafting will need to be used. Grafting is the removal of larvae from the cell to a specially prepared queen cup.
These cups are then placed in a queenless starter colony for 24hrs then into a queen right colony above a queen excluder or maintained in a queenless colony until ready for distributing too mating nucleus hives or direct into colonies for re-queening.

Summer management of hives
Add empty supers to maintain space above the hive all the time a flow is on, Check colonies weekly for swarming may and June then periodically check for space, stores and viable queens.


Extracting
In Oil Seed Rape areas honey is normally extracted by the end of may to the first week of June depending on the crop. The second extraction is usually early August then in September if heather honey is collected.
Most people will uncap with a cold knife although various forms of heated blades are available.
Honey is extracted using centrifugal force in a radial or tangential extractor. we normally store the honey in 30lb buckets straight from the extractor then it can be stored and processed later.

Processing honey
for clear honey we heat the honey tubs in a water bath to a temp of 40C but some people go as high as 48C. At these temperatures honey will melt without detrimental affects on flavour. Once melted the honey is filtered through a straining cloth into a bottling tank where once the bubbles have risen the honey is bottled into required containers.

To make creamed or soft est honey honey: A seed of set honey is needed (1/4 of the total processed) the seed is warmed enough to make it pour and is added to the melted strained honey. The mix is then stirred every day for several day until a homogeneous consistency is achieved. The honey is bottled while it is soft enough to pour.


Labelling for detailed advice see the following link to the BBKA site: http://www.britishbee.org.uk/articles/honey_labels.php

The wet season continues

The seasons are moving on and some crops are ripening despite the weather, the wettest July in 100 years. Slugs are ever present see below hanging off an onion leaf, but most vegetable crops are OK except for lettuce which has stopped growing and leeks that need good light levels to develop.

The Jerusalem Artichokes do well in wet weather and are over 10' tall now, presumably the roots are developing just as fast.

The Rhubarb has decided enough is enough and is going dormant for this year. I see some growers are still selling sticks but we have found that the quality has deteriorated on our crop and stopped pulling 4 weeks ago.

Discussion panel on peak oil in Ludlow

On the 21July I took part as a panel member in the discussion on Peak Oil and the implications for future food production.

I thought it may be of interest to copy my notes fro the evening as follows:

To decide what we need to do in the future we need to make a stab at what the future holds. We have three forces acting on us affecting how we can produce and distribute food.
1. Peak Oil, we have passed the point of peak oil, oil based products can only get more expensive from now on.
2. Global climate change, affecting the range and quantities of food we can produce.
3. A financial system based on commodity speculators and globalised food companies.

All of these interact affecting increasing climate change, social stability and food availability. The Chaos theory tells us that when three or more variables are acting together that the outcome cannot be predicted.
What we can do however is see the way general trend is heading. This is of finite resources and an increasing demand for food . Also increasing domination of food production and distribution by multi national organisations such as biotech/pesticide manufacturers, supermarkets and the major oil companies.
We as a community have a choice, these forces are not inevitably going to take control of our lives but we must use the power we have to control what happens now.
The choice as I see it is between a globalised mono cropping system based on input of petrol chemicals, commodities and large scale distribution and a localised poly cropping food system with local production and sale of food. Reliant not on petro-chemicals and the road haulage industries but on local farmers and retailers providing the bulk of our food needs.

Kisinger said: Control the oil and you will control the country, control the food and you will control the people.
I believe we are facing a time when multinational companies are actively taking control of our food supply by supplanting poly-cropping agriculture across the world with mono-cropping systems reliant on petro-chemicals, genetically modified crops and massive food distribtion businesses.
To quote Dr Vandana Shiva "Globalised mono cropping does not produce more food it produces commodities" These then are sold on the international market to the largest investor and used according to the needs of the most wealthy in the world. A system incidentally which produces losses of 50% of food produced.

I believe that in the future a sustainable system will be one that uses methods of crop rotation providing nitrogen using legumes, pest and weed control with organic methods and local low input distribution systems.
Specifically:
Small scale food production using organic or similar systems.
Farmers and local markets for retail of local foods wherever possible.
Sale of imported foods limited to those that can be transported by sea and which cannot be grown locally.

In short we should take back control of our food and our agriculture.

Beetroot and spinach

Having just finished clearing the paths between the beds I took the opportunity to assess how the spinach and beetroot we doing.

Spinach is a fast growing crop and has been producing a harvest for several weeks now. On average we can take three complete cuts from each bed. This bed is on it second cut, so we will be sowing a follow on crop next week to take us into the autumn and through to early spring.All our beetroot are sown in modules before being planted out through the biodegradable mulch. This eliminates weed competition (except for weed in the paths) and protects the roots from mice as they develop.

Onions and Leeks

The Alliums , onions and leeks are all planted and established. They are all planted through a biodegradable mulch which controls weeds and prevents soil water loss. The paths are sown down to white clover but in the first few weeks a lot of weed will grow. This if unchecked will suppress the growth of the crop. We therefore mow down each path to reduce competion.
The onions are doing OK and as seen below they are just starting to bulb up now we are past the longest day.
Onion beds with the paths tidied.

Leeks now starting to grow away, they are a bit late as we had a chicken attack on our seed beds this year, we therefore had to so 2,000 in module trays. They do OK from modules but we find that establishment and growth rate are reduced.

All sheep sheared at last

One of my biggest concerns this year has been the shearing of our small flock. we have a total of 30 ewes and wethers on two sites. This year Trevor came to our rescue and brought his aged dog Joe along to get the sheep in. This he did without a command from Trevor and was almost too early as we were still setting up the pen.

We did get them all contained, this is part of a contingent of 20 hoggets due to be sold as mutton in the Autumn


We were very pleased with the job Trevor did, he was very gentle and didn't cut them at all and the sheep were relaxed throughout . We trimmed feet and moved them to a new field at the same time. It was a late finish but we were relieved to have the job finished and the fear of fly strike has diminished.

Millie grows

Our young sheep dog is growing well, now at 5 months she is just starting to take commands and shows interest in sheep.I'm thinking of introducing her to sheep over the next four weeks or so, I just need to make sure that the sheep I use are used to dogs to avoid any chance of putting Millie off sheep for good by getting butted.
Not sure what's going on with those ears, one day they both looked pricked the next both down then one up one down.