June in the Apiary

What a Spring we are having. The bees are bringing in so much nectar that there should be good crops all round. Everything is early and dry which means when the Spring flowers die back there may be a June gap, so leave enough stores for your bees if you take a Spring crop. Keep inspecting weekly. Your bees may still swarm in the first weeks in June, so keep adding space in your brood box if it’s full. Many are finding Kevin Thorn’s advice at the March meeting on swarm prevention to be game changing. Spring crop – Most of us will have a good Spring crop and there are fields of oil seed rape (OSR) very close to the town. It granulates very quickly so extract when frames are about 20% capped and do the shake test on every frame before it goes in the extractor if you have to. You must extract as soon as you take it off and don’t clear overnight when it might cool. We use ‘Rhombus’ clearer boards for 2 hours in the morning, extract in the afternoon and put the wet supers straight back on the same hive. Always have an eke or empty super below a clearer board to give the bees space. We also use a small leaf blower for the last few bees. Remember, if you do take a spring crop, to leave sufficient stores for the bees in the June gap, when there is often less forage available. Any unripe, granulated or pollen frames can just be given back to your bees. Extracting honey from brood frames is a great way to ‘win’ empty drawn comb to give back as space for the queen to lay. Extraction – We decap with a serated knife, extract into a bucket through a double stainer and then through a 200 micron nylon straining bag into a settling tank. This takes out specs of wax and dust and leaves all the pollen in your honey. Honey is less likely to ferment if you use the fine straining bag. Sometimes oil seed rape honey just won’t filter and you need to warm the bucket first. A warming cabinet at 50°C will liquify honey in 12 to 48 hours without any significant increase in hydroxymethyl furfural (HMF). Let it cool before you strain it to avoid clogging the strainer.   We use a honey refractometer (a very handy and cheap piece of kit) to check that the water content is below 20%.  We store most of our honey, fully strained, in buckets until we are ready to jar it and we make most of our spring honey into soft set honey because otherwise the oil seed rape honey sets like a rock. The BBKA has a great special edition with information on how to prepare honey and the temperatures and times you can use to warm honey.  Getting ready for summer – If like us you have done splits to prevent swarming, the end of June is the time to start thinking about recombining to get good strong colonies ready for the summer flow. If we left a queen cell to emerge in full sized hive and knocked back all others to prevent swarms, we wait 3 weeks from the split to check. If there are no eggs we add a test frame of eggs to the main boxes to check they have a queen. Smaller mating nucs we just keep checking every week from 3 weeks and shake out after 5 weeks if they fail. Full sized hives with queen cells on a test frame get knocked back to 1 cell and given another chance and then combined with newspaper to another colony if they fail. When you see capped worker brood in a mating box you can remove your old queen and recombine if you don’t want more colonies. If there are eggs and larvae but nothing capped wait until you see a good brood pattern to unite. Patience is essential, inspect quickly in the morning to avoid disturbing virgin queens who have not yet mated. If there are no signs of eggs or larvae after 5 weeks, it is too late for her to mate successfully and your bees are probably too old to raise another. You can reunite and use your old nuc’ed queen or ask around and see if anyone has a spare. We give away good, spare 1 year old queens for free and sell spare newly mated queens via the SBKA shop from our queen rearing which is in full flow. References  BBKA special edition ‘Honey’  BBKA special edition ‘Queen rearing’  ‘Honey Bee Democracy’ by Tom Seeley .