A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings

A Honeybee Heart has Five Openings is a book by Helen Jukes, a member of our group while she lived in Oxford. Autobiographical in nature, it describes a period when she was generally rootless and dissatisfied with how her life and career were unfolding, until some friends gave her some bees. Caring for these made her reflect on her own life, and this ultimately led to a much happier balance for her.

The book was launched on 26th July at Blackwells in Oxford and Jack, Gino and I went to the event, where Helen spoke to 50-60 people, reading some passages, answering questions from the audience and being interviewed by writer Nick Hunt, who described the work as ‘humble and full of joy’. I particularly liked her equating a hive with a symbol of a house / home.

50+ people listened as Helen read extracts

The book has already been reviewed by The Guardian, you can see readers’ reactions on Amazon, Goodreads etc and you can see some extracts in the Mail. So I’ll discuss some of the back story instead, as she was a member of our bee group at the time. It mixes touching personal insights as she tries to find a new personal path, and discussions about bee life, surreptitiously educating the reader in ecology and bee biology. It draws you in and is a compelling read – I now realise Helen teaches writing professionally, which I wasn’t aware of while she was in Oxford.

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ONBG at Sutton Courtenay School

In May Sutton Courtenay Primary School asked us if there were any ONBG members willing to do a presentation on bees for its Year 1 and Year 2 children. I live in an adjacent village and had just caught a swarm not 100 yards from the school, so I could hardly refuse.

Washboarding

Two of my hives (packed with bees) have currently got two things going on in parallel at their entrances. This picture shows them both; click on the image for more detail.

On the horizontal landing board, bees are fanning to cool the hive. Their wings are invisible in the photo.

Above them, in the shade of the projecting handle and a plant, are bees apparently using their mouths to clean the hive. You see this sometimes, and it is a sign that a hive is happy and un-stressed. This behaviour is known as washboarding and is characterised by the bees going back and forth over the same area. Often there are many more bees doing this and as they move back and forth you can see they do it in synchronicity, waves of mass movement, like line dancers.

I caught this on close-up video a couple of years ago and you can see it here.

 

Fanning

Lines of bees fan air through the entrance (click on image to expand)

Hottest day of the year so far (27C), and I saw bees fanning at the entrance to this hive, though not the others near it. This colony was smaller and a while ago, I put a block of wood across part of the entrance to help them guard it in case of wasps or robbers. Fanning is one way bees cool their hives, like air conditioning. (Evaporating water or nectar is another.)

After removing partial block

I pulled the block away and returned 10 minutes later. Most, perhaps all the fanners were gone and the entrance simply a normal bustle of activity.

It’s worth mentioning these hives’ floors are sealed, the entrance is the main path for air to circulate through. Some beekeepers prefer open mesh floors, but these increase energy requirements in cold weather, and allow small parasites to hide below them; I prefer the bees to have access to a solid floor, allowing them to clean it themselves and kill or expel parasites. Bees didn’t evolve with mesh floors.

A swarm entering a box

You also see fanning when a swarm is entering a cavity, where workers raise their hindquarters and fan air backwards over their Nasonov glands to release a “come here!” pheromone. It looks similar (see picture left – many bees pointing to where the main cluster & queen have entered a capture box). The only other time they do it that I am aware of is when a new queen goes on a mating flight, and the colony left behind again fans Nasonov pheromone into the air from the entrance to help her find her way home.

Where are all the swarms this year?

Noooo! One of the few swarms this year enters a roof as I arrive just too late

The bees in this area have been acting very unusually this season: firstly high mortality at the end of winter, and now far fewer swarms than usual. We’ve been discussing this amongst ourselves and here are some preliminary conclusions.

ONBG meeting, 20th May 2018 – TBHs and tall tales

Telling tales round the camp quiche

An anarchic group of beekeepers met on a very sunny day at Shadiya’s farm near Oxford to celebrate International Bee Day with a picnic and a peek at her Top Bar Hives.

We began by discussing winter losses, which were high, and swarms – which were almost totally absent so far this year (but started a few days after this meeting). These are probably linked: England had a “false start” to Spring, followed by a week of intensely cold Siberian winds (the “Beast from the East”). This knocked back spring blossom by about 6 weeks, and the colonies are only just beginning to swarm.

ONBG at the Wolvercote School Naturefest

Jack, Jane and Phil set up our stall at Wolvercote Primary School‘s Festival of Nature on Saturday. We were between the Oxfordshire Mammals Group who were identifying skulls and footprints of deer, rabbits and badgers, and Oxford City Farm who kept kids busy throwing balls into a cutout pig’s mouth.