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.

Bee-ing Practical

Ireland's Royal Canal

Easter Saturday and we wake up to lovely weather and a few bits of good poultry news. While I'm still doing my 'feed and release' walk about, Black Feather hops off the eggs and goes for a walk allowing me in, at last, to gather the extra eggs again. She had gone from an unconvincing broody who we had thought would fail this time, to sticking like glue. I don't like to chase her off, so I was waiting for a chance to gather up the more recent, undated eggs to bring her back to the 12 we want her to incubate. Blondie, our new Guinea Fowl survives the night and in fact wakes us up with her strident calling from first glimmer of dawn - her temporary hutch is just below our window and we sleep with the window a-jar (not for long!). On that first walk about I also find Henry and Min at her run talking to her through the wire, the first sign that they want to know her. Later we discover a stash of 10 chicken eggs in the woods, all different as if 10 different chooks have all contributed one.

Fetching attire.....

So far so good, but today is really all about bees. We must visit our friend Elspeth in her gorgeous lock-keeper's cottage for our first practical training session around her hives. We had been a bit nervous of this. We have read and heard that you can be an expert bee-keeper "in theory", reading all the books and scoring top marks in the written exams, but that you might then still freak out when faced with a buzzing 35,000 bee hive and surrounded by potential stingers. A small proportion of people also show a bad allergic reaction to bee stings, which can lead to anaphylactic shock and be life threatening.

Liz examines a brood frame.

We 'book experts' were therefore keen to get hands-on and see if we could cope. Not quite so keen to get stung and see if we react, but that'll no doubt come. Thanks then to Elspeth who is on the Committee of the Longford Bee Keepers Association and volunteered to do us in her own home apiary. There is a club apiary but it has had some health problems and they are trying to keep visitors out while they isolate and sort it. She is a wonderful person and a good friend so we were treated to excellent hospitality too - coffees, cakes, sandwiches etc, as well as being loaded down with helpful literature, back copies of the Federation magazine "An beachaire" (The bee keeper), as well as being able to enjoy her perfect, bee-friendly cottage garden (along with attached farm, chickens, ewes and lambs etc).

We got togged up in our shiny new suits, gloves and (not so shiny) wellies, Elspeth lit the bee-smoker and off we went to find her three hives. This is the start of swarming season and we needed to check every frame in every brood chamber for sneaky queen cells, so we had real work to do while we were getting trained; plenty of practise at all the moves. It was very enjoyable and fascinating. We learned to crack apart the hive boxes which get glued up by the bees (the glue is called 'propolis') and then to prise apart the frames of brood and honey.

More importantly, maybe, we learned to reassemble the boxes without crushing any bees between the parts - bees getting squashed upsets all the workers and you can fast have a problem of angry bees on your hands. Some boxes are heavy but you must learn to be gentle, controlled and slow. Clonking about knocking bits together upsets the bees. You also need to be aware of where on your hands or body there might be bees. No good squatting and squashing a bee between thigh and calf, or leaning on a fence with a bee on the palm of your hand.

We also had to learn to tell the types of comb apart - are those storage cells for honey or pollen, are the brood cells for workers, drones or are they 'queen cups', do they have new eggs in or healthy white larvae, curled cosily round into their 'C' shapes. We had to become adept at spotting the drone bees and finding the queen bee in each hive. Your health checks now are all about is the queen there and laying eggs, and has anyone started trying to build queen cells -  a sign that half your hive may be about to depart in a swarm. More amusingly, I was also trying to suss out how to take pictures with gloved hands and with my face covered by the 'sword fencing' mesh visor.

As I said, though, it all went well and we are very grateful to Elspeth and her husband for entertaining us and for laying on this training for us. We were both delighted that we didn't 'freak out' and we feel like we may be able to cope with our own bees when they arrive (June?). All in all a brilliant day. Lovely too just to be near canals again and to see the picture postcard, beautifully maintained lock with its lovely flower beds and spruce black and white gloss paint.

Back home then to the continuing drama of the Guinea Fowl 'integration' if you can call it that. With the rabbit run doors open we sat back at a distance to watch Blondie's "escape". She was very reluctant to come out but eventually started to move about and soon came across Henry and Min. They seemed to get on OK with H accepting the new girl and even trying to mount her. We relaxed. I took the dogs for a walk leaving Liz well able to cope. Unfortunately, no sooner had I gone than Blondie suddenly took it on herself to make a drive east, a meandering path through various bits of garden and hedge, field and so on. Liz tracked her and called me over when I got back with dogs, by which time B was 2 fields away and almost at Una's. We rounded her up and sent her back home. She is a good flyer and whirrs over hedges with ease and can run like 'Road Runner'. There is no catching her but you can shepherd and marshal her. We then had an afternoon where she headed east several times and had to be rounded up but by roosting time she seemed to be hovering around the pop hole door with the rest of the gang. At that point Henry decided to have another go at her and she exploded into flight and whirred away across the east field, disappearing into the hedge. We went out with binoculars and walked the hedgerows but as we go to roost ourselves tonight we can honestly not say where she is or whether or not we'll see her again in the morning. She has a night outside to cope with. We are wishing her all the best, but we have to admit we have singularly failed to look after her as you should.

