Summer 2011

[gavin]

Mornin' Y'all

Spending a few days in North Carolina where they all seem to speak like they do in Deputy Dawg if anyone remembers that. Keeping an eye on the forum when I can. The summer here has been too hot and dry so the maize in the fields has, in some places, burnt up before the plants got far enough for a crop. Not so in Scotland.

Have a look at this from the Met Office:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/anomacts/

http://www.sbai.org.uk/images/summer2011sm.jpg

This is a rather nice way to see the variation across the UK.

From what I remember of last week, August is going to be rather similar ... but if it is brighter now maybe all is not lost for those of us with bees at the heather.

G.

[Trog]

Very interesting charts. Yes, it was wet in May!

[gavin]

I think that August will be off-the-scale dark blue here, but maybe it will end up as a months of two halves as they say.

[Jon]

April was exceptional for both high temperature and lack of rainfall. We had several days over 20c.
My colonies were on the point of starvation mid June but managed to fill a couple of supers each in July.

I used to love that Deputy Dawg y'all.

Top cat and Officer Dibble had real New Yorker accents

[Adam]

Very interesting charts. Yes, it was wet in May!
Not for me it wasn't!

[gavin]

From the look of that map Adam you could be growing the sweet potatoes they grow here in huge amounts, some of it for export to the UK. Somewhat annoyingly, they call proper potatoes 'Irish potatoes'. Can't for the life of me think why they would want to do that.

Lovely folk anyway.

The maps show quite well why there were puzzled looks on the faces of the east-central Scotland beekeepers at the SASA diseases day in July when beekeepers from Glasgow were positively beaming about all that nectar piling in. And why there was starvation in the west in May.

I don't know why Kintyre was singled out for such treatment in June, or maybe it was just someone piddling into the rain gauge there.

[Jon]

The debate about proper potatoes will have to involve Peruvians and Irish, with the Scots remaining on the sidelines.

The Puebla football team has the nickname of Los Camoteros (http://www.camoteros.com/) - the sweet potato men. I have been to a few matches in the Estadio Cuautémoc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estadio_Cuauhtémoc)

[Jimbo]

Hi Gavin,

You just can't get away from the tatties, sweet or otherwise. I have been playing with your maps and if you compare the rainfall for May/June 2010 (which was an average year for swarming and mating) and compare it to May/June 2011 you can see why it was such an unusal year for swarming which continued much later than average years

[gavin]

Tatties are my life (after bees of course) and the trip to NC was not unconnected with that. It will take a deal of arm-twisting to get me to call them Irish potatoes. We made the Peruvians very pleased by proving that the potato was domesticated in southern Peru and not Bolivia as some had thought, so they owe us a favour. That favour will be to call non-Latin spuds 'Scottish potatoes' from this point onwards. All the best varieties are anyway (that's a lie, Rooster was a cracker and it is Irish). Could we just settle on 'Celtic potatoes' as a compromise or does that have tribal connotations in the West of Scotland?

I think that I know the answer to that one.

Twiddling my thumbs at an ungodly hour in Atlanta Airport while we learn just how many hours late our plane will be. Three they said last time, which means that my connection in Amsterdam is stuffed, and on a Friday night when seats on alternative planes and even hotel rooms will be at a premium.

OK, bees. Do we believe that rainfall is the main determinant of bee performance? Wet and warm can be quite productive as long as there are gaps between the heavy stuff. But it will stop queens venturing out presumably.

Who has a series of quantitative swarming/queen mating data that could be compared with a series of weather records?

[Jon]

I am a fan of Rooster, a very tasty potato. Kerr's Pink would be my overall favourite.

I don't have detailed data re matings and weather but my queens mated well in both June and July. June was very wet whereas July was quite warm and dry. But there was at least one perfect flying day every ten days or so. I found that they just waited - and then about 3-4 days after a perfect weather window you would find laying queens in a dozen apideas. Where I do notice a weather related difference is in honey production. A month of wet and cold weather is always a disaster but does not seem to affect the matings too much as long as there are several decent days during the spell of bad weather.

