apidea - not worked?

[burren]

Had two apideas work fine last year. This has happened.
time line=
bees (2 x cupfuls) put into apidea am 4th june / pm sealed queen cell inserted.
Put in dark till 6th.
Then put in half shady bush and opened(slide door,not roof),
Expecting queen to emerge 12th (-14th).
Looked through top plastic lid on 17th cell gone.
checked today 29th, bees still there, 1/2 fondant still left but no wax has been drawn and they may have even nibbled bits away. I didnt search for a queen as it had got very cool. Why would this happen? Any thoughts please?

 

[BBG]

No answer except it's a funny old year with some.

We have two Kielers who have drawn out 4 brood frames, one only a week or so ago.

We put on a super over a month ago and they will not draw out the frames. It's always empty when we look and packed with bees in the brood.

As an aside, we fed fondant on a flora tub lid, which covered most of the OMF. She had refused to lay until this and the following week check revealed a heap of BIAS.

Did closing the OMF raise the temperature and get her laying? Have done same on two nucs and both started laying.

That was in cold weather so may not be relevant now.

 

[susbees]

checked today 29th, bees still there, 1/2 fondant still left but no wax has been drawn and they may have even nibbled bits away. I didnt search for a queen as it had got very cool. Why would this happen? Any thoughts please?

No queen most probably . Apideas drawn here back in May no trouble. Now...hmm. Keilers still in the shed...

 

[Hivemaker.]

The queen cell was put into the apidea far to soon if i am reading your post correct,better to use a ripe cell,which the virgin will emerge from while the bees are still shut in,less chance of the cell becoming chilled, or the larvae becoming detached from the royal jelly. I find it better to run in a virgin queen when first starting up a mini nuc,then ripe cells after any mated queens are removed..

When they have drawn no comb, there is no queen in the box.

 

[biglongdarren]

maybe be worth taking a empty drawn brood frame next time and cutting it to the size of the small frames and sticking it in to them with wax, at least they'll have nothing to draw out and it'll a great start for them.
just a thought,
Darren

 

[Into the lions den]

With Hivemaker on this pretty well completely.

Would just add that even with our experience of these things, three figures of them and over 20 years, the strike rate on first filling is always fairly modest, and refilling is required in about a third of them (some years it has been a lot worse than that).

There is no need to have drawn comb in them, and indeed the drawing of comb, as suggested, is a sure indicator that all is well. In duds with mini nucs laying workers develop very quickly, so failed ones are best remade. Once established and the first queen has produced worker eggs they can pretty well self maintain all season and raise many queens.

Not had quite the right conditions this season so for the first time in many years we have all the mating boxes stacked up in the shed unused.

 

[susbees]

Not had quite the right conditions this season so for the first time in many years we have all the mating boxes stacked up in the shed unused.

Reassuring for those of us yet to get any grafts to take. At decision time for combining nucs with hives to make strength for the heather...would you be banking spare queens in apideas ITLD or leaving them in nucs? Decisions, decisions. Need to bank assurance against DLQs naturally...

 

[Teemore]

I have had to refill several apideas, kielers and small ply mating nucs this season: so far I am having more success with the apideas which is the converse of last year when the kielers had a much higher success rate.
Hivemaker's comment about putting queens into the mating nucs too early is pertinent and is the likely cause of some if not all of my failures... I set out this year to do some structured and selective Queen rearing and I am finding my feet as i go along but trying not to learn by mistakes!
I currently have 5 queens who have started to lay in mating nucs (they took far longer to come into lay than a similar number that were put into 5 and 6 frames Nucs at the same time). Those 'active' mating nucs will provide a base for my next round of queen rearing.

 

[Into the lions den]

Reassuring for those of us yet to get any grafts to take. At decision time for combining nucs with hives to make strength for the heather...would you be banking spare queens in apideas ITLD or leaving them in nucs? Decisions, decisions. Need to bank assurance against DLQs naturally...

Generally dont bank queens. Anything left in Apideas after mid July is just harvested and sold or used in duds. then we gather up the Apideas (we also have a load of SwiBo ones, and they do a little better) and store then till next year, so this year they will just not be used at all.