Breaking 'The Codes'

The mini horse of whom we have had custody in our acre and a half of 'East Field' for the winter, is still waiting to have his gelding operation slotted in between the end of the risk of frost (which causes blood clotting problems) and the spring start up of the nasty flies which prey on horses and give them such a hard time in the warm weather. Well, I don't suppose HE is waiting in any sense, but we followers are. Cody is his name, but he's a pedigree with a name longer than he is which ends with "Da Vinci Code" so he gets called Cody, Codes, 'the Codes' and so on, hence my title.

He had been Carolyn and Charlotte's stud stallion but the market has fallen right out of almost every type of horse now, so there is no point in using him to breed with, so no need to put up with his 'stallion-ness', hence the decision to have the boy 'done'. So what to do with him? Charlotte decided to break him to the harness for towing, as has been done with his two amigos (Bob and Romeo). This way he can pull the cart and, for a bit of fun, also be used to drag logs back across Vendor Anna's land the old way so that he works and stays fit and strong. Charlotte asked me would I like to help, watch, learn and join in the fun and games

So Thursday saw us rounding up Cody and Charlotte started to wrangle him into all his leather gear, the big yoke across his back to take the weight of the cart-shafts, his head piece and the 'bit' for his mouth, straps from 'pommel' to the back of his head to stop him lowering his head, one from his girth (tummy) to his chin to stop him raising it too far, one round his tail across his bum to stop everything sliding forward... the poor boy was well trussed up.

There are presumably proper names for all these bits, so Carolyn and Charlotte will be laughing fit to bust by now but you get the idea, and Cody was familiar with NONE of this, so day one was about him getting used to all the leather squeaking, pulling and pinching in unfamiliar places, and noises behind him, out of sight. He did very well, the lad. We 'lunged' him round in circles for a while, then Charlotte led him from behind as if in the cart, steering him with the bit. Finally we tried him on his first 'load', just a car tyre. This was to get him used to the idea of the gentle (and sometimes catchy-jerking) tug on his harness plus the noise of the tyre sliding along the road on its little chain.

One of the fascinations for me, beginner that I am, is Charlotte's running commentary as we work away. The local old boys, rather than be annoyed that they are being held up by two muppets blocking the road with a horse pulling a tyre, will melt with nostalgia as they remember the horses they had to break in before and after "the Emergency" (WW2). This is very gentle breaking-in we are doing. The Gypsies break their horses "hard" but you know what? They are the quietest horses you can get - if you want to put a small child or a beginner on a horse, then horses broken by our Traveler friends are the perfect choice.

Guinea fowl inner feather

Unfortunately for Cody, in the middle of all this, Charlotte spotted a small patch of 'Rain Scald' on Cody's back. This is a bacterial ailment which happens mainly in wet weather where the horse fails to use your nice rain shelter and stands around outside, permanently wet. It is itchy and results in small patches of scabby skin and small tufts of hair coming out, but if caught soon, it is easy to cure. Cody has been taken home to spend some time in the dry of a stable (enforced dryness!) while being given tea-tree shampoo baths and some TLC. His hair is re-growing already. We were going to buy him a get well card but maybe that's a bit soft!

Meanwhile we are happy to report that Goldie the rabbit has now 2 perfectly clean, pink, mite-free ears and Lieutenant Colonel Sir Bufton-Tufton is also off the endangered list, strutting around and looking after the needs of his various women. Following up on a lead from Mentor Anne, we have also found a source of good, vintage Cheddar cheese which satisfies us, this being one John McMillan and his stand "Carlton Cheese and Olives" who do Saturdays at Boyle Farmer's Market. We also came by some good Wensleydale and some hard goats cheese (plus some pesto olives) so we are cheesed up for now. Thank you for that, Anne.

€100 Euro's worth of bee gear. Frames, smoker, hive tool

Finally, we are back off to the "Two Marys" today to collect the remaining parts of our hive, the frames, wax foundation and nails, plus our smoker and hive-tool. We love these ladies, They are so helpful and generous with their advice, happily talking us through all manner of nips and tucks which we might be able to do ourselves rather than spending €8 or so in their own shop (on a 3-frames-wide 'dummy' frame to reduce the space available for the newly established colony lest the brood get chilled). They also chat away happily about which hive-tool you might prefer to prise frames away from each other when the bees have glued them all solid with 'propolis'.

