Ann popped around the other day to check on the bee hive. Apparently the top super is empty and the 1st one doesn’t feel that heavy either so it doesn’t look too good.
The supers are where the bees store their honey so the fact they they feel light means there won’t be much honey to get them through the winter and even less for us to harvest.
The weather hasn’t been great for them though and even her hives on the bog itself are in the same condition. We’ll leave them for a couple more weeks before Ann takes them back and does a proper inspection. Lets just hope we get an Indian summer allowing them to increase their stores. Hopefully this is a sign of poor weather rather than the fact that Ynyslas isn’t the best place in the world for bees. I’m sure it’s a bit of both, but hives where there has been a plentiful supply of Himalayan Balsam nearby have been doing really well.
Phew - survived
It looks as though the garden has just about survived the recent onslaught from the approach of autumn.
Everything looks a little worse for wear and most things are a little windburnt but nothing has been destroyed. Despite the onslaught the courgette plants have of course continued to supply us with a steady stream of vegetables!
Maybe the shelter we’ve been gradually adding is working as there are still various plants in flower and nothing got snapped off even though the winds blew all day long on Tuesday at about 40 knots.
Time for a tidy up
I do have a bit of work to do out there though as the grass has grown well with all the rain and warmth and there are leaves and pine needles everywhere. In fact, everything is beginning to look a little tired out there as if the garden knows that autumn is pretty much here and winter is just around the corner. What a cheery thought!
The bees seem to have survived as well. The hive remained upright which is a start and there are still some bees coming and going although the activity levels are quite a bit lower than they have been. I’m hoping that all is well within the colony and that some sunshine will have them out and about over the weekend.
Bees Coming and Going
The bees that we have on loan seem to be happy. I’ve taken a look at the hive and there always seems to be a bit of activity around it and there are certainly more bees in the garden. The field behind us is full of clover at the moment too so hopefully they are finding plenty of food there as well.
The idea of having them on loan for 6 weeks is to see how they get on out here and how we get on with them in the garden. Anyone who reads this weblog will know that we like to keep the garden looking nice. We are also trying to create a wildlife friendly garden and grow some fruit, veg and herbs too. There can be some conflicts between things such as growing garden produce or keeping bees and having a nice garden for sitting and entertaining in. Often gorgeous show gardens and productive gardens don’t go hand in hand but we’re going to try to do both.
We aren’t going to extremes with either of the approaches so hopefully we’ll be able to find a perfect compromise and still have a nice looking garden that we can sit in and enjoy whilst also growing some veg and keeping bees.
Of course, the bees won’t like things such as mowers and strimmers so we may well have to keep part of the garden a little more unkempt and wild looking. If that is the case I already have a plan to separate that area of the garden off with a fence. This will not only compartmentlise the garden more (which I like) but will help keep me sane when it comes to garden maintenance and will provide yet more shelter for us and the bees.
Hive Entrance
So far our time with the bees has been fine. The hive doesn’t look out of place at the bottom of the garden, and we barely notice the bees. I’ve yet to mow or strim mind you so we’ll see how that goes soon and of course the area around the beehive has yet to get out of hand or overgrown so only time will tell if I can live with that!
We don’t know how the bees are doing yet either but they seem happy enough and hopefully in a month or so they will have a hive full of honey ready for harvesting and plenty of stores to get them through the winter.
‘Plan Bee’ is going well.
On Sunday evening under the cover of darkness an estate car pulled up at the house containing two people, two beagles a cat in a box and a mysterious cargo in the boot. With hushed voices so as not to wake the neighbours and donning head-torches we unloaded some carpet, carried it to the bottom of the garden and arranged it on the grass. Next came a wooden stand and finally a large square wooden box tightly bound with yellow straps.
We placed the stand on the carpet and then arranged the box on top of it. We delicately unfastened the straps made sure all was secure and then carefully removed a piece of foam that was blocking the entrance to the box and made a hasty retreat.
Hooray – We have bees at the bottom of the garden!
Beehive in the garden
Yep, the box was actually a beehive complete with a large, healthy colony of bees. It isn’t ours, we just have them on loan for about 6 weeks which is a perfect start for us on our adventures in beekeeping. They actually belong to Ann who wanted to place some hives closer to some heather to get heather honey. We aren’t that close to the heather but there is a chance that the bees will get to it. However, it is an ideal opportunity for us to see how we get on living with bees in the garden.
We’re hoping to start properly with hives of our own next year but this will let us see how it feels.
We don’t know how well the bees will do here yet, but hopefully these six weeks with Ann’s hive will give us an idea of how much they find to forage on and how they cope with the winds. It will also give us an idea of how we manage to live alongside them and share the garden with around 50,000 new inhabitants.
