When I offered to write an occasional blog for Laurence I'd perhaps somewhat under estimated the amount of time a full time job, beekeeping and the rest of life would have on my ability to sit down and write something so it has been a little while since my last entry, which I hope you'll forgive and to try and make amends buckle up for a lot of unpacking the season gone by!

Just by way of a bit of background at the end of 2022 I was in a rut, debating giving it up, I'd lost an apiary site, I wasn't even sure if I still had any bees, I had a big pile of kit but no real appetite to keep going. A friend and neighbour in the village however asked if he could get involved, see what beekeeping was like and maybe give it a go. Over the winter he found an alternative site we could use and I thought we'd give one more year, maybe I could hand over my kit and ride off into the sunset or it'd give me a new lease of life. Fortunately it turned out be the latter.

Long story short, we went into winter 2023 with 3 nucs on two different sites and all 3 came through into spring this year... So we start 2024 with 2 Nucs on one site in National Poly Nucs. One nuc on another site on 14x12, all into April still alive and a decent size. I'm not going to dwell on the weather this year too much, we all know what it's been like and it's played some part in this year's proceedings, but when all is said and done, the summer hasn't actually been too bad even if it's hard to actually plan more than a few days ahead for most of it.

My basic plan, knowing we had 3 colonies to play with was basically:

• Give my friend as much experience as possible. I wanted to try as many new techniques and options as out as possible, even where I already had firm opinions on what I thought was the "right" way to do something. Since I started beekeeping I've been told many times that 'this is the best way to do something, don't even bother to look at that' and so on. I've definitely formed some of my own opinions since. But where I felt we'd do no harm to the bees, if my friend has wanted to try something I've done my best to accommodate it and we've swapped notes, experiences and opinions at the end of it.
  

• Expand the number of colonies, double up if we can. We've got 2 sites and a lot of spare kit for both hive sizes, can we reduce the spares piles into actual hives of bees and increase what we can do with them? Starting from 3 hives my target was to try and go into winter with 10 colonies in full size hives and/or Nucs. was agnostic on how we got there, and anticipated additional colonies coming from splits, from actively trying to raise queens and from the odd swarm or two

  
  

• Get some honey. I haven't actually had a harvest for 2 seasons now, I get asked a lot when I'm getting some more, so for personal satisfaction and keep up the local "buzz" (sorry!) I'd like to have some honey again.
  

Honey! FInally!

I think I've achieved those goals. As of today in mid September 2024 we have:

• 60 jars of honey

• 3 full size colonies.

• 6 Nucs with Laying queens.

This year we have:

• Compared 14x12 and National Hives

• Experimented with Castellated spacers in Brood boxes

• Compared DN1 + Spacers vs DN4 Hoffman Frames

• Done a Pagden Artificial Swarm

• Tried a Demaree to make nucs

• Attempted to produce cut comb

• Collected a swarm

• Tried foundation and foundation-less frames in the supers

• Bought in a couple of queens and introduced to Nuc and Full Size Colonies.

• Tried different queen "catchers" cages and other techniques for catching and marking queens.

• Mucked up at different times on all of the above.

• Tried out different Hive tools

• Made a solar extractor

• Made hive stands

• Still to collect some propolis now the honey is off

• Managed to not actually spend very much money.

So I think that all things considered we've actually had a pretty good season. I would have liked a bit more honey and a few more Nucs, but I think we've done a lot, learned a lot and I have definitely re-found my "mojo" when it comes to beekeeping despite the reaction I had to getting stung yesterday! (might a separate blog post in that.) So to dig a little bit deeper:

National vs 14x12 Brood

I had started on Nationals and moved to 14x12 several years ago, back in 2020 I decided to experiment with Double Brood Nationals so I have two apiaries on different hives. My general feeling is that I still quite like 14x12 for the overall size of frame it gives the bees, but they definitely have their downsides. The frames are long, it can be difficult for the bees to draw them out consistently especially when the stands are not level. They aren't very flexible and as essentially brood and a half size they are heavy.

We quite like Double brood, the frames fit in the extractor, much easier to heave about, the long lugs on the frames make handling easy, dead easy to chop and change what is going on. We also tried with reasonable success the technique of moving frames of stores to the top brood box keeping space in the lower for the queen to lay and/or bees to draw comb. We've discounted going to (yet another) different hive configuration simply because of the amount of existing kit we have, but do want to try the Abelo Poly National.

