Starting up and looking for local group - Western Isles

[MairiMc]

I'm looking to get in touch with bee keepers in Lewis/Harris and wondered if any were active on the forum. Also if anyone has contact details for the Western Isles Bee Keepers Association, or knows if they are still meeting regularly, I would appreciate any information. Thinking of starting in the area and looking to get advice and chat in general about starting up. Particularly interested in what prompted people throughout the forum into the art of bee keeping.

[gavin]

Hi Mairi

Lovely to hear from another possible beekeeper from the Western Isles. From passing through Stornoway in the summer (on the way to Callanish and places beyond) it should be a great place to keep bees. I'll send you the current contact email for the Western Isles association privately. It seems to have changed hands since I was last in touch with Lewis beekeepers. Gregor McLeod at Callanish said that there was a beekeeper nearby, so if you can keep bees there it should be a dawdle in Stornoway.

One of the highlights (in my view!) of the forum were the posts by Kenny Creed describing an attempt in Stornoway to hold a beekeeping meeting. Always worth another look.

http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/showthread.php?138-Beekeeping-in-the-Western-Isles

As for why people got into beekeeping, for me I decided that I needed to keep livestock to keep me grounded properly. An allotment in Reading just wasn't enough. It was going to be either poultry or bees, and I had books for both. Fortunately after moving back to Scotland I found that an old friend had got into bees before me, so he got me started.

If you could talk to the three novices I had with me this afternoon they would all tell you just how fascinating beekeeping can be. Go for it!

Gavin

[MairiMc]

Thanks for replying.
I did see the post about the meeting and I have to say it made me laugh too! I spent a few cold morning on that spot waiting for a bus.
It was actually on the Callanish side (west side, but a bit further north) of the island that I am planning on keeping bees, so it's encouraging to hear of others. I have always been interested in bees and also fascinated by the idea of bee keeping and at this point I have a bit of land and think it's a great opportunity to start. Having read online and by what I hope is common sense, it seems the best idea is to source locally, both bees and information on keeping them.
Thank you for the contact details, I will get in touch and look forward to joining the community!

[gavin]

I don't know how many beginner beekeepers in the lush lowlands on average stick with it but I'd guess perhaps a third. To keep bees on the west side of Lewis you'd have to be a special kind of beekeeper anyway - so there's the scale of the challenge facing you! Still, if others can do it why not try.

Your challenges.

1. No trees, not much forage until late summer. Solution: slow building, frugal, local bees. The normally traded strains explode into life in spring and will starve in your conditions. You'll probably still need to feed them.

2. Varroa (every beekeeper's challenge). The west side of Lewis may be free, if so try to keep it that way.

3. Mating. Queens need several days (of around 18C?) during the three week period when they can mate. Those periods will be hard to find on the west of Lewis. Expect mating failures. Solution (perhaps): provide as many local drones as you can, go for a sheltered apiary (with the sheltered area extending to a sunny area perhaps 10+m across) where they may mate very close by rather than set off for distant drone congregation areas. Perhaps when you have some experience and a few colonies also try raising queens through the summer (by grafting and mating in Apideas) so that at least some find the right weather window.

4. Inbreeding. Repeatedly raising queens over several years from a very small number of colonies will lead to inbreeding and poor vigour. For most of us our queens share the skies with drones from the colonies of many beekeeping neighbours. Solution: keep several colonies and/or occasionally swap queens with someone with similar stocks.

[Trog]

All good advice from Gavin; however I have observed that our local island bees will mate at 10C, a couple of yards from the apiary. Yes, shelter essential, locally-bred bees essential. Just check they're not the offspring of package bees brought in by some - that's how varroa arrived in the Western Isles :( And do be ready to feed at any time of year, especially if you have an expanding brood nest and a bit of Weather arrives (as indeed it has today!). Contact details for all local associations are here: http://www.scottishbeekeepers.org.uk/About/LocalAssociations.aspx.
You'll soon find that although books like 'Bees at the Bottom of the Garden' offer good general advice, they're not that relevant to beekeeping on the edge, so do take advice from established locals - at least from the ones who keep their bees alive from year to year. That said, even the most experienced of us do lose bees from time to time! I would seriously look at poly hives (if you can weight them down sufficiently!) or modern WBCs (not second-hand, woodworm-infested, prone-to-mouse-invasion old ones!!).

