Wakefield and Pontefract Beekeepers: March Meeting

This Monday just gone was the last of Wakefield and Pontefract Beekeepers Association  winter meetings and was titled Apis Through The Looking Glass. We were shown a in depth presentation with slides of honey bees through a high powered microscope. The guy holding the meeting was called Graham and he has a book available at amazon.co.uk also called Apis Through The Looking Glass, which contains the photos featured in the presentation. The presentation was very detailed so I will just go over the basics and what I can remember.

Bees are insects so are made up of three sections; the head, the thorax and the abdomen. On their head they have two antennae, five eyes, a set of mandibles and a proboscis. Their heads are also mostly covered in hairs, including the two main compound eyes (yes, bees have hairy eyes!!). The thorax has the two sets of wings and six legs. The abdomen contains the bees honey stomach along with other internal organs and the sting. In the presentation these were all shown in very close up photos. I have included Wikipedia links for various parts for if you want to read more.

Head

• The antennae of bees contain many senses which the bees use to detect vibrations, smells and temperature among other things. It is made up of several sections but the male drone has one more segment, believed to be used to help locate Queens on their mating flight.
• Bees have two kinds of eyes; the compound eye and the ocelli. The two compound eyes are made up of  hundreds of segments which gives them a pixelated view of the world, the male drones have much larger eyes that almost wrap all the way around their head, again they are for helping to locate Queens. The three ocelli are situated on the top of the head and are arranged in a triangle, they are thought to be used to help the bee stay upright and straight when flying.
• The mandibles are the mouth parts of the bee and are used to chew up the wax scales and build comb. 
• The proboscis is the bees tongue and is used to suck up nectar from flowers. 

Thorax

• The larger of the sets of bees wings don't actually physically attach to the muscles that drive them. There are two muscles in the thorax that drive the wings by stretching and contracting the thorax vertically and horizontally, this in turn causes the thorax to push the wing making them beat. The smaller wing has got hooks that connect it to the larger wing when in flight so the aforementioned method that drives the large wing also drives the small one in turn. 
• The bees legs have two other functions, other than the ability to walk! The first is located on the front legs and is a small nook in the inner elbow that is used to clean the antennae; it works by wrapping around the antennae so they can be scrapped clean prior to flying. The other main function is the  pollen basket; this a hairy area of the back leg that collects pollen, the bee does this by first covering itself in pollen and then brushes the pollen towards its back legs. Then with the aid of a small amount of nectar the bee squeezes the collected pollen through it's "knees" into the pollen basket.

Abdomen

• The honey stomach is located just in the abdomen, prior to the main stomach and is where nectar or honey is stored when travelling from one place to another. It is similar to the crop in birds. It has the ability to stretch to fill a larger area of the abdomen so in summer months when there is plenty of nectar it will usually be bigger than in the winter when there is no new nectar coming into the hive. When a bee returns to the hive it brings the nectar back up and passes it to other bees in the hive for them to in turn take it to be stored as honey.
• The rectum is in the abdomen and has similarities to the honey stomach but in reverse. In the winter months, when it is too cold to leave the hive, the bee can store excrement in it's rectum stretching it to occupy most of the abdomen. In the summer the bee is outside a lot more and able to deposit it's droppings outside on a much more regular basis so there isn't as much need for a large rectum. 
• The sting is located at the end of the abdomen and is the part most people are aware of when in close proximity to bees! Bees have a venom sack connected to the sting that is pulled out of the honey bee when it stings you, killing the bee in the process. The venom only develops after a few days so a newly hatched bee is very unlikely to sting you and has less chance of it causing any damage. The sting of a bee is made of two main rods with barbed ends that move back and forth in opposite directions, thus causing them to dig deeper and administer more venom.

There were other parts included in the presentation including the reproductive system but I don't remember enough to do it any justice if I was to try to write it up. In the future I may learn more and also have access to pictures to show the various parts in greater detail and if so I will do a more detailed post.

