Britain’s Biggest Bee Bole Wall

Beautiful stone wall and amazing find by restoration work in this National Trust Estate in Wales. 

Staff renovating a National Trust Estate in Wales have discovered Britain’s biggest bee bole wall.   The 19th century bee hives were renovated as part of work to celebrate 75 years since the Dolmelynllyn Estate, at Ganllwyd near Dolgellau, came into National Trust care.

Originally thought to contain 38 boles (alcoves where the bees were kept in baskets), eight more were discovered during the repair work, making it nearly ten times bigger than the average bee bole wall in Wales and officially the biggest in the UK.

“I can confirm that this is the largest number of bee boles recorded in one wall,” said Penny Walker of the International Bee Research Association Bee Boles Register. “This is remarkable, considering that the average number per property in Wales is 4.9 and in England 5.2.”

Each bee bole would have held a skep, a basket for bees, and although a skep was much smaller than a modern wooden hive, there must have been an unusually high concentration of bees at Dolmelynllyn.

Sadly the boles won’t be returning to their original use – modern beehives are much more healthy places to keep bees – but the wall will be open to the public as part of Dolmelynllyn’s Open Day on Sunday, June 5.

Visitors will be able to take a circular walk of the restored lake on the estate, meet local beekeepers and see vintage tractors and take part in Victorian games.

from the website  24/  found here

Daily Iowa Capital
July 26, 1884, Des Moines, Iowa

There seems scarcely a limit to the increase of bees where feed is plenty. They go with civilization and like Greeley*, they seem to favor going West. Whether thisis a rule with them in all parts of the Country we cannot say. A man who does field work told us recently that during the summer four swarms has passed over his head two of them so low that he stooped to avoid contact with them, All of these were going West, or a little south of West. Probably it was because tall timber lay in that
direction.

There is a bee tree within ten miles of St. Louis, on the farm of a widow lady who protects the tree from the woodman's axe and the bees from all interference.  When the bees got ready to swarm they go
where they like with her approval, and no one says them nay. For twenty years, we are told, they have thus enjoyed their bee rights.

While bees seem inclined to move West they love an early peep at the rising sun and always select a tree as the place of their abode which has an eastern entrance.  They are early risers. We make a practice of going to the apiary as the first step of the morning's work. In mid-summer when honey abounds, we generally find some bees going out and frequently some coming home with stores, before the sun rises. A man may know a great deal about bees, but he will still have a great deal to learn about them. With all their system they are a mystery. They gather honey all day and in busy season build comb at night. When do the little fellows rest?  That they weary from labor, is certain. We have seen them drop exhausted, in front of the hive, and not until a moment's breathing spell was taken, could they rise again to enter the hive with their heavy loads. Why should they work so hard for food for others to enjoy? Few, if any of these hatched out in spring and early summer live to see the snow of winter.

*Greeley - A city of north-central Colorado  north-northeast of Denver. It was founded in 1870 as a cooperative farm and temperance center and named for its patron, Horace Greeley.  Horace Greeley was a newspaper man and saw the West for real and wrote what he truly saw.   Horace Greeley was very conscience and concerned about the people, the land, and the water.

thanks to Historical Honeybee

Mobile Bee Observatory

I went over to Berkeley this afternoon to have a look at a show at the Berkeley Art Museum and stumbled upon an event celebrating the 40th birthday of Chez Panisse.  OPENed  Amongst all the urban farmers, youth food education tables, artists, performers and musicians I found a display of beautifully painted bee hives and an enormous observation hive.  I wandered over, dragging my unwilling companion closer to the bees flying in and out.  I observed the IV drip bag of sugar water to the side and watched as the mastermind of this display, Rob Keller of the Napa Valley Bee Company,  squeezed the sweet liquid directly into the hive.  In an instant the bees lined up and began feeding on the sugar water.

