Thank you for visiting the blog of Imperial College’s Environmental Society. We plan to upload details of our wildlife garden, committee, events and campaigns here soon!
07/05/12
The day after we caught the swarm I dropped a container with some sugar syrup into the top bar hive, because the weekend was forecasted to be cold and wet so they probably wouldn’t be able to go out and forage. A few days later we opened up the hive on a fine day to find that all the bees had died. It looks like some workers were cleaning out cells from the super frames so that the queen to lay eggs. Very sad, but it just looks like it got too cold for them over the weekend and as they weren’t an established colony, couldn’t keep the temperature up. Next time I’d have kept them in the nucleus hive, and dropped that in the top bar, so that they have two layers of insulation. Ah well, you live, you learn (and a couple thousand of bees die in the process 
…)
16/05/12
We hadn’t spotted a queen in either hive for a little while, but last week we managed to see a queen in each hive and eggs in the nucleus! After not seeing any eggs in the national, we decided to buy a mated queen in, as the current queen probably hadn’t been mated. After tracking down the (probably virgin) queen, we dropped her in a match box and put the new queen in. The new queen has her attenders in a cage, the opening to the cage is blocked with sugar fondant – this gives a couple of days before the bees eat through the sugar, which is handy because the colony will kill a foreign queen if you drop her straight in, after a couple of days however, her pheromones are distributed around the hive and she essentially isn’t a foreign queen any more. In a bit of a blunder trying to take a picture of the virgin queen in the match box, she managed to escape and flew off, somewhat in the direction of the hive. I wonder whether she would know her way back to the hive 10 meters away. We have a couple of days before the mated queen is out, so will look in a couple of days to see if the virgin queen is hanging around, waiting to fight her (you can really only have one queen in a hive at once).
Oh and hey wonderful new cedar hive, how are you doing? Today we transferred our strong nucleus colony to a brand new cedar national. It smells great.
Today I got a call from Reuben after the normal inspection saying that the nucleus looked like it was swarming. Generally things looks very busy at the front of the hive, with a cluster of bees not at the entrance, but above it, near the top of the hive. When they start to swarm, they take the queen with them and fly to somewhere nearby to rest whilst scouts fly off and look for suitable new homes, they direct the bees using the classic waggle dance, so if you see bees dancing on the surface of the swarm you know that you haven’t got long before they start heading off.
Anyway, Reuben hangs around for a while but heads off once it looks like they’ve calmed down a bit. When I drop down to the hives an hour or so after and the front of the hive looks quite busy, with bees all over the front. Looking around the garden, I try to follow the bees leaving the front of the nucleus to see where the swarm is resting to no avail. But then as I walk back towards the hive I see a lovely little bundle of bees hanging from a branch directly above the hives – about 3 meters up!
After much messing around, I was joined by Doug. If you hold a container below the swarm and hit them into said container (which is close enough so that they bees drop into the box without giving them enough distance to start flying), you get a box full of bees. So long as the queen is in the box, the rest of the bees that are in the tree will go into the box. So I stood on a makeshift platform holding our delivery nucleus on the end of a pair of shears underneath the swarm whilst Doug knocked the swarm into the box. Hurrah.
we then transferred the bees into the top bar hive, strapped a couple of drawn out (a full frame of wax) super frames onto the top bar. By then it was 6pm and getting a bit chilly so we decided to leave them there.
After the beesplosion it seems that our little colony went from mere play cups to full on queen cells with eggs and royal jelly. This being a sign that swarming was imminent (probably only stayed that long because of the bad weather) we started getting ourselves ready to perform an artificial swarm.
An artificial swarm being a controlled swarm where you can split the hive (its through this method that colonies reproduce) and we left a healthy hive to choose between two sealed queen cells. Sadly today as we moved the “swarm” from its makeshift nucleus hive to a proper one we didn’t see eggs nor the queen. Although the hive seemed to be behaving fairly normally we noticed 3 supercedure cells, their presence has made us very suspicious that the queen has died or wandered off. A supercedure cell is a queen cup that that has been built midway up the comb from what would normally have been a worker cell, implying an unplanned and hastily taken action.