I accidentally left one apidea closed for 12 days and the queen flew and mated within 5 days when I opened it up. I used this one to make up a nuc about 6 weeks ago and she has now filled a brood box.

[gavin]

I've been getting a taste for potatoes at breakfast, not something a Scot would naturally turn to.

Perhaps we need to petition the Met Office to publish weather maps of queen-mating windows based on occasional nice days, and to derive formulae for the prediction of honey-getting ability depending on the reaction of each type of honey plant to the prevailing conditions. Or maybe we can do our own, over time and with a bit of thought.

Did I write all that without typos in this sleep-deprived state?! Good bee-foraging weather in Amsterdam. I was looking for dead insects and songbirds coating the waterways as we flew into Schipol but couldn't see any. Not from 500 feet anyway.

[Jimbo]

Aye, I see the jet lag is kicking in next you will be telling us about all the strange herbal plants the bees in Amsterdam forage on. Forgot to say have you never had a tattie scone for breakfast

[Jon]

Aye, I see the jet lag is kicking in next you will be telling us about all the strange herbal plants the bees in Amsterdam forage on.

Henk Tennekes must spend quite a bit of time in the coffee shops! I reckon his next paper could put Lewis Carroll to shame.

Must have been hard to push open the door of your 747 with the runway buried under several metres of invertebrates. I'm sure there were none on the windscreen though and the seagulls don't follow the tractor any more either allegedly. Probably too busy eating potatoes like the rest of us.

I always eat potatoes for breakfast and I often eat potatoes for my tea as well.
The previous day's boiled potatoes diced and gently fried in a smidgen of olive oil.
Who needs cornflakes.

[gavin]

I was seriously considering a late-night bowl of porridge as I've missed it. Worry about the effect it may have on the jet-lag at this time of night, so will settle for a cup of tea instead. Might have a peek at the bees tomorrow.

[The Drone Ranger]

Welcome back Gavin :)
We grew Sarpo Mira this year because of blight
Got a good crop which we are digging as we go
There were 2 or 3 full Smith periods this year but they were ok
Wonder if that contributed to the short lived chalkbrood outbreak :)

[gavin]

Nice to be back! Sarpo Mira is one of the few that stand up to the blight around these days. The feeling is that it has a resistance gene that blight hasn't yet overcome ... but may do soon if we're unlucky.

My stay in Amsterdam was mostly spent on the laptop so missed out on the coffee shops. Herbal substances are not only found in Amsterdam, they turn up in surprising places. Last stuff I saw was growing ... well ... no, don't want you all rushing off there!

Maybe I'll leave poor Henk alone. He means well, even if he can't see that the massive loss of habitat and general tidying of the landscape is behind the large losses of biodiversity in the Netherlands as elsewhere. (Small disclaimer: if the levels of pesticides in some Dutch waterways are as he claims they really do have a problem).

If they ever do a re-write of Deputy Dawg Alan, the extension specialist who guided our group around the southern coastal plain of NC, could do Dayton Allen's job doing the voices on this.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sewhJY6yynk

The southern part of North Carolina has fields of soybean, maize, cotton, peanut (see above) and - more and more - sweet potato. More likely than not your supermarket sweet potato came from there.

I suspect that chalkbrood rises when it is cold and wet rather than warm and wet.

PS I see that Deputy Dawg is supposed to be set in Mississippi a couple of States along from the Carolinas. Oh well, I'm a novice at pinning down accents in the US (or Dayton Allen didn't get it quite right).

[The Drone Ranger]

Gavin have you read Brother Adam's "Breeding The Honey Bee"
I just finished it and I think it has a lot of ideas that you might find useful in you bee breeding project.
I know he was hybridizing but his reasoning is sound for any breeding project.

[gavin]

Read it a couple of years back, a loan from a friend. That was before I was doing more organised breeding. Maybe this winter I'll read it again.

