Ivy Honey (The End of the Year?)

Ivy flowers about to open

Irish honey bees are different from all other 'tribes' in being adapted to cope with the long, mild, wet winters here. Their dark (mellanistic) bodies give them the name Apis Mellifera (sub-sp Mellifera or AMM for short) make them easy to spot and their special attributes make mockery of the global trends in commercial bee-keeping (Let's buy queens from Italy! Let's use these fantastic "Buckfast" hybrids from Devon!) - Irish beekeepers tend to be looking now, only for genuine dark Irish bees.

The ivy flowers start to open.

Worker bees hatching around now are physiologically very different from the short-lived 'Summer' bees; they can live for 6 months and this is not just because they do not have to go out and do all that exhausting foraging for nectar and pollen (and water and propolis). They have fatty 'bodies' under the skin in their abdomen where they can lay down fat to help them through the bad times. The fat comes mainly from ivy pollen, which is good news in Ireland where ivy is hugely abundant (hence, presumably, the co-evolution).

These 'super' frames are in pristine mint condition with none
of the wax 'foundation' drawn up into hexagonal honeycomb
'tubes'.

Top frame in this pic has drawn comb over all but only
capped-off wax (white crinkly bits) on a small area. The bottom
frame is a bit better.

Ivy, though, is good for bees, but bad for Irish bee keepers (well, pushy, asset-squeezing, exploitative bee keepers, anyway). The nectar the bees gather from those pollen-rich flowers, when converted to honey by bees and packed into honey comb, sets like concrete! You cannot extract it from the combs in any easy way, so bee keepers make sure that they go through their hives taking off the summer and early autumn honey BEFORE the ivy flowers start to open - about now in these parts. This is the end of the year in honey-harvest terms.

I was pretty sure I'd have no honey to harvest. Regular readers will know that I looked in a while back and saw two completely empty 'super' boxes containing frames of foundation wax like new, as if no bee had ever walked that box and none had started to draw up the hexagonal tubes of honeycomb. I put the lack of honey down to the wet and horrible June and July when the bees would have been unable to go out foraging and would have used up any stores ( gathered in April and May) keeping the larvae alive.

Dark Irish workers on capped honey. 

One of the hives today was true to this story. The super was still clean and untouched. The bees have probably been 'up' there for an explore but have not needed it yet as a larder. They seem perfectly good and vigorous below this in the "brood and a half" boxes. There are stages to this honey comb. You start by giving the bees your frames of wax sheet embossed with a hexagonal pattern (foundation). The bees add more wax to this, building up the hexagonal tubes of the 'honeycomb' we know. These tubes are then filled with nectar/honey as the stores are dried out and chemically changed (to invert sugars). When the gloop is dry. stiff and changed enough to be honey, the cells are capped off with more wax, crinkly and white this time. Job done.

Arum berries in the local hedges.

The style of bee keeping we do in our apiary is very different (I have suggested above) from the intensive, manipulative pushiness of the commercial boys. They are in it to make a living from honey or selling new colonies. I am just trying to sustain colonies on site here to help with pollination (and because I like having them around). If I get honey then that is a bonus. My second hive does, in fact, have some capped (extractable) honey in it but is patchy and light. An Irish hive colony needs around 40-50 lbs honey to see it through the winter. The bees work all summer trying to accumulate this amount FOR THEMSELVES, not so that humans can 'harvest' it. The commercial boys will take honey anyway and if that leaves their hive short they will replace the 'stolen' honey with sugar syrup. I do not do that. I leave them the first 40-50 lbs (about what would be found in the first 'super box') and would only take crop from any 2nd, 3rd or higher boxes. (Some colonies get so strong in a good year, the bee keeper can stack 10 supers up like a hi-rise block)

To cut a long story short, these amounts of honey are not worth extracting and it would do too much damage to the hives to do so, so I have decided to leave them with it this year. Hence, you hopefuls who have been asking whether there would be any honey, I am sorry to disappoint you this year. That's how it goes with 'Natural' beekeeping, I am afraid.

BIG thistles.

In other news, we sadly lost one of the tiny Buff Orp chicks this week. We don't know what did for him/her - I spotted that the 2 mums had only 4 chicks with them and went round trying to see if the little mite might be stuck somewhere in need of rescue. I found the body clean and dry, with not a feather out of place, but stretched out on the grass, stiff and lifeless. These things happen. Small Holders have a wry comment to one another to cover this - "Ah well... where there is livestock, there is dead stock". Just not a thriver, I guess.