My beekeeping neighbours are also part of the decision making here, they are all on National Brood and the ability to easily beg a frame of eggs, or borrow a bit of kit is that much easier when you're using the same kit as everyone else!

Verdict: Moving forwards I think we are settled on National Brood boxes.

Castellated Spacers in Brood boxes

This was very much a try not to let my personal opinion get in the way of trying something. I know some people swear by them so we gave them a go. Thankfully we both hate it! Your mileage might vary, don't let me put you off but we hated it. Ok in supers we both feel but a pain in the brood boxes. What we don't like is: It's difficult not to roll bees removing frames. On runners you can remove a frame or two to give you space to pull a frame back so you can lift it out gently. It's hard to get the frames out in the first place, they propolise the frames and the castellated spacers make it hard to get to a point you can try and lift things out. A "J" type hive tool can help here, but they're un-affectionately known as "lug breakers" when it comes to Nationals for a reason. If you need to do something that requires going back to a frame it's harder because everything has its specific place. E.g. dealing with swarm cells seems harder to deal with because you need to go through the rest of the brood box and there's nowhere convenient to put the frames.

Verdict: It was a short lived experiment and not one we want to repeat, quick trip to the local supplier for some extra runners and spacers and back we went.

DN1 vs DN4 (Hoffman) Frames

In the grand scheme of things I think I prefer DN1 with spacers, but there have been occasions we needed spacers and couldn't find a spare or two, really annoying! Hoffman frames have the spacing built into the sidebars, they don't move about, get stuck or require propolis scraping off to get a spacer on, if you can find one when you need it. The narrower spacing between frames generally means you need a dummy board to plug a gap at the back of the brood box but all things considered they are a bit less faff than DN1 + plastic spacers.

Verdict: Personally I think the extra mm or two that DN1 gives is better, they gum up less than DN4 and you don't need a dummy board, but we are going to standardise on DN4 Hoffman frames for less overall messing about moving forwards.

Hive tools

Again in the interests of trying not to let my preferences dictate future travel the one thing I let my friend spend money on was hive tools and we bought a couple of each type. even with castellated spacers we have managed not to break any lugs with the "J" type hive tool:

 but we have decided that the flat tool:

 wins. It's also the best DIY bit of kit I have in my armoury. You would not believe the number of general DIY things get solved with "let me just grab a hive tool" :).

Farming friends also playing a part in this part of our kit by supplying some sheep feed buckets for our soda solution that the tools live in when not actually in a beehive. Big enough to hold the tools, deep enough not to slosh soda solution all over the back of the Land Rover.

(Used to buy in pound shops, but is on amazon. Support your pound shop!)

The Soda also scotched the not entirely daft idea of colour coding hive tools for each apiary by washing off all the nice red paint that a new hive tool comes coated in once left to soak in Soda for a few days.

Verdict: J Tools are the work of the devil, but I have one in the kit bag anyway.

Solar Extractor

Win Win Win. Not cheap if you buy from a supplier or even just the metal parts, but without one we were basically burning frames/comb to keep on top of wax moth. We managed to DIY one in its entirety for pennies to save on costs having received a free window pane including glass someone was getting rid of. So now frames and wax scrapings get chucked in the solar extractor. We will turn a 14x12 early poly hive into a steam extractor as well but we're now recycling everything. a Steam extractor is arguably easier and cheaper to set up, but it does tend to crack wood hives, the solar extractor is not a day 1 bit of kit, but is definitely worth the investment in the second or third year once you've expanded a bit and have frames of dark wax that you want to deal with.

(initial test with some old combs taken off the frames)

Verdict: Had one years ago, really missed it since and it will pay for itself relatively quickly after the 2nd or third year in just easily being able to chuck in frames of cruddy old comb to get the wax back either for your own use or just to exchange for foundation. You can turn what's left into firelighters or simply lob it in the compost.

Hive Stands

Pretty easy to make yourself and definitely cheaper than the major suppliers if you've got a saw and a drill! We like benches that can take 3-4 hives, they tend to be more stable than a single stand if a bit more difficult to level. If you can get a pallet or two then they are great, but having brood boxes at waist height makes the whole thing that much easier especially once you've got a few hives on a site to go through. The obvious trade off is a double brood + 4-5 supers can get quite high!

