Stan’s Story
When I was first trained in the UK, the aim of the backyard beekeeper was to produce enough honey for the household, with a little extra to give to friends and to tide over a lean year. A swarm was a minor disaster and lumber was so scarce you needed a government permit to buy a 1×6 and there was no hope of building a new hive. Hive swarms were to be avoided and indeed were widely (and correctly then) regarded as bad bee management.
Now the amateur has read all about maximising yields, splitting hives, reorganising the brood chamber, spring feeding etc. practises which practically guarantee swarms. No wonder swarms are a nuisance in Metro Halifax.
The mentor I had in ’72 in N. Ireland (my first tenure track-appointment was at the ‘New University of Ulster’ in Coleraine) was Mr. Sands, the principal[1] of Ballymena High School. He had the most silken gentle fingers of any beekeeper I have ever seen handle bees and he claimed never to have had a swarm in 25 years. His concept was first of all “watch, listen, sniff, that” he said “tells me everything.” Apart from that, “examine inside the hive as infrequently as possible and then gently, gently but above all make sure the bees always believe they have enough space.”
Everyone I knew in the Ulster Beekeepers Association (as fractious[2] a bunch as any I ever met) all agreed, Mr Sands never had a swarm[3].
So what did Mr Sands have that has taken me close on 50 years to learn to cope now with my 3 hives. The ‘watch, listen, sniff’ is crucial and saves most interventions. I have an acre to garden, almost no lawns at all now so am out gardening whenever the weather permits. I “watch” the hives almost daily and know their routines and notice anything out of the normal. From the “listen” the sound likewise is important and a disturbance easy to spot. Incidentally the ‘happy’ buzz folks record when they open the hive to show its insides, is nothing of the sort. It is the sound of the bees frantically working to restore their very carefully constructed air conditioning. For the “sniff” if you can smell something off in the daytime by a hive, then something could be badly wrong. But in the calm evening at dusk, I usually quietly approach the hives, watch, listen and sniff. On a warm evening in a honey flow the detection of the smell of honey being worked is easy. Sometimes it is possible also to detect the main nectar source (always when the privet is in flower, the hives smell of cats). Otherwise, best make sure the hive smells ‘sweet’.
Intervene as little as possible. In nature as Chandler (he of the top-bar hive) makes clear, the bees originally choice was a hollow tree for their hive. It should have lots of vertical space, a sensible entrance, and no top ventilation. The bees leave the lower combs empty, for the incoming foragers to quickly dump their goods, set the temperature gradient from the 30’sC in the brood, with a carefully graded cooling down as you go outwards from there. The honey is stored on top, the lower capped the upper open and being concentrated. Later when fall approaches and brood rearing slows, the upper stores are all first capped. Then the now empty cells below are slowly filled with honey and then capped. Honey being worked below the capped stores is a sign either that winter is coming, or that the hive is out of space.
When a busy beekeeper opens the hive, the hot air rushes out and the AC is shot. The guy notices the empty frames at the bottom and promptly moves them to the top of the brood, rearranges some of the brood frames, or at least pulls them out messing up the spacing and then to get the honey frames filled, moves the half-filled frames down, and the filled frames up. No matter what is above the filled frames, the bees will now believe they could be soon short of space.
Bees swarm when three conditions are met: There needs to be a good honey flow, drones present and the bees need to have previously believed they were getting short of space and usually have also been stressed. Go Figure.
So how did I manage Sands’s help those years ago; not well at all? My first hive came and was installed in a far corner of a university field. At the end of each day if it was fine out I went with my smoker to see what they had managed since the last visit. Learned a lot about the inside of a hive. Then about 7 weeks later I went again and almost bumped into a great mass of bees hanging on a sapling near the hive, a swarm. A frantic call to the guy who provided the hive met a weary response, “You right p**sed them off, why couldn’t you leave the blurry things alone?” However he found me a couple of old worn boxes and a lid so now I had two hives. I still have the single pot of honey I got out of the two hives that year. By 1976 I had five hives, three out on the heather and the original two. They went to good homes when we came to Canada later that year.
Shortly after coming here we got friendly with a farmer in the Gaspereau Valley and went into a small commercial operation on his apple farm. He provided some labour, wood and the site. I managed the bees. We bought 50 packages (at $25 per package) and shocked the provincial apiarist by successfully over-wintering them as was then the norm in the UK (the normal NS practise was to kill the hives and harvest all the honey). We grossed between three quarters of a ton and one and a quarter tons of honey yearly and I made at least half of all possible beekeeping mistakes, the other half just needed time. The farmer was of the US and not of the Valley and he went bust 1984/5 but found me a new birth on Greg Coldwell’s farms in Port Williams where I ultimately ran everything down to a small operation and then retired to become a proper backyard amateur again.
