A Farewell to Bees

As you know, I had a very nasty experience at the end of August, when I was stung by one of my bees, and ended up having an anaphylactic reaction (blog here, with more details).

As a result, I made the sensible but disappointing decision to give up, fetching though the bee-suit is.

It took a little while, as this is not the ideal time of year to sell bees, as  they are about to settle in for the winter, and it is always a bit of a gamble as to whether they will make it through the winter.

But via the local beekeeper's association I found a lady who was looking for some bees to boost a weak hive going into the winter.

New bee-owner sealing up
 the hive

So, on Friday evening she came to shut up the hive, and on Saturday morning she, and a friend, came and collected the hive and bees. 

So, I no longer own any bees.  

Which is sad, as I liked having bees, right up to the point when they nearly killed me. 

But since I can't look after them any more, I'm glad that they have found a new home, and relieved not to have to rely on others to look after them for me.

So, bye-bye bees. It was (mostly) nice to know you.

In Which I Do Not Die

I had been planning to do a post about the bees, and to talk about how I heard my new queen 'piping' before I installed her, but then I had a bit of trouble at the weekend..

I went down to my hive on Sunday afternoon for a routine inspection and as I was finishing I got stung.

This is not normally a major issue. Obviously no-one likes to get stung, but, equally obviously, it is an occupational hazard of keeping bees and it happens.

I've been stung three times before, and each time,the reaction was perfectly normal - a bit of swelling around where I was stung, itchiness  where it was swollen, and all better after a few days.

Sunday's experience was rather different and very scary. 

Almost immediately after I was stung I started to feel a bit odd, and things went downhill rapidly from there, as it turned out that I was having a full-on anaphylactic reaction. 

I was lucky in that it didn't significantly affect my throat and mouth so I was able to breathe, but even without that it was pretty unpleasant - full body rash, (which itched and burned as well as being bright scarlet and very unflattering!) faintness, very low blood pressure (all my fingers turned a deep and un-beautiful shade of blue, and I couldn't sit or stand up without passing out ), constant shaking (apparently that goes with the 'shock' part...

I don't recommend it. It really isn't any fun at all.


Fortunately, although it was pretty quick (rash started coming up within about 5 minutes of being stung) I was able to phone an ambulance (and also to call my neighbours, who came round and waited with me for the ambulance, and then locked up an fed the cats for me while I had a ride to the hospital and a 5 hour visit to AandE.

I was allowed to go home after being pumped full of steroids, hooked up for several hours  to  machine which goes *ping*, and (a little later) being given a splendid, NHS issue cup of tea.

And my lovely parents dropped everything and came down, so they were able to drive me home and stay over for a couple of days offering tea and sympathy.

I know have an epipen in case of further incidents, but I think I will be getting rid of the bees - I know some beekeepers do continue even after developing allergies, but for me, a big part of the attraction was to have a calm, relaxing hobby, to counteract all the stress at work. 
And somehow, knowing that a minor sting might result in collapse, hospitals or death isn't very relaxing.

Which is very, very disappointing.

I have to say, though, that having a smart phone and being allowed to use it in the hospital did help a lot. Once I started to feel better it was good to be able to text my parents and give them reassuring updates (they live a 2 hour drive from me so although I called them from the ambulance it took a while or them to get there. And I suspect, with hindsight, that my attempt to break the news gently so as not to cause panic may not have been as sucessful as I intended!)

And as I started to feel better, being able to post on facebook and have friends offering (virtual) hugs and real company and sympathy made it a much less lonely experience!

LAst, but definately not least, thank god for the NHS! 

Adventures in Beekeeping - The Queen is Dead, Long Live the Queen

I'm still new to this bee-keeping lark, and it is a fairly steep learning curve.  I was hoping for a nice, straightforward first season, but it was Not To Be.

 I started the season with a lovely, golden Queen Bee

But at some point last month she disappeared, missing, presumed accidentally squished. Or otherwise lost or damaged.