I struck up a conversation with the wild eyed enthusiast and we discussed the terrible dearth of food for the bees this year.  He told the crowd they better stock up on local honey now because there wasn't going to be much of it.  We pretty much cleared the area with our detailed bee crazy conversation and I could feel my friend fading a bit in interest.  I quickly made arrangements to have a look at Rob's operation up in Napa and then headed back to San Francisco. 

Dog Days

Our bees have not had a good season. The cold rainy winter lasted until the end of June and even a little into July.  While it stopped raining, we did not see the sun until August.  The bees were not flying, the flowers were not blooming, it was cold, windy and miserable.   We found foulbrood, usually a winter disease, in one of the hives in June so we had to treat it with antibiotics and lose access to all the honey they produced.  The swarm we caught near the school slowly dwindled away to nothing despite the fact they had a laying queen.  The smaller secondary swarm from our main colony did not have a good queen or something tragic happened to her and we watched that colony develop a laying worker and become a colony of all drones.

We have a had a month of good weather so we thought for sure we would be harvesting some honey today.   We had a look in the first hive, the swarm we caught at the school.  The bees clustered on one frame and were just about the size of a tennis ball.  No queen.  This hive will be dead in a week.

The second hive had a good pattern of brood and I could not see or smell any signs of foulbrood.  But there was only enough honey for the hive, not enough for us to take any.  I was grateful they were doing well and did not care if we got honey from them or not.

The third hive was the small swarm from out main hive.  Cluster of bees about the size of a tennis ball, like the first, no queen.  Doomed.

The fourth hive was doing great.   Three boxes full of healthy activity, though they were using only 2/3 of the boxes and gathering mainly on the east side, leaving two or three frames empty on the west side, probably because of the way the sun hit the hive.  We took the top box off and looked into the second box.  That's when I smelled it.  Foulbrood.  Damn it.  We tried to figure out how to deal with it without throwing away more equipment.  No way around it.  We had to make a new box for them, dump them in, treat them with antibiotics and throw away all their hard work.

After that disappointment I was excited to see if the fifth colony, the big one where the queen got stuck in the honey supers, had recovered.   We had seen larvae in the lower boxes before I left town for a few weeks but we were uncertain if it was going to be new worker bees from the recently freed queen or drones from the laying worker.  I had noticed a few days ago that very few bees were flying in and out of the hive.  As we opened it up it became clear why.  The colony was completely gone.  The only bees in the boxes were robber bees from other colonies.  There were two frames of spotty dead capped worker brood (not drone, so yay!) and some had even tried to chew their way out before they died.  But whjere the heck did the queen and all the workers go?  It seems like they absconded rather than died out or swarmed, though I suppose there could have been zero nurse bees to keep the eggs and larvae fed and warm.  Or they died before the new ones could hatch.  Not sure.  Not experienced enough to know exactly what happened.  All I know is they are gone and we have no honey. 

Not the very best news.  But at least we have two colonies that are doing OK.  Not great, but OK.  
This was one of the most disheartening days  I've had as a beekeeper.  I am afraid that the foulbrood spores have contaminated the entire area in the garden where we have the beehives and are probably also in all of our spare boxes and frames.  Probably a thousand dollars' worth of hive boxes and frames possibly useless.  Not possibly.  Probably. 

Peter and I discussed the possibility of buying a new colony and putting it on the roof in all new equipment to see if it did better up there in the full sun.  I have always thought it was too shady and cold back there where they are now.    I have been wanting to try a hive on the roof but am sad that we have to do it because our other hives are failing.

larvae spotted in Big Hive

Well, the good news is that we found larvae in the brood boxes of the Big Hive today.  We are not sure if it is new larvae from the recently freed queen (the one trapped in the honey supers for who knows how long) or if it is drone larvae from the laying worker we kicked out.  Once it is capped we will be able to tell since the drone larvae sticks out a lot more than the flat sandy colored capped worker brood. 

Queen Trapped!