I checked on them in the morning and all seemed fine. There were a few bees out flying around the hive, orientating themselves and heading off on exploratory flights. The field behind us has plenty of clover in it at the moment and there was also evidence of honey bees on some of the plants in the garden. They were checking out the Innulas, Marguerites and the Hebe.
Lets hope the like it here and we like having them.
Our plans for keeping bees are progressing well.
Regular readers of this blog will know that we’ve been attending meetings of the Aberystwyth Beekeepers Association. Despite our concerns that the windy, slightly barren nature of the local surroundings may not be ideal for bees, we’ve been encouraged by members of the association and are going to give bee-keeping a go.
We were going to buy a beehive over the winter and start with a nucleus of bees early in spring 2011. After much deliberation and research we decided that a National Standard hive was the best option as far as the beehive was concerned. But, to make it look a little prettier we wanted one with a gabled roof and stand – it is going to be a fairly prominent garden feature afterall.
They aren’t cheap, but after my Dad attended a beekeeping meeting with us, he’s been fairly keen to put his carpentry skills into action and build a beehive for us. Normally a National Standard hive with:
- a mesh floor
- a stand with alighting board
- a brood box containing 11 deep section frames
- a queen excluder
- 2 supers, each containing 10 shallow section frames
- a crown board
- a gabled roof
costs anything from £250 – £450 depending on where you get it. These are usually made of cedar and can come ready assembled or flat packed.
My Dad has priced it all up and for around £130 can make 2 hives from plywood based on these plans for beehives (with a few modifications of his own here and there no doubt). These don’t include the frames though which are actually more expensive than I thought.
The frames come in packs of ten and to fill 2 hives we will need 22 deep section (DN1) frames and 40 shallow section (SN1) frames. Ready assembled with foundation these will cost around £170, or we could buy the frames and foundation separately and assemble them ourselves for around £100 (we’d have some spares leftover too).
So, for somewhere around £350 – £400 we should be able to get two complete, fully functional and hopefully nice looking hives up and running.
Of course, on top of this we’ll also have the expense of bee suits for all three of us, including veils and gloves (although I’m hoping to manage without gloves so may even start gloveless!), along with other tools such as a smoker and a couple of hive tools (we’re bound to lose one of them so may as well get two straight away!)
The plans are all in place now we just have to find the money and make them a reality.
We may be getting some bees sooner than expected.
Our plans were to get all the equipment ready over the winter and start beekeeping in Spring 2011, but I had an e-mail from someone in the Aberystwyth Beekeeping Association the other day saying:
“Alan
I am interested in taking one hive to the heather to try to get honey. I thought I had managed to get agreement to put one on Borth Bog but it is slow in happening. So thought I would ask if you would agree to have one of my hives at your place and see if they manage to get any. It would be for about 6 weeks and then they come back to me. What do you think?”
I of course agreed – I had been thinking of asking if anyone wanted to place a hive in our garden so that we could see how well the bees coped with the exposure and forage (or lack of) here – but now I don’t need to.
She’s planning on popping out over the weekend to check out the location and its suitability. Hopefully it will be OK, but we might be further from the bog (and the heather) than she thinks so it might not be what she (or her bees) are looking for. If it is OK though we could well have a hive in the garden sooner than we thought.
Looks as though we’re going to be having another naturalists weekend this weekend.
First there’s a meeting of the Ceredigion Moth Group so I have to set my moth trap up on Friday night and then go back to it for an early morning meeting with the other members and go through the contents of the trap. If you trap moths or want to start trapping moths then let me know and feel free to join us.
A few other members will be setting traps too and I’m sure they’ll hang around for a while for tea and cakes. I’ll miss out on that though as I’m going to have to rush off after investigating the trap contents as I’ve promised to take Morgan to Teddy Bears Picnic at RSPB Ynyshir. I’m not sure exactly what’s happening there but as RSPB members we’ve been making the most of the events at Ynyshr lately and Morgan seems to look forward to them.
Then on Sunday we’re all off to a meeting of the Aberystwyth Beekeepers Association – At the moment the weather isn’t looking too good for Sunday, but hopefully that will change by the time the weekend comes around. Hopefully we’ll be able to borrow bee suits and such like again and inspect some hives. We’ve yet to get our own hives, but will do ready for next year. We might even buy ourselves some bee-suits soon so that we can attend the meetings without having to borrow someone elses.
Sounds like we have a good weekend lined up – I’ll have to find some time to ride my bike as well.
As I mentioned in an earlier post on the plight of the bees, the loss of bees could be a blow to UK economy, that would cost up to £440m per year. I also eluded to the fact that myabe the government should provide grants to help people get started in Beekeeping.