In these circumstances, what is *supposed*  to happen is that the bees find a nice new egg (or several) and feed them Royal Jelly to make a new queen (or more than one new queen, in which case they can fight to the death when they emerge)  

the books also say that if your hive becomes queenless, the bees will normally be grumpy.

My bees obviously haven't read the books. 

They didn't make any queen cells, and continued to be pretty mellow and laid back.  I got a more experienced (as in, has been keeping bees for 38 years) to come and give me his view. He thought my bees were behaving as if they were queenright (i.e. there was a queen in there somewhere), so recommended leaving them another week to see whether anything changed (one possibility was that the old queen had gone, and that there had been a queen cell I'd missed, in which case a new queen would take a while to hatch, mate, and start laying.

But nothing changed, so a week later, he kindly gave me a cut out from one of his hive.
This is a small section of comb with fresh eggs in - you  replace a bit of you own comb with this, and if there is no queen, the bees can use some of the fresh eggs to build queen cells)

Which, in my case, is what happened. 

Queen Cells - on cut out 

At this point, there is a choice. You can either wait for one (or more) of the queens to emerge, at which point they fight to the death, and the survivor then goes out, has lots of wild sex with lots of drones (which is literally the only reason for the drones to exist - they do nothing else!)  an then comes back and start laying eggs, Or you buy in a new, mated queen, introduce her and hope the bees accept her.

I decided to go for the second option, because  I was worried about how long my bees had been queenless ( leaving it for a queen to emerge would have meant anything up to 4-5 weeks for her to emerge, fly and mate, and then start laying - and in the mean time, the bees are getting older and there are fewer 'nurse bees' to look after any new brood, ad it is getting later in the season) 

So, I ordered a new Queen.

She was sent to me in the post. She came (via special delivery) in an introduction cage, accompanied by about 6 attendants. 

My new queen in Introduction cage

And a set of instructions. Which start by telling you you should remove the attendants.

They do not offer any clues as to how you are supposed to extract 6 of the 7 bees in your tiny box,  without either (i) losing or (ii) stressing the Queen. (They are very specific that you shouldn't stress the queen out, although I would imagine that being sent through the post might be a little stressful) 

Frantic googling reveals that around 50% of beekeepers think there is no need to remove attendants, and that about 50% consider it to be absolutely essential. And that you do it by opening the cage inside a plastic bag near a (closed) window, in the hope that the bees will come out towards the light, but remain in the bag so you can avoid losing the queen.

It's not as simple as they made it sound, and after getting 4 of the attendants out, and having the queen out once and back in again, I decided that I'd leave the last 2 in with her and hope for the best.

So, down to the hive.

You'd think, given that a hive will die out with no queen, that they would be happy to see a new queen,but this isn't always the case. It all has to do with pheromones, apparently - each queen has her own individual scent, so if there is already a queen in the hive, the bees will be loyal to her, and attack a stranger. But (I didn't know this until I started reading about introducing a new queen) her pheromones also act to supress the egg-laying ability of the worker bees. If she's gone too long, then workers may start laying eggs. They re not fertilized, so won't become new workers, but will develop into drones (who may get to mate with queens elsewhere, so there is a chance of some of the colony's genes getting passed on) 

But this can mean that if you do get workers laying eggs, the pheromones sloshing around can mimic there being a queen well enough that the bees will reject a new one..

So one of the reasons for having an introduction cage for a new queen is that it gives the hive time to get used to her 'scent', while keeping her safe, so the bees can't kill her.

I took a short video of what happened when I put the queen, in her introduction cage, down on tip of the hive.

As you can see, the bees were all over her (literally). Apparently, if the bees like her, they are all over her but if they don't like her and are trying to kill her, they would *also* be all over her ... the difference, according to the books, is whether they are biting - and (if you are not well-versed in spotting whether a bee is biting) you can tell by whether or not you can brush them off..

