Beekeeping - Short and Sweet

My regular monthly Questions and Answers podcast with some timely questions about feeding bees overWinter.
Check out my full range of microscopes and books on my website www.norfolk-honey.co.uk
You can find Randy Oliver's website at www.scientificbeekeeping.com

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Although there are not many jobs to be attended to in December there are a couple of important issues to be sorted. Making sure woodpecker damage doesn't occur it's important to get some protection on during this month.

I'm also thinking about repairs, renewal and replacement of equipment particularly my hive floors. I need to make up around 40 or more in total and have an idea for making up my own this Winter.
Remember to cehck out the new range of microscopes www.beekeepingmicroscopes.co.uk

I hope you enjoy the podcast this week. Next week, it's time for my Q&A session.

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In this week's podcast I travel down to Chippenham, Wiltshire. UK., to interview Alan Potter, Managing Director of Brunel Microscopes.
Brunel Microscopes supply equipment to a wide range of organisations and beekeepers for a small but important part of their customer base.
The exciting news is that we are now able to announce we have become Authorised Distributors of Brunel Microscopes and can supply all the equipment any beekeeper might possibly want in order to identify pollen, diseases and carry out dissections.
Do check out our website www.norfolk-honey.co.uk for all the relevant information.

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Well, I don’t know about you guys but for me, As the season progresses we seem to be constantly accumulating beeswax in a range of different guises, brace comb, burr comb, frames that have become too old and need replacing, frames that have been drawn out just the ways the bees want it but completely at odds with how we would like it. 
The best way to deal with it is to render it down and save it for reuse with another project or take it to a show for wax exchange.

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My regular monthly questions and answers session where I reply to questions submitted via my Patreon page www.patreon.com/norfolkhoney
Questions about woodpecker protection, the dreaded wax moth in supers and the use of Oxalic Acid sublimation. The latter question I was able to answer with some details from a research paper and I promised to detail the paper here so her is the reference:
Hasan M Al Toufailia, Esmaeil Amiri, Luciano Scandian, Per Kryger & Francis
L W Ratnieks (2014) Towards integrated control of varroa: effect of variation in hygienic behaviour among honey bee colonies on mite population increase and deformed wing virus incidence, Journal of Apicultural Research, 53:5, 555-562, DOI:10.3896/IBRA.1.53.5.10

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I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you Autumn has finally arrived and last weekend here in the UK, we turned our clocks back. With the turning back of the clocks we suddenly got hit with some colder weather and we’ve now had a couple of frosty mornings where I had to scrape the ice off the Windscreen of the pick up.

All of this means the one thing - Cluster time!

It’s a quiet period for us beekeepers and hopefully you’re sat listening to this with a hot drink and a smug grin on your face knowing you’ve completed everything you needed to in order to best prepare your bees for the coming Winter.

Although the bees are not as active, they will be popping out of the hive on cleansing flights and gathering water when the sun warms the daytime temperatures sufficiently. There may be some very late Ivy that they can still forage on, you might see some yellow pollen coming back into the hive if this is the case.

I recently spent some time reading about Fat Bees and Thirsty Bees! It's amazing how, when you dig a little deeper into the lives of the the honeybee just how everything fits so well together.
If you'd like to follow up on the various references and articles that I've been reading check them out here.
Tomas Erban, Petr Jedelsky, Dalibor Titera. Two-dimensional proteomic analysis of honeybee, Apis mellifera, winter worker hemolymph. Apidologie, Springer Verlag, 2013, 44 (4), pp.404- 418. <10.1007/s13592-012-0190-5>. 
Amdam, GV, K Norberg, A Hagen, SW Omholt (2003) Social exploitation of vitellogenin. PNAS 100(4): 1799-1802.

Altmann, G. & Gontalsl-ti, H. (1961) Uber den Wasscrhaushalt der Winterbienen.
Symposium Genet. Biol. llal. 12 : 308 –328
Chauvin, R. (1968) (Editor) Traité de Biologie de l‘Abeille. Musson er Cie, Paris, 2:
245-252
Furgala, Basil (1975), quoted by Grout, R. (Editor). The Hive and the Honey Bee,
(Rev.Edition) Hamilton, lll. USA. pp 472-473
Jeffree, E.P. & Allen, M.D. (1956) The influence of colony size and Nosema disease on the rate of population loss in Winter.
Amdam, GV, et al. (2004a) Hormonal control of the yolk precursor vitellogenin regulates immune function and longevity in honeybees. Exp Gerontol.39(5):767-73.

Amdam, GV, K Hartfelder, K Norberg, A Hagen, SW Omholt (2004b) Altered Physiology in Worker Honey Bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae) Infested with the Mite Varroa destructor (Acari: Varroidae): A Factor in Colony Loss During Overwintering? Journal of Economic Entomology 97(3): 741-747.

Amdam GV, et al. (2005) ; Social reversal of immunosenescence in honey bee workers Experimental Gerontology 40(12): 939-947

Amdam, GV, K Norberg, SW Ohmolt (2005b) Higher vitellogenin concentrations in honey bee workers may be an adaptation to life in temperate climates. Insects Sociaux 52(4)

Anon. 2007 Genetic links illuminate bee social life. Australian Life Scientist 13/03/200

Keller, I, P Fluri, A Imdorf (2005) Pollen nutrition and colony development in honey bees. Bee World 86(1): 3-10.

Kleinschmidt and Kondos (1977) The effect of dietary protein on colony performance. Proc. 26th Int. Cong. Apic., Adelaide (Apimondia).

Lin, H., C. Dusset & Z.Y. Huang. 2004. Short-term changes in juvenile hormone titres in honey bee workers due to stress. Apidologie 35: 319-328.

Mussen, Eric (2007) FOOD for thought. Apicultural Newsletter March/April 2007. Dr. Mussen’s newsletters are some of the best references on issues related to almond pollination. http://entomology.ucdavis.edu/faculty/mussen/news.cfm

Nelson, CM, KE Ihle, MK Fondrk, RE Page Jr., GV Amdam (2007) The Gene vitellogenin Has Multiple Coordinating Effects on Social Organization. Public Library of Science http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/

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As we head into the Autumn and Winter months I wanted to revisit some of the more important aspects of beekeeping. this week I wanted to talk about the two foul brood diseases, American Foul Brood and European Foul brood. 
A lot of the information I’m discussing in today’s podcast comes directly from the National Bee Units Foul Brood  Disease of Honey Bees Booklet that can be downloaded free of charge from the BeeBase website
http://www.nationalbeeunit.com/index.cfm?sectionid=26

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Oxalic Acid treatments over the Winter period are a great way to remove unwanted varroa mites prior to the start of the new season, in today's podcast I share my thoughts on how I will be treating my colonies this year.
Check out the Sublimator that I will be using on my website where you will find it available to purchase www.norfolk-honey.co.uk/provapp220
Two of the very best informative beekeeping websites that I mention in the podcast are Scientific Beekeeping which can be found here: http://scientificbeekeeping.com/
and The Apiarist which can be found here: http://theapiarist.org/
The scientific paper that I mention in the podcast can be found here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.3896/IBRA.1.53.5.10
Please do leave message via my website www.norfolk-honey.co.uk or on my patreon page www.patreon.com/norfolkhoney

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