[MairiMc]

Thanks for the advice :-) I don't think the area is suitable for poly anything with the winter weather and it's got sheltered parts and a few trees. My thoughts were to populate the area with plants (flowers, bushes, fruit bushes) as it is surrounded by moorland and heather, not to tempting for the wildlife. From the stage I'm at, complete ignorance and planning to the far future, I'm generally thinking that more 'small' hives rather than less 'larger' is better giving more colonies and more opportunity for mating, reducing, but not omitting the need for swapping Queens. I can see the frustration in taking care of your colonies and having that potentially devastated by a quick fix package nucleus, or the mistakes of a neighbour. Please feel free to set me straight if i have got the basic concepts wrong, I'm trying to gain an understanding to help me plan out a strong, sustained apiary.
Thanks for all the advice and taking time to reply.
Mairi

[Jon]

3. Mating. Queens need several days (of around 18C?) during the three week period when they can mate.

I don't think so Gav.
A queen will take her orientation flights at a temperature of 12c or less and she only needs a blink of sunshine for 15 minutes to fly and mate.
I remember reading a paper on the number of mating flights a queen takes and it is often just the one and rarely more than two.
Same as Trog, a lot of mine tend to mate over the apiary. I don't know what percentage fly to congregation areas but a significant percentage definitely mate close to home. 15c with the sun shining is often sufficient as opposed to the 20c you read in a lot of text books. Needs must if you live oop north.

[mikemilespitcairn]

Hi MairiMc
I am hoping to be over in Shawbost in the middle of June on our annual holiday visit to Lewis and would be willing to talk bees for a few hours one evening if you would appreciate that. I am a relative beginner having kept bees for only 3 years but have packed a lot into that 3 years as Gavin will testify. I now manage the Perth and District Beekeepers Associaton Apiaries so have been thrown in at the deep end when it comes to setting up apiaries and planning for different locations. I talked to a couple of beekeepers on the island last year but I'm afraid they were a little discouraged with the performance of their hives over the past few years but having said that, a visit to Riof beach last year proved that there were colonies alive and well in that area as there were honey bees all over the machair. Search out your sucessful local beekeepers and seek help from them; they will keep you on the right track.
Good luck,
Mike

[gavin]

Mike comes highly recommended. :) Riof?! I feel a Dougie Maclean video coming on but will desist. I wonder if the bees there were his. My own trip there was a flying one but it wasn't the best place to lose an exhaust on a Sunday as I recall.

Thanks Jon. Still, mating will be an issue on the far side of Lewis. The long-established Shetland beekeeper uses II to overcome the problem there. Now that really is oop north, though the accent isn't quite like that.

Sizes of colonies, type of box. Trog is right, they do winter better in polystyrene boxes (http://www.cwynnejones.com/). It looks even better now that it comes with runners. Any hive will need weighed down against the gales but there is plenty of stone on Lewis and the polystyrene is a particularly robust type.

The usual advice is to winter strong colonies if possible. In the 2012/13 winter locally 50% of colonies of less than seven frames of bees made it whereas for that size of colony or larger, 80% made it. Thankfully last winter (and the preceding summer) was kinder so my usual risky splits at the association site have all survived, now giving me a headache of too many colonies to manage. So a compromise must be made: strong colonies for survival, additional colonies for genetic diversity at an isolated site.

[Jon]

Definitely go with local stock and local advice for somewhere like the western isles. Probably not the easiest place to start beekeeping.
winter 2012/2013 I lost colonies which went into winter on 7 or 8 frames as well as almost all my nucs.
winter 2013/2014 was so easy that queens were able to overwinter with just 500 bees in an apidea.
Nothing predictable in beekeeping.

[drumgerry]

And Gavin's giving you great advice re polystyrene hives. Get the Swienty ones from Highland Bee Supplies or C Wynne Jones. They take one frame less per box but they're the easiest by far poly boxes to work with. I'd imagine any hive - timber or poly will blow over where you are unless very securely tied and weighted down!