Oh well, the makeshift hive was pretty cramped and hopefully it was just because the queen hadn’t been able to wander the comb enough to stop workers thinking she’d died and if not, at least they are taking the right action to make the colony queen right.
We can only hope the other hive is doing well and shall check and report back next week.
This season is incredibly different from last year: it appears the colony is thriving. Not only are there plenty of drones being grown but queen play cells were seen for the first time today.
These cells are a sign that the colony is strong enough to swarm (as are the large number of drones), so it looks like that some swarm control measures will have to take place in the following months, today we just destroyed the queen cells and as eggs were definitely see (and so the colony queen right) we can know that the hive is queen-right. Although by the looks of things this was not the right thing and we may be splitting the hive sooner than we expected…
So after treating the hive against Varoa the out look still was not that good, the honey stores were very low and bees dwinderling. The society had hoped not to feed the bees but sadly we were forced to begin feeding with sugar syrup up until November, then we closed the hive and hoped for the best.
You might have noticed that the winter was very mild, and even in January there was activity in the hive. Its convention that you shouldn’t check a hive below 10C or before March, so today we finally went for a proper inspection. The hive entrance was abuzz with activity, including bees performing training flights and returning with pollen. Inside the hive the bees seem to have hit the new season flying, with frames being drawn out, good honey and pollen stores as well as eggs, lavae and capped brood. This is all very promising that the hive will be strong enough for a crop of honey this year.
Alas, the spring is a time when most colonies die due to the high demand for pollen and relatively low supply, so we’re not out of the woods yet.
If you want to come down and get involved in the apiary and bee keeping, come down to the Secret Garden on Wednesday 21st, 13:30.
In addition to the current hive, the society shall be investing in a new colony in our top bar hive, 2012 shaping up to be a busy year.
Welcome to all those new and returning people interested in the environment at Imperial. This being Welcome Week we have some events to welcome you all to the society.
Wednesday 1pm: Introduction to the garden with bee inspection in the Secret Garden
Weekend (time tbc): introduction and gardening session. We’ll be making some raised beds and planting some new things as well as doing some tiding.
Look forward to seeing you there!
Weekly inspections of the hive had been going well, the population was expanding, more and more brood frames were being used and even the supers are being drawn out. There is significant amounts of honey being stored and lots of brood. However, on one week we noticed about 12 bees on the floor with withered wings being devoured by wasps. It appears the hive has an infection: most likely Deformed Wing Virus. While disease presence in a hive is not unusual nor disastrous, it does imply that the colony is infested with Varroa mites. This week, on inspection we saw a worker with a mite on its back, confirming our suspicions.
Varroa mites are parasites, and while Asian varieties of honey bee are able to glean themselves of the mites, the Western variety is unable to do so. Varroa both feeds on the bees and acts as a vector for various diseases and has been implied to be the cause of the drastic loss of feral colonies within the UK.
So treatments: the society would prefer not to use too much pharmaceuticals in the hive, partly because it means we can’t harvest the honey, and partly because why not?
The reason why varroa is such a problem in the Western honey bee is because it doesn’t clean itself in the same way as its Asian cousin and therefore the mite remains, one way of encouraging the bees to clean each other is to shake icing sugar onto the bees and then they come and remove the mites off each other. We’ll be trying this next week.
Ever thought how much stuff college throws out? Even with the reducing and recycling initiatives, it is a terribly large amount. Westminster Council estimate that about 8% of IC’s waste is food waste, and so we introduce Big Hanna. The composter being used to reduce the amount being sent to landfills by composting food waste on site. Which also helps Imperial meet Waste Implementation Programme Targets (UK legislation of the EU Landfill Directive), to reduce the amount of biodegradable waste being taken to landfill.
Nic Dent gave a short tour of the project which has been running since February. Food waste from the main outlets on campus (sadly, not yet the Union) are transported to the portacabin looking building behind central library. Here the waste is poured onto a table to remove any obvious contaminants, before being shovelled into a desiccator and moved into press to remove the liquid elements which is transferred to the sewers (about 60% of the initial mass), the dry fracture is then weighed for monitoring purposes.
