bees unite

The talk at tonight's monthly beekeeping association meeting was on uniting colonies.  I found it extremely useful, though it would have been a pity if I hadn't, since I suggested the topic in the first place.  If you attempt to control swarming in your apiary then by this stage of the summer you are highly likely to have two colonies where back in March you only had one.  Add in an odd swarm or two that may have taken up residence on your property, which again is not unlikely since if there's one thing that homeless bees like it's the smell of boxes that previously held bees, and it's easy to go from two hives to four or five in a single season.  And in the following year, as they say, do the math.  You are either going to be Mann Lake's best customer, and well on the way to being a commercial beekeeper within a few years, or you are relying on half of your bees dying over the winter to keep the numbers in check.

My bees generally seem to survive the winter, which on any rational scale has to be considered a Good Thing.  They must be reasonably healthy and happy.  I had one hive go mysteriously queenless last winter, and one the year before.  They were fine when I tucked them up in autumn, but come spring there were no eggs or brood.  But overall I certainly don't reckon on losing half my colonies each year, and I'd be horrified if I did.  I could ask around and see if anybody wants some bees, and would probably get takers.  Several people I've asked about their bees by way of polite conversation have launched into explanations involving queenlessness and subsequent fading out, and I know the feeling.  My former beekeeping tutor said that bees rarely go queenless save through the efforts of the beekeeper, and I suspect he was right, since my early attempts at swarm control seemed to put paid to a number of colonies, otherwise I'd be up to about two to the power of thirteen hives by now.  But in the past few years, as I've got better at not killing them off by degrees, their numbers have been creeping up to the point where Something Has To Be Done.

The principle of combining bee colonies is pretty simple.  You choose the queen you'd like to keep, whether because her hive is productive, or good tempered, or for some entirely arbitrary reason like that the bees are pretty.  I have one box which always seems to contain golden bees.  Each time they swarm I wonder sadly if the new queen will still make golden bees, and so far they always have.  The golden bees have no particular utility whatsoever, not being especially quiet, or unusually productive, but I like having them simply because I enjoy looking at them.  Then you remove the queen from the other colony, and physically combine the two boxes in such a way that the bees won't fight.  Classes and textbooks for amateurs always recommend using a sheet of newspaper at this point, but I learned this evening that professional beekeepers who don't have time to fiddle about give both colonies a squirt of Febreze to mask the unique scent of each hive and leave them to get on with it.  If you don't like the idea of spraying your bees with air freshener then you can use a Fox's Glacier Mint dissolved in a cup of warm water.

I knew the basic theory, and earlier this year combined two colonies successfully using a sheet of the Times, after one of them became queenless following my botched attempt at swarm control. That was dead easy, since I didn't have to find and remove an unwanted queen and there was no brood in the second colony to worry about.  And the two hives were right next door to each other with their entrances facing in the same direction.  The second colony probably barely noticed that they'd moved house.  The member giving the talk, who estimates he has done close on ninety unites in the course of his beekeeping career, showed us a Youtube video of some people performing just this manoeuvre, complete with newspaper, which blew about just like mine except that they had drawing pins to fix it.  The professional beekeeper in the room could barely contain himself when the clip was finished.  Why, he demanded, did beekeepers always make everything so complicated? Why the newspaper?  Why not just put the crown board on the queen right colony, with a piece of paper over the feeder hole if you insisted, and put the queenless colony on top of that.  The bees without a queen would be so happy to get one, they'd be down through that hole like a shot.  The entire job should take the beekeeper ten or fifteen seconds maximum.

I always listen to the professional beekeeper's views, because his belief that bees know more about what they're doing than any beekeeper, coupled with a desire to do as little work as possible, chime with my own feelings about bees.  And since the local farm shops are full of jars of his honey his methods must broadly work.  But I did pick up some very good practical advice from the talk on how to approach the job, including what to do when the two boxes you'd like to combine are not next door to each other and with their entrances facing the same way, and the idea of fixing the newspaper to a queen excluder before you start, so that it will not blow all over the apiary.