Ivy

Buff Orpington youngsters go free range at 6 weeks

We are still very much enjoying the unseasonable warmth and sunshine of this 'Indian Summer' but we know that the year is on the change, leaves are starting to turn colour and fall and the garden is a lot about seed heads rather than new flowers. For the bees, though, the most important season of their year is just about to start; the ivy flowering season. Not many people outside of bee keeping know that 'our' Irish dark bees (Apis mellifera mellifera), sometimes also known as 'black bees' or 'Buckfast bees' show a behaviour unique to the subspecies, that of keeping brood (i.e. larvae) alive all through the winter months.

Ivy flowers almost open

Our bees in summer are like any other type, with the colony made up largely of a succession of fairly short lived worker females, each lasting about 6 weeks but capable of 'rearing' in that time, an average of 3 younger 'sisters', so that the colony can rapidly expand in spring up to the 20-30,000 population typical in a late summer Irish hive. Come September, though, there is a significant change with the larvae being produced being physiologically quite different. The winter workers can live up to 6 months and can lay down fat in their bodies in autumn to see them through as the honey and pollen stores start to dwindle.

Ivy covered old farm house.

These workers shrink the colony down from 30,000 bees till it can be massed in a dense, football sized 'winter cluster' in the middle of the hive, with the queen and some brood kept warm at the centre of the football by the warmth generated by bee bodies. Bees do not hibernate as such, though they do go quiet and do not leave the hive unless outdoor temperatures are over ten degrees or so.

More ivy than ash. A well covered tree

As is the way in these 'co-evolution' set ups, the plant partner to all this is the ivy which not only flowers this late in the year (starting about now) but also has pollen which is uniquely very high in fats and oils giving the Irish bees what they need. Ivy is very very common here, growing in ditches and hedge bottoms, covering walls and abandoned farmhouses, climbing high up into the canopy of big ash trees and way up trunks of the big spruces. It even commonly climbs all the way up telegraph poles leaving them completely encased in a shaggy blanket of foliage as if they themselves were some kind of bizarre palm tree. It is a real saviour for the bees as long as the weather stays warm enough for them to forage through the flowering season. I have not seen any flowers actually open yet but it cannot be long. We have high hopes.

Ivy on Black Spruce

With me back from the UK and the Buff Orpington youngsters now making 6 weeks, we have let them out free range. They love the access to the grass (which probably could do with a mow!)  but do not yet go far, hanging around by the home run and the house end of the big pond. They know the two-tone whistle and the tap of a plastic beaker full of growers pellets and come sprinting over to get fed at meal times and they take themselves off back to their familiar (rabbit) run as it starts to get dark, ready to be shut up for the night, safe from Mr Fox. We fancy that they are starting to show the enlarged combs in the possible cock birds and we are fairly sure we have at least 4 'boys' in the dozen. It will be nice if it is no more than that; 8 hens to add to the laying population!

Fodder beet for the pigs

The pigs, meanwhile, have been enjoying some fodder beet I grew for exactly that purpose. This was a new crop for me but I have done OK with it. The seed was pelletized with a fungicide and an insecticide (oops) and was a bit variable in germination, so I have gappy rows and a lot of variation in size. Some, though, are good weights and when tasted, raw, are quite sweet, like an over-sweet carrot. The pigs approve and grunt with delight as they chow down, taking either complete half beets which they carry around so that the other sister does not get any, or eating them pre-chopped into wedges.

Mapp and a chunk of Fodder Beet

Having had my turn at 'holidays', I am now taking my turn and looking after the place 'solo' as Liz took the call yesterday to say that the expected house move by the parents from Dublin down to nearer the Silverwoods was suddenly all go for THIS WEEK, today in fact! She hurriedly packed a bag and her 'Kim and Aggie' cleaning basket and jumped in the car, her job being to help with the last of the packing up in Dublin, then blitz the 'old' house ready for the buyers. This will be followed by a hike down to Silverwood-land (My ol' man, said foller the van?) to help clean up and then unpack enough stuff that Mum and Dad can move in. She's going to a tired little scullery-maid by the time Mum's done with her! Poor Liz. She was so looking forward to getting a lie-in once I was back. She only managed the one!

Finally, a Happy Birthday to my UK-born Westie girl, Deefer-dog who gave her name to this blog (and started it?). She is 8 years old today. Many happy returns, the 'Deefs'; may you have many more and live to see the ripe old age of your predecessors, Megan (13) and Haggis (15).