Well, a few local authorities seem to be doing just that. I mentioned a while back that the Coop were offering start-up Beekeeping grants to people in Manchester, London and Inverness. It also seems as though Snowdonia National Park are also offering grants.
In partnership with WBKA (Welsh Bee Keepers Association) and CALU Bangor University (Centre For Alternative Land Use), the Snowdonia National Park is offering anybody attending a training course through the WBKA, the opportunity to apply for a grant through the Park in order to purchase a traditional beehive.
these schemes sound ideal and are just what the government and other interested parties should be doing to encourage people to keep bees and raise awareness of the plight of the bees. Such a grant would certainly be a help for us and with one there would be no hesitation on our part to take up bee-keeping. We want to keep bees here, but the intial set up costs are quite high. Some help towards these costs would be great.
Unfortunately we don’t live in Manchester, London or Inverness – actually, from my point of view that is fortunate, not unfortunate – but it does mean we don’t qualify for the Coop scheme. We also live just outside the Snowdonia National Park boundary. It’s probably less than a mile away as the crow flies, but I’m sure that will count us out of the Snowdonia National Park scheme as well.
Looks as though its time to get onto our local councilors, the people at the Dyfi Biosphere Project and maybe the Rural Affairs Minister to see if there are any schemes where we live and if not, encourage someone to set one up. It has to be worth a try.
I haven’t given up on the idea of bee-keeping yet. In fact I’ve been reading more, listening to podcasts and keeping in touch with the Aberystwyth Bee Keeping Association (ABKA).
A Very Serious Beekeeper!
We have decided that the best plan of attack as far as bee-keeping in the back garden is concerned is to learn as much as we can this year, attend meetings of the ABKA whenever we can and make contacts in the local bee-keeping community.
We would really have liked to start this year, but it is a little late now and Anna and Morgan hadn’t had chance to see a hive up close and personal until yesterday at an ABKA meeting. I didn’t really want to introduce a hive of bees into the garden until Anna had seen them properly so that we all knew what we were letting ourselves in for. Waiting until next year is the sensible option and gives us plenty of time to prepare.
The meeting yesterday was very reassuring though. My parents were here so we went along en masse (I did check that this was OK before hand) and we went armed with Anna’s special Guinness cake so no one was likely to turn us a away either! In fact, everyone was very welcoming and the meeting was well organised. They had suits and gloves etc. for all of us, including a childs one for Morgan. Once fully protected we headed off to the orchard to inspect a couple of new hives, whilst the more experienced people headed down to the field where the host, Jim, had 5 established hives and was talking people through his queen bee rearing techniques.
Hive Examination
As beginners we were more than happy with our little hives, where the bees were very quiet and well behaved. The first of the hives was healthy with a new queen. We could tell that she had mated as there were cells with eggs in and also some with grubs in. The rest of the frames were well stocked with nectar and pollen too so all looked good in that hive.
Morgan enjoyed looking through them and wasn’t at all intimidated by the bees. he picked it up pretty quickly and was soon spotting the difference between honey, pollen, grubs, workers, drones and the queen and seemed really interested in how it all worked.
The second hive was well stocked with nectar, and pollen stores and had lots of honey in it but it appeared queenless. We of course reported back to Jim with this news and I’m sure he will re-queen the colony soon.
Beekeepers Meeting
After going through the hives we headed down to the queen rearing talks. These were a little above us as we won’t be doing advanced techniques like that for a while, but it was still good to see the larger hives in action.
Afterwards had a chat with a few of the other bee-keepers over a drink and some cake. The Guinness cake was of course well received so we’ll be welcomed back again!
Overall it was very promising. Our garden might not be perfect for bees but most people seemed to think it would be OK. It was also good to see that Anna and my Mum were able to sit in pretty close proximity to the hives whilst we went through them and that Morgan will become a good little helper and in time an expert bee-keeper. We think therefore that they will be fine at the bottom of the garden and now can’t wait to get started.
It looks as though everyone is jumping on the beekeeping bandwagon at the moment. A good thing for bees, a good thing for the environment and a good thing for beekeepers too.
Even the Coop are trying to encourage people to get into beekeeping. Their ‘Plan Bee‘ has been offering training courses and has even funded beekeeper starter packs including bee colonies and hives for Manchester allotment holders.
They have now expanded the project from Manchester to London and Inverness. I’m not sure why they’ve picked those cities, but it doesn’t seem likely that I’ll be able to get a free starter kit from anywhere. I doubt that they will expand the project to take in Borth and Ynyslas, but it would have been good to get some start-up funding to increase beekeeping in the area. I wonder if anyone else is willing to fund such a project locally?