Then tipped into Big Hanna, and is ground with some wood chips (for added carbon) and pushed into the composter.
Now the bacteria get busy, digestion occurs and temperature increases to 50C and 60C by the end. We put our hands in because we were that way inclined and allowed to do so, it was warm like a sauna.
Surprisingly, the smell outside the building and next to the composter was much better than expected. An earthy farm yard smell, but not the pungent stench of decomposing food waste you’d expect.
The end compost product, however, was steaming and emitted a strong odour of ammonia, and is then moved to outdoors wooden containers before being mixed with soil to improve the appearance of the compost. So far, Esoc has used it on the plum tree and the clematis’s which would make the sign look beautiful were it not for those meddling kids.
As well as massively reducing the amount of waste going to the landfill, college is also saving much more money by not requiring rodent-proof waste containers and other expenses in waste management to an order of £95k a year, which is incredible and should be applauded. It should be noted that the operation conforms with the Animal By-Products Regulations, so that surplus compost could be sold in the future bringing further revenue to the college.
While not all College outlets taking part, and already college needing to upgrade the composter to a larger one, Imperial is doing well in terms of adding to its green credentials and saving money through the scheme. This latter aspect is not one I often focus on, but it is such a good illustration of how environmentalism can have benefits outside the ideology itself. Now, if only the Mirror and Mail could see such things. Also, its great to see college doing something so visible which makes a great difference!
Another week, another inspection! Which, theoretically, we are now slightly better at doing after a weekend course of theory and practical sessions. Having seen marked queens and therefore a better grounding for knowing what to look for, 4 intrepid apiarists went on the search for Albert.
While they at first seemed more agitated than usual they swiftly quietened down and we were pleased to see that fresh frames were being drawn out with wax (comb was being built by the bees). Brood frames (where the bees are born and bred) showed signs of queen activity as eggs were present. As eggs only last 3 days before turning to larvae, we knew Albert had been around in the past few days.
Can you see it? 3 cells down from the bee in the middle burying its head in the comb? Fancy a zoom and a crop to make it easier?
In 3 days that small white egg (which looks a lot like a size 12 font comma) will start to form a spiral of larvae before later pupating.
We continued through the frames looking for Albert, and when we found her she was unexpectedly unmarked.
She being the elongated bee in the middle with a trail of workers following her. It turns out that bees aren’t as busy as they are made out, and while industrious tend to spend wandering about the hive on breaks, and also finding the queen, licking her with their proboscises, because that’s what bees like to do.
We also saw her laying eggs.
As the nucleus of bees we received contained various stages of brood at the moment the population of the colony is relatively stable with new bees hatching as older foragers inevitably die, but in 2 weeks we should see a rapid increase in numbers as the eggs being laid from last week begin to hatch. I am curious to see what these bees look like, as these will be the first bees of our queen. Within a colony, there is great variation in the appearance of the bees due to super-sister subgroups, with some being greyer looking and others vibrant yellow, and I look forward to the emergence of Albert’s super-sister daughters.
Super-sisters share 75% of genetic material, opposed to 50% seen in most animal siblings due to the nature of the bee’s reproductive methods. These subgroups can be visibly different, but also this genetic variation goes some way to explain why some bees spend longer proportion of their existence performing a specific task relative to their half siblings.
Even in the most active months, an apiarist should only have to check on their hive once a week. The reason we have been checking twice that is to make sure Albert, our queen, gets out and starts laying eggs. It seems in the last few days finally Albert has been released from the her cell and can get onto the serious business of laying eggs.
Sadly we weren’t able to locate Albert, despite inspecting all brood frames. We were astonished at the progress being made by the colony, which has already begun to work on the frames they weren’t transported on.
As you can see in the above picture, nectar is already being collected and some cells capped as well as others being filled up. Now that the queen has left, future inspections will include looking to find any cells with eggs or larvae in, and we hope to be able to show you them as we find them (As well as Albert when we eventually find her).
As we put the frames back into their original position, sets of bees formed mini bridged between the frames holding onto the frame and each other. It looked weird.
Poor guys… We have a bee keeping course this weekend and have some books which will form the beginning of our apiarist library so its time for some studying to go along with our curiosity!