Wakefield and Pontefract Beekeepers: November Meeting

This months meeting was titled Queens and Things and was presented by a guy called Gerry Collins. As you can probably imagine by the title the subject was Queens and included other little bits.
We did have a presentation by him last year. Gerry mentioned that he used to be a biology teacher and some of this was shown in his presentation; he named a few of the pheromones that Bees produce along with the names of the glands that produce them, unfortunately I don't remember the names or I would have included them here. I may in the future need to learn them when taking advanced Beekeeping exams but at this stage I don't think I need to know them.

We were shown many slides throughout the presentation showing pictures of Queens illustrating the possible problems with locating her majesty. For example in one picture she could be clearly seen and then in a second shot taken seconds after the Queen had disappeared into a cluster of Bees. Other pictures included a Queen that was partly into a cell laying a egg making her hard to see and also virgin Queens that are only slightly larger than workers.

We were also advised about looking for the signs of having a laying Queen. One photo showed a group of cells with more than one egg in each cell. This normally would indicate the possibility that there are laying workers in there (which is bad because workers only lay drones). However in that slide what we were seeing was a young Queen that hadn't learned to just lay a single egg per cell; a clue to this is that although there were multiple eggs, they were mostly central right at the bottom of the cell, when you have laying workers the eggs are generally closer to the sides due to workers having much shorter abdomens.

There were plenty of other things covered but I either can't remember them enough to write up or I have previously written about the subject anyway so have chosen to leave them out. After the presentation there was, as always, a raffle with prizes including a bottle of wine, chocolates and honey storage buckets, along with other bits. I didn't win anything this month although I really would have liked to get some storage buckets, I only currently have 2 and one contains whats left of my honey and the other contains some honey my dad acquired for me over a year ago. The honey my dad got me has set solid in the bucket and it's this that I'm using to make my mead, when I have more mead making experience I will use honey from my own Bees, or what I like to call "The good stuff"

Beekeeping Course: Week 5

This Wednesday was the first lesson back after half term. As I am working night shift this week I had a lie in on the morning, however I was woken up by such a large noise outside as the heavens opened and hail stones came down hard for 15 minutes followed by a heavy thunderstorm. Though this was impressive to watch (and amusing watching our 3 chickens running around in the rain getting wet) it also made me think there would be no apiary visit on the course this week; I was wrong! After 20 minutes of heavy rain it stopped as quickly as it started and the sun came out for the rest of the day.

When I got to the classroom we all suited up and made our way over to the apiary. We split into 3 groups and checked the hives. After having some really nice warm weather over the last 2 weeks we were hoping to see eggs laid by the new queens. Last time there were a couple of hives that had virgin queens that hadn't mated yet, they need a couple of warm days to allow them to get out of the hive to mate; the first hive opened was one of them and there were eggs present. A further inspection of that hive in a weeks time will hopefully reveal that she is laying worker eggs and not just drone eggs. If she is just laying drones (males) then the colony is doomed as it can't survive without workers (females) to collect food and look after the young. We didn't see the queen in there but as she is a new queen she wouldn't look too different from a worker as her abdomen wouldn't have got enlarged yet. We then moved onto the second hive which is an established colony and did a check of that. In this hive we got the chance to do the inspection ourselves so when it came to my turn, using the hive tool, I separated the frames of brood and carefully lifted the frames one by one. I was unable to find the queen but did find brood in all the frames I checked. While we were doing this the teacher with one of the other groups shouted over to say they had a drone laying queen. Unfortunately she will have to be killed and replaced if the colony is to survive but as she couldn't be found then it'll have to be done another time.

After a short break for tea and coffee we had a sort of test where we were given nine bits of paper with images of the 3 castes of bees (queen, worker and drone) but they were cut up separating the head, thorax and abdomen. We had to put the bits together to correctly identify the 3 castes. We finished this fairly quickly and moved onto the next part which was talking about the different castes and comparing how long each takes to develop from egg to bee; this is a link to wiki site that shows the times if interested. This is important to know as it helps with swarm control. Next weeks course includes swarm management so I won't go into that this week.

I have saved the most important part of this weeks course while last. During the apiary visit Ivor said that he does have a few nucleus hives ready for us and hopefully will be able to collect mine next Wednesday! This means I need to pull my finger out and get to my Dad's allotment during the week and prepare the site. I must admit that I am buzzing with excitement at the thought of finally being able to say I'm a Beekeeper!