Today we went out to harvest the frames of honey off the Big Hive.  When we opened up the top box and removed the inner cover at first we did not quite understand what we were looking at.  The capped and partially capped frames of honey we put in there two weeks ago from the other hives were chewed open and empty.  It looked like instead of finishing off the honey and capping it, they had instead decided to eat it all.  But why?

I wanted to see what was happening in the brood boxes, even thought this colony is usually pretty aggressive,  so we popped the three very light supers off and set them aside while we looked into the brood boxes.  All we could see were capped drone cells and no worker cells at all.  The population had really dropped dramatically since the last time we were in here.  This hive was in big trouble.  It seemed like it had somehow lost the queen and it looked like there were mainly drones populating the boxes.  Signs of a laying worker.   But what happened!!!!!  There was a very good queen in there just a month before.  We looked for succession or swarm cells and found none.  The only thing to do was to get rid of the laying worker, put in a frame of eggs from another hive (if we could find one we could spare), and hope that they could raise a new queen for themselves.  

Getting rid of a laying worker is a very time consuming and disruptive process.  You can't tell which worker it is so you have to take the whole hive far away and dump all the bees out onto the ground.  The theory being that the laying worker has never left the hive in her life and will not be able find her way back to fly back in.  The field workers and drones will.  Problem solved.  And it makes the birds really happy because all of a sudden there is a huge pile of confused bees wandering around on the ground just waiting to be eaten.  

We got ready to dump the workers out to get rid of the laying worker.  That's when Charlie spotted a black queen running around in one of the honey supers we had just taken off a few minutes before.  Somehow she got trapped up there.  Probably our fault.  The poor thing had no room to lay eggs because the supers were full of capped or partially finished honey and no attendants to clean out the cells for her.  The colony probably could still smell she was in the hive so did not think to make a queen cell until it was too late.  And then a worker started laying and they just make drones...who in turn are hungry little guys.  The drones ate all the honey we had been counting on harvesting today.  

This is all an educated guess.  Not sure what actually happened, but who cares, we have a queen!  Relieved, we set her aside in a closed box so she did not fly away and then reassembled the brood boxes  after dumping all the workers and drones out across the yard.  

 A big set back but maybe this colony will bounce back.  

Beekeeping seemed easier when we first started.  The more I learn the harder it gets.

 

Bees Avoid a Big Boulder

The Daily Press,
May 14, 1910, Sheboygan, Wisconsin

Bees Avoid A Big Boulder
Move Out of Tree Before Huge Stone Crashes Into it Smashing Everything in Path.

New York.—Someone tipped off to a big hive of bees in a hollow tree at the foot of Hog mountain that a ten ton boulder was going to roll down from the top of the mountain and smash everything in its path,  including the tree in which they had stored 700 pounds of honey. In what way they got the tip is not known.

The best evidence the bees had it is they moved to another tree out of the danger line a few hours before the big boulder made its sensational downward rush, and that Reuben Van Winkle, who owns the farm on which the bee trees are, returned from Montclair loaded down with presents he bought after he had sold the 700 pounds of honey for fancy prices.  Incidentally, when in Montclair, he fell
so rich as a result of the bee tip and the boulder he went to the Central hotel and had a full course dinner.

The bees occupied the hollow tree ten years. Van Winkle never disturbed them, because he knew the
only way to get the honey was to cut the tree down. He was averse to doing that. So the insects worked
away until the tree literally was saturated with honey. Two weeks ago he noticed the bees were moving to another hollow tree. He thought it was because a new swarm was being driven out of the old quarters to find a new home. As he sized it up, nothing short of a big fight in the hive could force bees to go out in December.

Friday night the Van Winkles were aroused by a terrific crashing on the mountainside. Van Winkle got out of bed and went to investigate. By that time the noise had ceased and he could not discover the cause. In the morning, however, he saw the big boulder in his meadow and up the mountainside trees which had been felled by its rush. At the end of the line lay the old bee tree.

Then it dawned upon Van Winkle why the bees had moved.

thanks to Historical Honeybee