Beekeeping - Short and Sweet

Hi, I’m Stewart Spinks and welcome to Episode 67 of my podcast, Beekeeping Short and Sweet. After our first extraction session of the season, it’s time to consider what the month ahead will bring and also a brief update on how we’re doing so far.
Check out my Patreon page here www.patreon.com/norfolkhoney

So we’re just out of the honey room and I’ve enjoyed a decent early season crop of Oilseed Rape honey, even with the numerous splits and swarms we still managed to extract plenty of honey. I say extract, those of you that have been watching the latest videos on my Patreon page will have seen just how much we had to cut out of the frames. Oilseed rape is a terrific early season honey but it does granulate very quickly in the comb. I’m not too disappointed though as I want to have a crack at making my own foundation this year, so need to stockpile plenty of fresh wax for the Autumn and Winter months. The honey room looks like a tazmanian devil has been let loose with a bucket of honey, I’m not sure how I manage to get it everywhere but it just seems to have a mind of its own, so that’s another cleaning job to add to the list. We’ve moved around 30 hives from the Oilseed rape site, I managed to pick the one morning that the skies decided to open up and it rained almost continuously for the entire time we were trying to move the bees. On the plus side, the bees were fairly calm and for the most part stayed in their hives, the flip side of the coin meant despite wearing waterproof walking boots the rain went down my trouser legs and puddled inside my boots making my feet squelch with each step, luckily I can report I didn’t suffer any permanent damage such as trench foot. We were moving the bees to a site of late planted field beans, the top field has a very nice grass track for us to drive along and a fairly flat, hard standing area for the pallets to sit on acting as stands for the hives. We weren’t so lucky with the lower site, the field has been left fallow for the year and the farmer had been over it and drilled some grasses or something into the field, I had to call him to make sure it was ok to drive across, which he confirmed, I obviously didn’t want to upset him on my first day, but the result was my truck tyres collected an additional four or five inches of muddy circumference as we drove across the field and my boots gradually got heavier and heavier with each step until it felt like I was about four inches taller. All that said, the very good news is the field beans have literally just started to flower and we’ve had some much-needed rain which I’m sure will help the plants produce lots of nectar and the weather for the next couple of weeks looks set fair so I’m certain the bees will be all over it. I watched the bees on their orientation flights yesterday, it was lovely to sit and just chill out for 20 minutes watching the bees as they fly out and locate themselves to their hives. I’m certain today and into the weekend they’ll be foraging in earnest with overnight temperatures staying in the double-digit area, sunrise is around 4:30 am so they’ll have some very long days coming up, I must make sure those extra supers are ready, another job for the “to do” list.

Talking of the jobs list, this month is an unusual one as historically, we used to describe it as the June Gap, where forage became more difficult to find and sometimes colonies needed feeding. Oh, one point about taking off the Spring crop, make sure you leave something for the bees, I noticed a couple of my colonies were literally all brood in the brood box with no stores at all, if I had taken all of the stored honey in the supers they would probably be starving right now. That is, if I hadn’t taken them to the field beans of course, but if the weather happened to have turned cold and wet preve

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Hi, I’m Stewart Spinks and welcome to Episode 65 of my podcast, Beekeeping Short and Sweet. I’m gearing up to start my queen rearing program at the end of this month and so I thought I’d go over my selection criteria and maybe this year we’ll get some fantastic new queens.
The books I refer to are available here:
Queen Bee: Biology, Rearing and Breeding by David Woodward
The Principles of Bee Improvement by Jo Widdicombe
( These are affiliate links which cost you no more than you would normally pay for the books but I get a very small commission should you choose to make a purchase).

There’s an old beekeeping saying that goes something like “A swarm in May is worth a load of Hay, a swarm in June is worth a Silver spoon and a swarm in July isn’t worth a fly”.

I guess the meaning of the proverb is the earlier the swarm the more productive they can be. That’s not to say July swarms can’t be built up and be ready for the following Spring but May swarms can easily grow into full sized colonies and give a super of honey if everything falls into place.

Thinking back to the proverb and swarms in May, I’m going to need a barn to put all that hay in because my bees have really been going for it this Spring.

I’m not complaining, I’ve managed to either split colonies or collect swarms and have reached my target number of colonies for the year with plenty of time still to come so it’s currently looking quite positive. It would be easy to get pessimistic with all the posts by beekeepers proclaiming they’re having the best Spring ever with no swarming and more honey than they’ve ever seen before but just remind yourself that these are the exception and if you’ve seen my latest videos on Patreon you’ll see how things can quickly go sideways.

I had lots of good intentions for a bumper Spring honey crop and certainly the bees on the oilseed rape have been doing a fine job, it’s just they also decided they wanted to take advantage of the early windfall of resources and get their reproduction in early and who can blame them. Those swarms now have really good chance of building up strongly to see out the Winter to come. I can’t believe I said Winter already, oh well, always looking forward.