(Best of all worlds: Pallets, bought stand and DIY stands, we're tall, we like high stands!)

Verdict: Not hard to make if you've got ready access to scrap wood, a pallet or two also does the job.

Pagden Artificial Swarm

Dead easy as a manipulation for managing a swarming colony once you have queen cells. Easy to explain, easy to follow what is going on and why, the only downside is that you need an entire spare hive and the space to move it about. The more colonies you have the more spares you need because they will all decide to swarm at the same time! But if you're trying to increase your small existing number of colonies anyway, then it's a no-brainer.

I'll add the usual caveat about splitting from "swarmy" bees and add that I think it's, frankly, tosh, especially when you only have 1-2 hives to choose from to begin with, beggars can't be choosers and a 'natural' split with a free queen from a reasonable colony of bees shouldn't be overlooked. The weather played its part here, we had swarm conditions in Mid July and a badly mated queen on the brood side that needed a frame of donor eggs to remedy, but they got there in the end.

Verdict: There is effort involved in moving things about, but relatively hard to mess up once you've split it up and if the new queen fails you do still have options to do something about it, we used donor eggs from the colony we wanted to raise queens from, but a bought in queen could also have gone in (and got us more honey maybe than waiting another 5-6 weeks for the new queen)

Demaree for Splits

Never actually done a Demaree before. As an "easy" way to make up Nucs it worked out OK, but not spectacular.

(Pagden on the left two hives, Demaree on the right)

In terms of which hive, we used the "Roger Patterson Method": 50% of your bees are good and you could raise Queens from. 50% are bad and should be re-queened. The two we started with on this apiary made this an easy choice, Hive 3 on the right in the photo above were 'nice' bees. They propolise a lot but they're calm on the frames, aren't aggressive and particularly between the two initial choices don't follow after inspection. Hive 5 on the left were more jittery and follow. In our opinion, we preferred the quiet life post inspection so 3 was the hive we raised all our queens from this year across both apiaries.

At the start of the season we weren't actually certain which of the two hives the followers came from. We sorted this out over a couple of separate inspections by changing the order we went through the hives. One week we inspected Hive 5, but left Hive 3 alone and changed the order the following week. That allowed us to confirm the Hive 5 was definitely the culprit.

Following is just that, after you've closed up the hives post inspection you have bees still following you around the apiary and sometimes for quite some distance outside it, they can also come to you even before you've started inspecting.

I had an interesting discussion on the Discord channel on this. To my surprise it was an almost even split of people who'd consider following to be a negative trait vs those who'd just accept it. As hobbyists we both felt that we lost part of the enjoyment finishing inspecting to not really be able to hang around the apiary, especially without a suit because we were being followed. Hive 5 in the end decided to swarm and was given a last chance for daughter queen to be better behaved, thankfully this seems to be the case so has a reprieve from re-queening... for now.

Back to the Demaree. By moving the brood above the supers we got a decent number of queen cells to split out into Nucs, needed less room than other things we could have tried and other than actually doing it needed very little from us in terms of technique, the bees did it all for us. The biggest downside is that you have no control over the number of queen cells or where they will be, if you're lucky you get lots of queen cells on lots of frames. We sort of did to the point we could make up the Nucs, but we didn't actually have a lot of choice. You don't have to go to grafting to get a better degree of control over the number of cells you can end up with, but it is definitely no comparison and a real trade off, but as a first attempt to make a serious increase on current colonies it's not to be sniffed at. 2-3 Nucs easy, 4-5 probably, much more than that and you're into having to do more about it that other methods would give you better outcomes for the same effort I think. We got 6 nucs in the end:

just (there's actually two brown wood nucs back to back). Lots of cells on some frames, not very much on others, but the double brood (22 frames) split down ok into 6 Nucs and we got a decent queen cell into each.

I said I wouldn't mention the weather, but this is definitely an area where it played against us, we didn't ultimately start this until almost the end of July because of the weather, the bees didn't bless us with a nice spread of cells across the frames although we did make up 6 nucs in total from the double brood above the supers. We had a poor return of 4 nucs with mated queens and one of those just never took off even when they had a queen. So our total number of nucs was supplemented by 2 swarms and a bought in queen.