How do I run my bees today? Well, to the best benefit of the hive. The commercial years of hive intervention gave me plenty of scope to understand everything you experience inside the hive and how it relates to the ‘watch listen sniff’ routine[4].
My hives are made from (nominal) 2” cedar boards, dovetailed. Externally they measure 18×21”. I have a set of boxes roughly the depth of shallows but with an internal measurements of 19×22”. In winter these slip over the hives right up to the roof, and there are sheets of ½” styrofoam between the inner and outer boxes. The bottom shallow is constructed to fit to the ground round the base-board but to have a 3/8” small entrance for the bees. Thus the bees over-winter in a thick double-walled hive with styrofoam insulation in the gap. It may take ten minutes, tops, to install it.
I over-winter on three deeps and those three are the bees’ domain. In spring once the bees are properly out, the three boxes on each hive are carefully examined, the bottom one has any bad old frames removed, is placed on top of the other two with new frames added as necessary. By the end of winter most of the activity is in the top of the three boxes so I am not messing up much of the hive. The bottom board is replaced with a clean one, Thymovar added and a watch is kept on the now empty top box. As soon as there are signs of the bees working in the top box, Thymovar comes off and an empty deep is placed on top. That top box is now watched. A very gentle lift of the top board does not bother the bees, and that top board is insulated all year with ½” styrofoam (no top ventilation, so all you find up there are a few workers taking time off for a fag with a few friends!). Once there is activity in that top box, a new empty goes on, so there are now 5 boxes and by late July there are 5 ½ or 6 boxes on the hive.
By late July most of the brood rearing is over, and year on year, despite all my worry little ever happens in the top box.
The bees always believe they have adequate space, the hives are in dappled shade, and are not baked mid-day (lesson from the orchard days), and I try to avoid messing up their AC so no stress from me.
Come honey gathering, I wait until Heptacodium micinoides has finished flowering just after the Ivy. It is now a big tree, coming into blossom early September finishing sometimes in early October. It often drips with bees of all types on a warm fall afternoon, particularly queen bumblebees feeding up for the winter. Then I wait a couple of weeks for any top combs to get capped then collect all the honey in the fourth, fifth and (? 6th) deeps. Box 3 and below are for the bees.
The honey is extracted, the empties returned to the bees for cleaning, each hive getting their own back. The bees in the three boxes are fed (the new Countryfields top full slit feeder will get at least 30lbs off syrup into a hive in 24 hours). The three-box hives are fed until the bees will take no more. They get Thymovar again, nosema fix and Hive Alive. The timing used to be tight, but climate change and the new feeder make this routine fit nicely. Finally the hives are snuggled down for the winter.
Yields per year range from 180lbs in a good year, normally 100-120lbs and 80 lbs one bad year (3lbs to the litre; 1kg = 2.2lbs)
My last swarm was in 2011 and definitely my mistake. If you watch daily you cannot miss the loss of a swarm even if you do not actually see it. One hive absconding since then, I somehow forgot to replace the top styrofoam on the top board after removing the upper boxes for the honey and there was a big gauze-covered hole underneath. No way were the bees going to stay with that great draft overhead that they couldn’t fix, it totally messed up their AC (lid, pitched roof, vents in gable ends). So they had upped and off by the time the empties came back. It wasn’t a robbery as the stores were all carefully and neatly removed and a robbery makes one hell of a noise easily heard even indoors. Incidentally there hasn’t been a single nuisance swarm in Jollimore for the 41 years I have lived here and kept bees here.
There you are 50+ years of beekeeping on a page or two. I am finally, just moderately content with my beekeeping.
Note, All I heard from Sands, long ago, I am still only now finally understanding what he tried to teach me, so whether it is worth saying any of this to our younger colleagues now or later is moot.
Stan
[1] You hardly come higher than that in Ulster: it was said that when the time Mr Sands finally came up to the pearly gates, St. Peter would put in a call to head office and ask the boss to come down to welcome the principal in!
[2] There were once fisticuffs in the parking lot after a meeting, all over half an inch (National v Langstroth hive). One occasion there was calm accord; Brother Adam came to spend a day with us.
[3] Remember, there were no Nucs, or package bees available. A new hive meant catching a swarm. English common law (Edward III 1327-1377) held that a swarm visible from its original hive belonged to the hive owner, who could follow it if it flew off and provided it was still in sight, the law of trespass was suspended. Feral swarms were gold dust, but hive swarms were universally regarded as evidence of incompetent beekeeping. Thus everyone knew the provenance of every swarm.
[4] . I even had a worker-layer hive filled with kamikaze Italian bees (they cruised 20’ overhead as soon as I appeared, and dived for the first bit of flesh showing). That hive took some finding in the orchard.
Another wonderful story by Allison LaSorda:
The Keeper of the Bees
I followed a desire to witness, but not control, the inner workings of living things.
To read, click here: https://hazlitt.net/feature/keeper-bees
Halifax Honey Bee Society 