[The Drone Ranger]

Isolated mating sites seem to be the biggest obstacle.
Namely how do you find one which is reasonable bee habitat
Where would the nearest drone congregation area be? even if it's within 4 or more miles queen's apparently will go there
Can new drone congregation areas be created in one season if so that would solve some difficulties?

[gavin]

I don't know the answer to the last one but don't think that will be an issue. We have the other ones covered!

[Trog]

This may be a silly question: given that drones do not survive from year to year, so cannot possibly be passing any knowledge to the next generation, why is it that there is such a thing as a 'drone congregation area'? Surely a mating area would vary almost from day to day, taking into account wind direction, time of day, hive densities in a given area, etc?

[GRIZZLY]

My Sarpo Mira were badly attacked by blight last year and didn't store at all well-unlike the Pentlands that I also grew which were blight free and didn't waste a tatty in store.I'm growig Sarpo Axona this year and so far they are clean.I thought last years tubers were poor from T&M so that might have been the problem.Never had problems with S.Mira before.The Roosters were also excellant Jon.

[Neonach]

Surely it must be a combination of environmental factors (which will generally persist from year to year) and bee-specfic factors. The latter might - I suggest - include the perceived (by pheremone detection?) number and vigour of the mating partners present. If a long-established and successful apiarist maintains a particularly good stock at a particular site, and it is judged (by the bees) environmentally favourable, it is likely that a mating may occur at that apiary (or part of it) year after year, giving rise to the simplified notion of a 'drone congregation area'. More likely it would in many cases be more temporary. Here in these islands, it is difficult to imagine that these two factors - persistent environmental and bee-related - could arise without man working to establish them. Environment - a sheltered garden; Bee - a number of strong hived colonies. Mating will tend to occur in that part of the apiary in which the bees judge both these factors to be optimal (and that will probably vary from time to time). Here, honey bee swarms going AWOL would not find these conditions anywhere in the landscape outside such an apiary, and so could not survive longer than the life of the generation that swarmed.

[Trog]

Interesting point, Neonach. However, your feral swarm would be just as likely to survive as it would at least have its own drones and could quite likely be within flying distance of the parent apiary. Here on Mull we had an isolated feral colony (very isolated) where the last beekeeper had kept bees 8 years ago. Even allowing for a queen with Methuselah tendencies, there must have been a generation or two created. We eventually picked up a swarm from them but found them very un-swarmy indeed when it came to managing them, so it was clearly not something they did regularly. Unfortunately they eventually died one winter but not before they'd donated considerable genes to our colonies over a few years, I'm sure!

[The Drone Ranger]

I suspect that chalkbrood rises when it is cold and wet rather than warm and wet.
]

Les Bailey believed that was the case

This article seems to cast some doubt on that

http://www.beesource.com/resources/usda/chalkbrood-research-at-madison-wisconsin/

Benomyl was withdrawn after rats in tests with it were born without eyes

[The Drone Ranger]

Re Drone congregation
Some interesting stats here

http://www.beeculture.com/storycms/index.cfm?cat=Story&recordID=603

Drone congregation areas are commonly visited by drones from almost every apiary in the neighborhood, although ground elevation changes between the DCA’s and the apiary may reduce or prevent approach flights. In mountain districts at least, there appears to be no correlation between the number of drones in the congregation area and the distance from the apiary. Areas as far as five km from an apiary may be visited regularly by numerous drones; some drones were found coming from more than six km away. It is suggested that drones my orient themselves by means of near and distant physical features of the landscape (Ruttner and Ruttner 1966). Apparently a mountainous terrain negatively impacts the formation of flyways and congregation areas.

In flat country, it was impossible to get pure matings if there were other colonies in the neighborhood; at least 6 km must be free of bees or inhabited by the same strain in order to prevent crossing. A physical barrier of over 500 m seemed to be necessary to prevent colonies as close as three km away from intermingling. Drones, and apparently also queens, will not willingly fly over water (Ruttner and Ruttner 1965b).