So, I felt hopeful, as the bees were pretty relaxed and let me brush them off the cage, and went ahead with the next step, which is to put the cage into the hive, still sealed.

The instructions suggest that you use cocktail sticks to hold the cage in place against the comb. This would probably work best for someone who had not carefully located some cocktail sticks, put them in her pocket, and then zipped pocket, sticks and all inside a bee-suit...

However, one can improvise.

Twenty-Four hours later I returned, made sure that the bees were still seeming happy to see her, and took the packing tape off the cage - underneath is an entrance tube filled with sugar candy - the bees eat there way through the candy, releasing the queen. In the mean time, she has already spent 24 hours with her personal pheromones wafting through the hive, and by the time she is released the bees should have accepted her.

At this point I ha to be very patient, as the instructions, and the advice from experienced beekeepers, is that you should leave the hive completely alone for 10 days after taking the cap off the cage, as opening it up to inspect could, apparently, cause the bees to change their minds and reject the queen (I like to imagine that this involves small cadres of revolutionary workers, standing around on corners of the comb and preaching republicanism, but I suspect that it is less political than that! )

Anyway, after a nervous 10 days, I went back to check on the hive on Sunday.

And... 

It seems as though the introduction has been successful.  I didn't actually spot Her Majesty (my Queen-spotting skills are not great, and for the second time I appear to have bought a Queen Bee ho was supposed to be marked, but had been cleaned off by her courtiers) 

BUT, there are lots of new eggs (and they appear to be proper eggs from a queen, not from workers), and larvae of various ages, so it appears that La Reine has emerged from her cage, and got to work.

Comb with new eggs and larvae

I shall be checking again this weekend, to make sure that all is well, and shall be hoping to spot the Queen.

I am hoping, also, that with the sunny weather we've been having, and the plants which are out, that they will have time to build up a few more stores before we go into autumn.

It doesn't look as though there will be any spare honey for me (I may take a little bit of comb, just so I can taste it, but people are mostly harvesting their honey crops and starting to prep for winter, now). I'm hopeful, however, that the colony will be strong enough to make it through the winter. 

And it is all experience! 

Beekeeping update

I've had the bees for 3 weeks now, and they have not given up on me in disgust yet, which is good!

Comb with Queen, bees, pollen and brood.

As I explained in my previous bee-post, I didn't manage to spot the queen when I installed the bees, but I did manage to see and identify her on my first inspection. She was supposed to come ready marked, but she isn't (or perhaps her workers have cleaned the marking paint off her).  She's also much yellower than I had expected, having seen much darker queens in the other hives I have seen.

But I did feel very pleased with myself when I managed to identify her! 

It was fascinating, too, to see the different colours of pollen as the bees bring in stores - if you look at the photo above, you can see one cell with bright orange pollen in, which I believe is likely to be dandelion pollen, for instance.

Newly drawn comb with eggs

The bees have also been busy as, well, bees, 'drawing out' wax into new cells to fill with stores and new bees - I was very impressed to be able to see the teeny tiny eggs in the new cells - clearly Her Majesty is hard at work!

I have also now received my first bee-sting (not something to celebrate, but I suppose it can be seen as  a rite of passage of sorts.

I had a bit of a wobble this weekend, as when I went to see them on Saturday they appeared to be much less mellow and chilled out  than they have been until now, but happily another local beekeeper came to inspect them with me, which was very reassuring.(We didn't either of us manage to spot the queen, but she was obviously there, as there were plenty of new eggs!)

I have added a Super to the hive - this gives the bees more space to keep stores, particularly honey, but the queen cannot get into it so she stays in the bigger brood-bx down below and keeps laying eggs. I am not really expecting to be able to harvest any honey this year, as it is the first year, as the bees will of course need stores to keep them going through the winter, but who knows? If they have a good year, they may have some honey to spare for me!