Tomorrow we are back into visitor mode, potentially with 12 for lunch. The biggest pork leg joint you ever saw (6.2 kg) is in the oven getting a very gentle roast to a 24 hour (!) recipe, chocolate mousse cakes have been made, ice cream bought and a rhubarb and date crumble constructed. Bring on the Silverwoods who are showing up divided between a train journey for the car-overflow and a car bringing a hand-me-down fridge-freezer from the Steak Lady, plus the Cody-owning crew from down the road, Carolyn, Charlotte, K-Dub and young H. Chaos? It probably will be!

Bee Space

We progress! We received today through the post, our Pig Herd Number and the paperwork we are required to keep all the time we are pig keepers; all the triplicate, multi-colour forms and A4 blank proforma sheets for such as our internal Register. This makes us all official and is required by the responsible breeders before they will allow you to buy and take away their pigs. Still a way to go, of course; we have to do fences, build an ark and actually go and get some pigs, but we are all excited for those days - it will be another new adventure for us. Neither of us has had anything to do with pigs before.

We have also been to Longford again for Lesson 2 of "Bee School", this one a nice lecture by an experienced bee keeper from Co Lietrim, name of Eamonn T which he entitled "The Hive and Its Inhabitants". He brought along a hive similar to the one we are building (a UK National Modified Hive) and talked us through the parts and their functions before then moving on to the bees and how they go on inside, frequently referring to our own local expert, Dieter, to compare experiences. I would not even want to cover all that was included but there were 2 aspects that were new and worth noting. The first was that bee keepers now think that there are no longer any 'wild' (or feral) honey bees about and the second was the subject of 'bee space'.

It is the varroa mite (which you may have heard of) which seems to have done for the feral colonies as it is so successful a parasite that it easily spreads between colonies, especially via the male 'drone' bees and easily between domestic and feral colonies. In domestic (hive) colonies the mite can be controlled using pesticides and its numbers stay low and the colony can thrive, but in the wild situation the bees get no such protection and the mite wipes out the colony which would be in a roof or an old hollow tree. The Department scientists here are now sure that this has been so bad a collapse that the only bees here in Ireland now are in hives or in recent swarms from same. It makes the beekeepers job even more vital to the bee-pollinated crops and wild flowers so it is good to see that our own group and the training classes are so well supported - there is a huge surge of interest in bee keeping going on at present.

Bee hive entrance, 7 mm high give or take.

I was also fascinated to see demonstrated and hear Eamonn's stuff about "bee space". You may be able to see in your mind's eye a typical hive - ours are a 19 inch square set of stacking wooden 'boxes'. But inside they are not just an open void full of random bees. They contain a set of ten or eleven hanging wax frames looking a bit like short files in a filing cabinet. Bees in an empty box would build a similar arrangement of vertical sheets of honey comb hanging from the roof but you'd struggle to get in to examine them, check on them or harvest the honey, so we give them a blank 'brood nest' on which to build and the frames can be slid out vertically.

One of the Bee School hand-outs

The bees move about within this box and between the 'files' like  people in a library, facing the shelf of books but with their backs almost touching the shelf behind. If the space they are moving in feels too 'wide' they build out more comb from the foundation till their backs are again touching the comb 'behind' them. The hive design is set so that bees will build comb from either side of an 'aisle' to the depth required for storing honey or housing the growing baby bee (larva) and to recreate the 7 mm "bee space" between the two sheets of comb. Give them too much space and they will build deeper ('brace') comb which can make it difficult to ease out the frames. Give them too little and they will not be able to go into the 'aisle' and will seal up the gap with resinous 'glue' called propolis to stop the draughts and glue everything very tight together. So hives not only have their frames at the correct distance apart but also have to have all the cross-ways tunnels and pathways of that spacing too - above the frame tops, along the side under the ends of the frames, moving around the floor of the hive, between its layers of frames and across the 'ceiling'. It's all a pretty exact science and they say that if you are going to DIY your own hives then you can do what you like with wall thicknesses and exterior detail as long as you can build to exactly the right internal dimensions. It's called the 'Bee Space' and it is almost sacred.

In one area, though, we are tapping our fingers at lack of progress. We have, as you'll know, our 'magnificent' (our unbiased opinion!) wildlife pond all planted up and filled and bristling with skaters, boatmen and fly nymphs. We have deliberately stocked it with NO fishy predators. We have seen frogs and newts among the long grass in 2013 and some of these we have dropped into the pond just so that they know it is there. We have seen people's pictures of frogs spawning in December 2013 in Cork and now in Kent in February. We have sent out invitations. We have even seen road-kill frogs on the lane here this week, so we know they are starting to move about, seeking out those breeding ponds. We have NOT, however, seen a single frog or newt in our pond. Patience, you wildlife gardeners. If You Build it, They Will Come.......