Honeybee nutrition can be a complex subject. Whilst wild colonies rely on the environment to provide all their needs throughout the year, with changing climatic conditions and stretched forage resources, if the colony has insufficient food resources available in its foraging ranges it will abandon the nest and migrate to where food is available.
Honeybees rely on three main sources of dietary requirements: nectar, pollen and water.
Nectar is the carbohydrate and plant nectar is made up primarily of dextrose (glucose), fructose and water. If the bees have no available sources of nectar or stored honey reserves this will detrimentally affect their health and prevent them from foraging for the protein in their diet, pollen. Pollen contains the growth essentials all young bees need for development and contains the necessary minerals, vitamins, and fats (lipids) for a balanced diet of all the bees in the colony.
When nectar and pollen resources are scarce, invariably due to seasonal conditions, the beekeeper needs to consider substituting these products.
BeeQuipment has successfully been producing its BoosterBee™ Nectar and Pollen Substitutes for more than ten years, supplying a truly South African product made for its Scuttellata and Capensis sub-species.
There is a misconception amongst many beekeepers that when it comes to spring maintenance you should replace a couple of the old worn-out brood frames with new frames of full brood sheets. Or you should cut a wavy pattern into the brood sheet for the bees to draw the comb down in pillar formation.
Full brood sheets are unnecessary and should be avoided. When building fresh combs the young worker bees like to cluster underneath the comb and hang on to each other as they masticate the pliable wax flakes into the cell formations. A full brood sheet prevents them from doing this.
It is therefore advisable and wise to only insert half brood sheets (100mm wide) or even a third (60 mm wide) sheets into the brood frame. It is also unnecessary to cut the sheets into a wavy pattern. A straight cut will be just as effective and is easier to prepare using a straight ruler and scalpel. It is even more important when setting up your trap boxes to not use full sheets in your brood frames. A newly arrived swarm does not want to be separated by full sheets and there is a risk the colony will abscond after a few days of insecurity in the trap hive. But then, when preparing your super frames for the summer honey flow you should put full super foundation sheets into the super frames if you intend extracting the capped honey using a centrifuge honey extractor. If you only put in super frames with foundation strips you run the risk of the top part of the honeycomb fracturing when spinning.
The full foundation sheet gives the necessary strength to the full super honeycomb and will not fracture.
On one of my farm sites, I was recently asked by the farmer to remove a colony of bees which had made a home in a closed off borehole pipe.
As usual, someone had simply placed a plank over the hole which had moved slightly creating a gap, and the colony had made its new home there. Again, of course, no one knew it was there until they decided they needed to start using the borehole.
Generally, it can be tricky to carry out the removal for fear of some of the combs, with bees on, falling down the shaft and lost forever. But I must say I am quite proud of the tools I had designed and made, and it took us less than 6 minutes to remove the whole colony up with all the combs intact, and then re-hive them into a six-frame trap box. Luckily, I had two experienced assistants, Elizabeth Lamont and Dave Kemp, with me to help, although they admitted they had never done a borehole removal before.
In a job like this it is always good to have an extra pair of hands because you cannot use the tools and grab the combs at the same time, unless you’re a woman and able to multi-task! The tools I had designed were a long metal bar, one with a hook to secure the separate combs underneath and the other with a long knife to cut the combs away from the pipe where they were attached. You need to work fast, cutting the comb and lifting it up with as many bees on as possible.
Before cutting the combs we used a small length of hosepipe and puffed smoke down below the combs to drive the bees up. I find if you are careful, the queen will remain on one of the combs and you can get her into the box quickly before she hops off and runs down the pipe.
On all my beehives I place a corrugated roof for protection against wet and hot weather.
Researchers have claimed that our African queens can lay up to 2 500 eggs per day during strong nectar flows. One side of a brood frame can hold up to 1 500 cells and with 20 sides to fill there is capacity for 30 000 cells in a brood chamber. Not all will be allocated to brood, but with a healthy and virile queen, the colony can double in size within 21 days. By adding supers to your hive structure obviously more space is made available.
So why do so many bees cluster on the outside of the hive? Some call this bearding. The inside temperature of a brood chamber is generally maintained at between 32° to 37° C. On very hot days the nurse bees must work harder to keep the interior at the right temperature and the more bodies inside generating warmth, the higher the temperature, and the greater the discomfort to the bees working inside. The bees clustering on the outside are younger, nurse bees. The foraging bees are out foraging. So, the bees on the outside are just chilling! It is too hot for them to be inside.
Many beekeepers believe that the best way to alleviate this is to add an extra super. But it is not generally a space problem. When the sun goes down and it gets cooler, and on cool, rainy days most of the bees are inside. It is correct that as the colony grows there will be more bees to accommodate and eventually, it is more likely that the colony will swarm off. But the swarming queen needs to wait until many younger bees have developed into foraging bees to be able to take a large swarm away to start afresh.
So, adding an extra super is not always the solution. Clustering on the outside is another natural phenomenon of honeybee activity and generally nothing to get alarmed about. If you need to work on the beehive these young bees can be gently moved out of the way with a small amount of smoke and will not add any resistance to being handled in a gentle fashion.
This is a subject not often discussed. To use 9-frame spacers or not?
Normally when you purchase a super with frames it comes with the standard 10 frames, which fit perfectly across the width. This follows the principle of the “bee-space” between each frame. If you insert the 9-frame spacer then of course you only have 9 frames in the super and wider gaps between the frames.
Is there an advantage? In my opinion there certainly is. When it comes to making honeycomb, as opposed to brood-comb, the bees are not that pedantic about the 5mm space between the top bars. When it comes to producing honey, and there is a honey flow on, the bees want as much space as possible to store their nectar. By having 9-frame spacers the bees can make nice fat combs. I have weighed a full super with 9-frame spacers against one with 10 full frames of honey. There is clearly a 3 kg advantage with a full 9-frame super.
In addition, when extracting the honey in the honey room, it is far easier to remove each frame when the gap is bigger.
I always use 9-frame spacers and encourage those visiting our shop to do so.