I'm also not sure I'm sold on it yet in terms of swarm management but I do like going vertical. There are other options/variations for vertical swarm management such as a snelgrove board, maybe something to try out next year.

Verdict: Of all the queen rearing techniques I've had a go at this is definitely the easiest in terms of getting queen cells and having enough bees to make a sizeable number of Nucs. If you can find your original queen, have enough kit and know the brood cycle of queen cells then you've got enough basic knowledge to try using a Demaree to make nucs, with a better summer maybe I'd be singing its praises as a method.

Introducing [bought in] Queens.

I don't buy queens as a matter of course, but given the weather and "shenanigans" from the bees we thought we'd try it. We'd tried letting one colony supersede naturally, it didn't and ended up hopelessly queenless, this was a hive that was going "great guns" until it wasn't, they did replace the queen and then decided to replace her a week or two after she started laying. This had also happened the year before so we were starting to suspect a "dodgy" line and decided to try introducing a queen instead. We bought two "Buckfast" queens from a local breeder, thought we'd requeen this hive and raise a nuc with the other one.

In both hives we simply introduced the queens and left them to it. Nuc took her fine and she's still one of our 6 Nucs going into winter, but we lost the queen in the full size hive.

In hindsight we should have introduced her more slowly, given the colony time before we broke the tab on the cage. This was our biggest mistake, up until this point the hive was one of our honey producers, but from letting it try and replace the queen naturally, messing up the queen introduction and then giving them donor eggs it dwindled down to a nuc. Now has a daughter queen from our best hive, but we could have done more with this one sooner. Lessons learned and all that.

Verdict: I messed this up. While I very rarely buy in queens (4 in 15 years!) it's not a value judgement, I've typically had enough decent hives of my own not to need to but this year, especially as we were experimenting, it was something we decided to try. £30 down the drain because I was impatient and a waste of an otherwise good queen.

Swarm Collection

Everyone should have a go at this, we got a call, we had a look, the bees were naturally at the foot of a fencepost with sheep wire stymying any chance of scooping them up:

but they were quite obliging in climbing into the skep allowing easy collection the following morning.

(You couldn't just hang from a tree?)

They are now quite happy in a full size 14x12 hive.

As well as the active collecting of this one, we also had two swarms move into the apiaries, one to an empty Nuc, the other into a kit pile with a bit of a gap where we didn't think we had one. Naturally going under a gap in the roof than an entrance down the bottom:

(When a swarm moves into the top of your kit stack, "double brood" 14x12 so they can find the entrance)

(A bit small once we properly hived them, but they're doing fine)

Verdict: Typically I don't look for swarms, you never quite know what you are going to get, you need an empty hive to put them in and there's always a chance they might just fly off again anyway. But the flip side is free bees and we were looking to expand so welcome in little friends, hope you like your new homes.

Also if you have spare kit, leave the entrances open, everything you've read about swarms is interesting but also complete bollards. Swarms go where they go, this year they moved into a kit stack in one apiary, a nuc in between existing nucs with bees in and settled on the ground in a field... I've never had a swarm move into a bait hive where they are supposed to prefer but frequently find them where all the books say they wont look at. I found one a couple of years ago clustered on a hive stand underneath a big, populated hive. Go figure!

Foundation in the Supers

I don't tend to use it, I'm cheap, there I said it. Beekeeping for me is a hobby, every super costs £10 in foundation and bees are pretty good at making wax, plus the majority of it in the supers will end up being drone if you leave them to it. The one downside? on my tangential extractor the frames need an extra turn, if you go full pelt on foundation-less frames from the get go it will break the combs until you've got one side largely empty. So the trade off here is time vs the cost of foundation. I do recommend thin, unwired worker foundation if you want to do cut comb, it just leads to nicer looking combs compared to leaving the bees to their own devices.

The main lesson learned here is that if you want to try it, start off with a least a super of foundation. Once you have one box of comb you can start to "build" supers with comb frame, emtpy frame, comb frame etc and they will draw it out nicely. you can then move from an 11 frame super into an 8 frame super, less wood, more honey! This is where we do use castellated spacers in our first supers. These are always the first super above the brood and we paint them brown.