And that brings me on to today’s topic of my queen rearing plans for this year and how I intend to select my colonies firstly for the queen mother colony, that’s the donor colony that will supply the young larvae that will become new queens. And then the equally important colonies that will supply the drones to mate with the newly emerged virgin queens.

I’ve got quite a number of queen rearing books now, some of them really quite old, but my two favourite books for queen rearing are David Woodward’s Queen Bee: Biology, Rearing and Breeding, this is my “Go To” book when I need to remind myself what the heck I’m supposed to be doing.

The second book is a relatively new book by Jo Widdicombe called The Principles of Bee Improvement and I particularly like the simple Five qualities for selection used in the book from the Bee Improvement Programme for Cornwall or BIPCO for short.

I’ll leave full details of the two books in the podcast notes beneath the podcast on my Patreon page if you’d like to take a look at them.

Looking back at my experiences this year so far, they haven’t much different from other years in that colonies will swarm but it’s been the cocktail of that very mild Winter, the early warm Spring weather, followed by a rather chilly period in early May that we are just coming out of.

I think all of this helped the bees decide to swarm and regardless of how many swarm cells I removed the bees were building them up again faster than I could tear them down. The result has been quite frantic. Like I sai

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Another week another challenge here in Norfolk. I’ve managed to tweak my recurring back problem again and that’s causing some fun issues for me, particularly putting my socks on, however, it happened after we moved around 50 of our colonies to the Oil Seed Rape pollination and I think it was probably just tiredness and no doubt laziness that caused it so I’m resting up for a few days and hopefully it will be fine. I really must look into some lifting gear to help move hives around more easily, perhaps that will be something I can report back on in a later podcast.

So this week is my regular Questions and Answers session, thank you to everyone over on my patreon page for submitting some really great questions for this month, and there’s lots of them so let’s get stuck into them straight away. First up with have a question from Ben Hoen, Hi Ben, thanks for the question.

Ben asks:

I have heard the reversing deeps (in a 2-deep 10-frame configuration) can help reduce swarm tendencies. True? If so, when's a good time to do that? And any advice on how best to do it and what to watch out for?

Context: I have 2 very strong hives (out of three) coming out of winter (they have 8 frames wide of bees in the top box). My concern is that they might not fill up the lower box and think they are out of space. One hive is not using the lower entrance at all currently. Both are 2 weeks into drone rearing and still appear to be fairly light when hefting them. I heard that by reversing the boxes you can encourage them to build up, filling up the less-full what would then be the upper box (after reversing it from its lower position), and therefore discourage swarming.

What do you think?

Hi Ben, I think you have almost answered the question for me. I’ve heard beekeepers talk about this as well although I’ve never practiced it myself. I think a lot depends on the type of bees you have and whether they fill the brood boxes fully or if there is additional available space that the bees can utilise. I would also say that a lot depends on your reasons for keeping the bees in a double brood box set up. For me, the vast majority of my bees are very happy in a single commercial brood box and I only double up if I intend splitting at some point during that season.

Focussing on your specific question and I’m in agreement with your comments, I suspect it may help with swarming if the bees have plenty of space in the bottom box because the brood nest will naturally move up into the top box and expand there, this will leave the bottom box relatively empty with stores in just some of the frames, the rest being put above the queen excluder in honey boxes or supers. By reversing the boxes you immediately give the brood area more space and the queen can move up and continue to lay in the newly available cells above. I suspect that’s the reason people say it can help reduce swarming. I hope that helps Ben.

Next up is a question from Charlie Edge

Charlie asks;

when would be the earliest you would commence splitting?

Also if you did an artificial swarm is there anything wrong with splitting the queen cells down into 2/3frame nucs instead of leaving 1 cell in the original brood box?

Hi Charlie,
That’s such a good question and perfectly timed for a lot of beginner beekeepers out there. Unless you have a specific set up for breeding and rearing bees I would say wait wait wait.

So many beekeepers attempt to split colonies way too early and they get set back by cold weather which almost seems to cause a bigger delay that if they’d left them a month before splitting. Smaller colonies, that’s the splits you’ve made, have to work so much harder than full sized colonies at regulating colony temperature and this early in the Spring the weather fluctuates so much that small splits can get dangerous

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Hi, I’m Stewart Spinks and welcome to Episode 59 of my podcast, Beekeeping Short and Sweet. We’re finally into some early Spring inspections and I’m gearing up to move some bees to their first nectar flow of the season.

Welcome back and this week has seen that lovely warm early Spring disappear down a rabbit hole and we’re once again back down to more normal temperatures for the time of year. A lot of days over the past week have been down into the single figures, temperature wise and the last couple of days have seen frosts on the truck windscreen which is as much frost as I think I saw all Winter.

I’ve been able to carry out inspections on all of my colonies during that warm spell and I have to say on the whole they are looking really strong and healthy, I have colonies with as many as eight frames of sealed brood ready to explode into life and with our main early nectar flow of Oils Seed Rape just starting to flower it looks as though we might see an alignment of good fortune and a decent early crop of honey.