Just clipped this small excerpt

[Trog]

Interesting post re chalkbrood. I was down at the assoc apiary (where bees have been purchased from a neighbouring island) and they've still got a great deal of chalkbrood. I'd put this down (partly) to the stress of their journey but should have thought they'd have cleared it all out by now. Maybe there was so much it's just taking a while. There are young bees present and numbers are increasing, so I guess it's not impacting on numbers too much. Worrying though.

[Jon]

I see more chalkbrood in Spring when colonies are building up and a cold snap can lead to some chilling of the brood.
I also see it after splits or nuc making if a colony ends up with an inadequate number of bees to cover the brood.
Any type of stress such as lack of nectar coming in will increase the prevalence of chalkbrood. I think the same applies to nosema re. stress.
if chalkbrood is really bad, replacing the queen should help as it is supposed to be in part a genetic trait although I have never come across a reference for that.


In flat country, it was impossible to get pure matings if there were other colonies in the neighborhood; at least 6 km must be free of bees or inhabited by the same strain in order to prevent crossing.

Sad but true. I have a couple of colonies I requeened early July producing about 50% of offspring with yellow bands. I have a few producing all dark bees so the proof will be in the morphometry pudding when I do the testing in October .

[Adam]

Trog
Do you use open mesh floors in your hives or solid ones? I have heard that there is less prevalence of chalkbrood with OMF's. I think this is anecdotal only.

With replacing the queen, there will be a period of no brood - even a few days - which might allow the bees to sort out the chalkbrood themselves, so maybe it was not the new queen but just a broodless period. This would particularly be the case in Spring or when the bees are trying to build-up the colony as fast as they could and there may be insufficient bees. The proof would be to cage the queen for a few days.

[Trog]

Solid floors, Adam, as we don't have varroa here. I have an OMF in my own apiary and the bees which wintered on it did much worse than all the others, everything else being equal, so I'm only using it as part monitoring for the arrival of varroa (may it never do so!) during the season. It's good for keeping the braula numbers down, though!

The chalkbrood bees were in two late-arrived nucs (only a month ago) which were building up fairly rapidly so perhaps the trauma of the move and lack of time for housework was a factor. They've been clearing the stuff out faster of late. Requeening not an option, as the whole point was to bring in some fresh genes, but I don't think it'll be necessary. We'll see how they are in spring.

[Hoomin_erra]

Some one has it in for me don't they!!!!!

I finally get a chance to move the bees back up home onto the heather, and the weather goes shitty again!!!

[gavin]

That's beekeeping for you! Once in a while it all goes well, and the better you can manage things the more often it goes well.

I reckon that in the Angus Glens there could be another fortnight of heather bloom. If there is no frost and if we get some settled warmer weather they may bring more in.

My better three colonies have filled a super each on the heather. One more or less fully capped super came home yesterday. One stock (look like Italians) are just retreating inwards in their brood box, unwilling to go out in the cool breeze.

[Troutnabout]

I thought fishing was bad for highlighting the end of summer but bees are worse. I went to check the hives yesterday, the 1st time for two weeks. The 1st thing I saw was a couple of drones being forcibly evicted from their home. I took a few sealed frames from the two hives, 13 in all. but noticed that there was a lot of comb that is unsealed. There was also a lot of bits of wax on the removable floors (OMF's). does this mean that the bees are taking their supplies down into the brood chambers; and if i had been able to get to the hives last week I'd have been able to get more sealed comb from the hives?

The swarm that I managed to capture back in June is doing well after the initial near disaster and is now a strong hive and is still carrying in pollen. Two frames in the super have been sealed completely but on one side only. It looks very nice, flat, edge to edge work.

[Trog]

I know what you mean, Trout. I was out after seatrout on Saturday ... thinking of all the fishing I hadn't managed to date, though glad to have managed some at least and hopeful of more. Drones were being chucked out of one colony on Sunday but there are still some in others, and even the odd bit of drone brood; almost as if the bees are hedging their bets!