The Bee-ginning of a New Season

4/26/2017 03:47:00 pm 0 Comments

We carried out the first full inspection of 2017 on the Honeydale beehives this week and there’s lots to report.

The day before the inspection, Paul checked on all the hives, assisted by Ian’s wife, Celene. They noted that there was little or no fondant left in our two WBC hives. In one of them, honeycomb had been created on the queen excluder to fill the big gap left behind as the fondant was used up, but since the queen might be on this comb, Paul didn’t remove it, but added as many super frames as would fit for the time being.


The new hive was full of busy bees which had also created honeycomb inside the lid. 


There’s lots of rapeseed flowering at the moment and these additional honeycombs that have been created inside two of the hives show that the colonies have developed so well over the spring they’re cramped for space. It’s good to see all three hives with lots of bees building stores and from the outside Chris' five hives were also looking good and busy.


However, just as we were about to leave, we found a swarm in the hedge roughly the size of a football. 



Paul cleared away the grasses and brambles so he could get a box under the swarm and shook the swarm into the swarm box. Two brood frames were added together with small amount of fondant left over from another hive (watch the video below).



When Paul came back the next day with Chris to carry out the full inspection, all his existing hives were preparing to swarm and were very busy with queens being reared. Chris removed so many queen cells from each hive to prevent swarming that he used up all of his queen cell cages! It was clear that one of them had swarmed - likely to be the swarm we’d discovered in the hedge. Empty supers and frames were added to all five hives.


When he arrived at Honeydale, Chris’s first task had been to place five new colonies in their 'nuc' boxes, beside his existing hives (also visible in photo above, nuc box on the right). These had been left for an hour or so to calm down after transit, then the doors were opened so the bees could start to acclimatise to their new location. These colonies will be re-homed into proper national hives ASAP, ie as soon as weather permits. 

The inspections of the white WBC hive with honeycomb on the queen excluder showed there to be no eggs or brood on this honeycomb, so we were confident the queen was not on them. The worker bees were shaken into the hive and the honeycomb removed. 

Regular inspections were then carried out on the other two WBC hives. A few queen cells were discovered in one hive and we broke these open to determine the development of the queens. In the picture you can see the tiny queen larvae at the centre of the cell, surrounded by Royal Jelly, which is required to rear a queen from a regular larvae.


Both existing 2016 queens were found looking healthy and laying lots of eggs and stores were being filled with lots of rape pollen. With all the rape flowering at the moment we expect the supers on these two hives to fill quickly.

The third hive, which was recently donated to us, was also busy and healthy. We were unable to spot a queen as yet, but we could see lots of drone brood, so we’re confident she’s in there somewhere. The bees were still a little bad tempered and twitchy though, so we may decide to re-queen this colony in due course. When we re-home the bees into their lovely new refurbished hive, we will try to locate her and ask her why she is in such a bad mood!

You may remember in a recent update that storm Doris lifted the lid clean off this hive, here you can see Paul fitting straps to it to prevent this happening in the future.


The keen-eyed amongst you may have noticed that there are some new non-bee additions to the apiary since last year. We had some leftover trees from the 250 tree heritage fruit orchard and we thought it would be a great idea to plant them in the apiary. These consist of apple, cherry and plum trees and in a few years with a little bit of TLC, the bees will be enjoying the 'fruits' of our labour!


Watch this space for the next update, we'll be visiting the bees again as soon as the weather allows, to re-home the 'nuc' box bees into proper hives and also the donated bees into their new refurbished National hive.

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Animal Farm

4/10/2017 11:35:00 am , 0 Comments

The animals at Honeydale haven’t quite taken over yet, but they’ve been creating havoc in the Heritage Orchard! Readers of this blog will know that we’re very keen to encourage a wide variety of wildlife to make their home at Honeydale and to introduce livestock back onto the land to improve soil fertility. But sometimes managing all the different species of animals which now live here can be a bit of a headache.



We guarded the fruit trees in the orchard from deer with tree shelters, and while doing their job effectively, the shelters created another problem. While they protected the trees from one species of wildlife,they made them vulnerable to a different one, as they proved to be popular nesting boxes for field voles. The voles have destroyed 69 of the trees in the lower area of the orchard by chewing the stems, which is precisely what we were trying to stop the deer from doing! If less than 25% of the stem is damaged the tree can survive but the ground-dwelling voles at Honeydale have been very thorough, and have chewed all the way around the stem, so sadly the trees can’t be saved. We’ve replanted the damaged trees with bare root saplings and some potted trees, putting woollen mats around them all to prevent competition from weeds until the tree roots are better established.

We tried to graze the heritage orchard with sheep to keep the grass, and therefore the voles, at bay. But the sheep were rubbing against the trees, stakes and guards and knocking them over. They also enjoyed pulling up the woollen mats, so we’ve moved them to the permanent grassland where they can now enjoy grazing around the ponds.



We’ve cut the grass all around the trees to remove the voles’ habitat and though this seems a bit harsh, unless we do this we won’t have any trees, which will ultimately support a wide variety of wildlife, including voles!

Hopefully all the animals will behave themselves for a while, and we can get on with other jobs on the farm, including ploughing.

We’re very much in favour of shallow ploughing at Honeydale, as an alternative to glyphosate and deep ploughing. Shallow ploughs are precision machines that need careful setting up so they don’t plough too deep and invert the soil, the theory being that soil biological material should remain on the surface of the soil where it can be utilised by crops. We had some teething problems with the setting up of ours, which has delayed the ploughing of the stubble turnips area, but we’ve now done this, and are waiting to plant spring wheat when the weather allows.




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Introducing Molly the Collie

4/03/2017 10:13:00 am 0 Comments

Since we’re using the mob-grazing system at Honeydale, Ian, Macca and Sam have been moving the sheep on a daily basis since the beginning of March, but now the sheep have grazed down the crop of ryegrass and vetch from the top to the bottom, they needed to be moved onto the field of stubble turnips to clear up the regrowth before being moved to permanent pasture. This meant directing the whole flock through the narrow farmyard and out the other side, so owner of the sheep Ed Adams, who farms across the valley, brought his trusty sheepdog Molly to help out. Four-year-old Molly is used to shepherding large numbers of sheep on the Adams’ farm and the work at Honeydale proved a breeze for her. It was wonderful to watch her in action. One clever dog achieving in ten minutes what it would take several grown men four times as long to manage!

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