That said, it’s way to early to be counting jars of honey on the shelf from a crop that’s not yet past 10% in flower, a lot can change between now and then and we have to be careful not to get too far ahead of ourselves.

I posted a lengthy video to my Patreon page showing my first inspections at the University apiary, overall it was a really good inspection but it did throw up a number of questions that I’d like to go over and hopefully give some explanation as to why I did some of the manoeuvres with the hives that I did.

If you haven’t seen the video, it’s available on my Patreon page, check it out here.
I carried out inspections on three very different colonies on video to show my approach to each one. The first was a straightforward single brood box colony, the second was an overWintered nucleus colony still in a nuc box and the third was a colony that had been under-supered for the Winter.

I obviously inspected all of the colonies in the apiary but these were the three I chose to show on the video.

The first colony was the one that had a massive varroa drop when I treated with Oxalic Acid in the Winter, they looked really well and were building up strongly. One of the benefits of this apiary site is the huge amount of early season pollen that’s available to the bees, this means strong, healthy brood and this year the bees were able to get out very early because the weather was so mild. This brings me to the main question that I’ve been asked since posting the video and it revolves around when to add a first super to a colony after Winter.

As with most things in beekeeping it boils down to a judgement call but you can make some initial assessments of the colony and that will help you in making that decision of whether to add a super and queen excluder or not.

When I inspected this colony it was obvious they had grown and were doing well but that alone isn’t enough to make me add a super. What I did notice however, was the large amount of sealed brood that was already present in the brood box which already had a large number of adult bees in it. With so much sealed brood it’s important to remember some of the time lines and numbers. A single frame of brood will produce enough bees to fill a couple of seams between frames so if they emerged over a few days apart they would quickly become congested in a single brood box. It’s easy to see in this colony that the brood had been sealed for several days prior to me inspecting so I would expect the workers to emerge around the time of the next inspection if I were doing weekly inspections. However, with the possibility of the weather preventing an inspection a week later it might be the case that I would inspect for nearly two weeks and by that time the bees would have d

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Hi, I’m Stewart Spinks and welcome to Episode 66 of my podcast, Beekeeping Short and Sweet. It’s been a busy week as we clear some of the supers ready for extraction and begin the process of moving hives to field beans.

Join me each week for my latest podcast www.patreon.com/norfolkhoney

This has to be one of the more exciting weeks of the year, as if beekeeping isn’t exciting enough, of course. We’ve been through the long, cold Winter....... well, it wasn’t that long or cold really and that seems a distant memory now. And I always get excited about the start of the new season, but then we get really busy and this year seems to have been quite swarmy, to say the least. I’ve managed to use that to my advantage and have seen a significant increase in colony numbers by making quite a number of splits and collecting several swarms that I missed from my own colonies.
I’ve had an above average number of phone calls relating to collecting swarms, the majority of them being bumblebee nests. It always surprises me that more people struggle with the simple identification of our bumblebees. That said I guess people aren’t quite so connected with the natural world perhaps as they once were, I was very lucky growing up as my grandparents lived in the countryside, we visited regularly and I didn’t have the distraction of technology in quite the way that young people have these days.

Anyway, back to the excitement of this week. Firstly, my thanks to Steph and Pete, without whose help I’d really struggle. It’s always nice to have someone to lend a hand but also someone to chat to about beekeeping, it can get quite isolating if you are on your own beekeeping. I think it’s just that we get so busy we don’t normally have much time to stop and strike up conversations. I have to acknowledge here that technology really helps bridge that void sometimes, so I’m not averse to using the mobile phone when I’m out in the apiaries, as long as I can get a signal that is.

So, I have my willing helpers on hand to assist with the lifting and being on Oilseed Rape we certainly need a helping hand. Some of the boxes were very heavy indeed.

What I thought I would do today is explain the process that I use to go from a hive full of bees to honey in buckets. I think my methods for handling the various parts of the job can be adopted and adapted by most new or growing beekeepers, and I’m changing and adapting my various methods myself as our business grows and develops.

I was chatting to Pete yesterday and describing one of my funniest extraction day memories that I had when my brother came over to help me. This was many, many years ago now and shows how we have taken some fairly large steps to get where we are now. We had removed the supers from the few hives we had, I think there must have been maybe 10 supers of honey to extract so you can see we were a very small enterprise back then. I had an old, galvanised extractor and settling tank, not something you could use these days, everything has to be stainless steel or food-grade plastic but back then we were both a lot poorer and a lot more naive about the ways of extracting honey.

Anyway, I was living in a semi-detached house with a very nice but small sun lounge on the back of the property, south facing and lovely to sit in and have a glass of beer in the late evenings. This, however, was turned into our honey room and piled high with equipment and honey boxes. We had picked a lovely day for extracting but of course, we had to keep the doors and windows shut to prevent any bees from sniffing out the honey and invading our workspace. Well, by the time we had really got started the sun was up, the room was hot and getting hotter by the minute and we were stripped to shorts and t-shirts. I think that’s probably as much detail as

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