Verdict: Generally I like it but the downside we faced this year because I was stupid is a lot of the comb I had was old and we decided to recycle it so had a lot of empty frames. If you want to try it, start with a super of foundation to begin with to give them a good chance to draw out initial nice combs. You can then start to take the foundation out and move in empty frames between two combs then they will typically draw the new frame out nicely between the existing. A bit of wax melted along the top bar doesn't hurt either.

Cut Comb 

We just never got that nice consistent capped comb in the super, even with foundation and ended up extracting it or using it for Chunk Honey.

(CC for cut comb, but very uneven and capping even worse)

That said I think we now have comb to try again next year and we'll try it again. Having historically never had that much interest from customers I never bothered even trying to produce/sell it, but we had a few requests this year and my Friend wanted to try it so it is disappointing that we've come away empty handed on this front.

Verdict: we go again next year with a good supply of ready drawn comb, cut back to the frames to start with. I've also just spotted my mistake that they're in a 10 frame castellated super starting from foundation so wider spacing than they should be for nice tidy comb, sigh.

Honey

We did actually get some this year and I do think it's worth saying a few things on this as well/

I have an extractor and it cost a fortune, at this scale though it's doable. When it comes to extracting I am very much pitching this as 'artisan', premium produce. We hired, at very good rates it must be said, a commercial grade kitchen and we took our extracting seriously:

The extractor is wrapped in a cheap electric blanket, £14 from Argos, works a treat to keep the honey flowing nicely. Giving to friends and family is one thing having enough to sell to to others means taking it seriously, having a commercial grade kitchen in the village hall definitely helps!

We are in a privileged position as small scale/hobbyist beekeepers. Value it and protect it. We get a premium price our product often, frankly, doesn't deserve, certainly in comparison to the larger scale, domestic, commercial producers.

What's it cost us?

So this year, between the two of us we've spent probably just shy of £500, mostly on Nucs, queens, frames and foundation. We've got about £300 of income from the honey plus whatever we do with the wax. Now we're recycling and re-using frames that expenditure should come down a bit next year for the kit we already have albeit we do want to increase the number of colonies we have again and we should get more wax as we replace older brood combs in particular.

Granted I have a lot of existing equipment in terms of Hives themselves. We were running short on National Brood boxes, floor and roofs to try and do everything we wanted to, especially as two brood boxes ended up being "supers".

In an ideal world the bees would at least pay for themselves, but at £4-500 for each additional hive and supers, costs can expand very quickly when you start out! And even in a year we're counting as a success we were still out of pocket at the end of it.

Time is the other big factor, we have gone to the hives pretty much every weekend from April to September but it is a hobby, we don't have to make money so I'm not factoring in "labour" to the equation when it comes to costs and you could probably chuck a couple of tanks of Diesel into the mix as well given both my sites are out apiaries.

What's Next?

Next year will be another expansion year and we are now starting to push into the limits of the existing kit. We need more Nucs, more brood boxes, more frames etc but we can still pretty much double up the number of hives that we have on the sites we already have. We will definitely need another couple of hives and will likely go poly over wood moving forwards. Some of the kit is now 15 years old and is definitely getting towards "end of life". If we can bring the majority of the existing colonies through winter we can repeat this year, best 2 colonies for splits, rest doing honey. We are far from considering selling Nucs, these are "mongrel" queens and temperament is still quite variable, but we are already seeing a big improvement in that behaviour just by only rearing from the best colonies that we want to see in terms of handling and requeening those we don't like. We've eliminated following as a trait just in this season but you wont see any photos of me going through a hive without a suit anytime soon :D

I have tried to give my friend an opportunity to try a variety of techniques and tools out this year, not to be too judgemental in teaching them my prejudices in terms of technique or approach but to agree on a "standard" we both like moving forwards.

Might we try a flow hive or a Langstroth? Maybe, but I think we're both of the opinion that there isn't a lot "wrong" with Nationals nor that 14x12 particularly addresses the issues where it could be better. Double brood is pretty flexible, we like the long lug frames which renders the advantages of the "J" tool pretty much null and void, though they remain in the soda bucket anyway. We would like it to be more cost neutral at least than it is right now as a hobby, especially with the level of kit I already have but all things considered it's been a pretty good year, especially compared to last and we build from here!