All our bees go to the heather, starting next week actually. Once the hives are on the moors they are NOT receptive to requeening and attempts to do so are not economic, so if the queens left in the Apideas do not have a home with us they are either moved on or just allowed to dwindle away (sadly). It is normally a very low number left homeless.

Most of our heather uniting is a full split above a flight board..........so you can be adding a full single chamber nest to a double chamber nest below. At this time its quite normal for us to take a couple of frames of the brood away with one of the queens and remove them to the balsam on the lowlands and bring them on for winter in the 5 bar Lang nucs. That would tend to be the only way we would save queens. Normally they just get united together and no attempt is made to find either queen and we just let them sort out who is boss themselves.


ps.....Please do not ask to buy any spare queens we have. We have a voluntary code of conduct in place here since the 2009 EFB outbreak, that we sell nothing to destinations outwith the nominally infected zone. Abiding by the agreed practices keeps our relations with the authorities in good nick, and they are very helpful to us. thus since 2009 we have sold no nucs or queens outside our area, if bred within the area.

 

[For want of a better word]

That's very interesting ITTLD... I often wonder if sending bees all around the country and ( shock HORROR) importing queens from outside the UK is indeed good practice.

Attempting to keep our local population "Kosha"..... sometimes I feel we are hitting our heads against a brick wall !!!

 

[Into the lions den]

That's very interesting ITTLD... I often wonder if sending bees all around the country and ( shock HORROR) importing queens from outside the UK is indeed good practice.

Attempting to keep our local population "Kosha"..... sometimes I feel we are hitting our heads against a brick wall !!!

Thats mixing two motivations. The avoidance of sending stock known to be a diease risk that we cannot GUARANTEE free of EFB is something I support.

The lack of a UK scheme giving officially endorsed health certificates for traded bees was one of my reasons ( along with cost, availability, quality, and calmness) for selecting the stock I did for the Co-op project.......reference back to the big stushy last spring. I simply do not trust UK sourced stock. This is not a criticism of any particular supplier, most are good people doing the best they can, but if you hit a supplier with an order for 600 nucs what would happen? It would have taken at least four suppliers to make up the order and THREE of the recommended four supplied at last one nuc infected with one of the foulbroods. It would have been a very very expensive error and there would have been bonfires in both areas.........

So, yes I totally support the restriction of willy nilly bee sales. Give us a fully empowered certification scheme then my position would change.

On the matter of imports I'm afraid I disagree. There is a lot of really good stock abroad that is perfectly well suited to these islands, and of course a lot that is definitely not. If *I* was confined to using local stock I would have a real struggle to survive.

 

[For want of a better word]

Possibly imported bees are having to go through rigorous importation controls to prevent disease and I expect some are fit for purpose... however with the vast profits to be made I wonder how strictly any control is enforced... bees could be bred in any part of europe... now a far flung community... and then re -exported to a UK importer, who believes the bees have been raised in a particular area / island... by a specific apiary / breeder.

The lack of a good nectar flow is making me cynical!

 

[Into the lions den]

The 'vast profits' are only there if someone knowingly does as you say. Imports bees from certain origins, then passes them on into the terribly over inflated UK nuc market, misrepresenting them as UK bred stock. The current rate is actually about three times the price for virtually identical bees in France for example. (And in France you can get a proper health certificate, which is needed for cross border bee movements. Not needed for internal national shipments.)

Not a lot anyone can do about it, as under the Balaii directive (valid for all livestock) it is illegal to prevent intra EU imports on the basis of pests or diseases that are already present in the destination state. There are a few minor exceptions for some tightly defined areas but not many. I'm afraid I would rather have the EU system of inspected origins and health certification on all shipments than the UK system. I annoyed some before saying this, but the UK is the least safe legal source for buying bees, and you are left to rely totally on the professionalism and integrity of the supplier. They come in a range of reputations from whiter than white to blacker than black............

 

[mbc]

I dont buy it, these "health certificated" bees are going into areas where both AFB and EFB historically occur and the possibility/probability of picking up some desease over time by robbing or drifting is very real and yet these valuable health certificates are essential for the project ?!
In England and Wales any internal bee sales can be preceded by an inspection by the NBU upon request and yet this is inadequate in the face of a bit of paper and cheaper bees from abroad, mmh .
Logic tells me internationally traded bees pose a greater risk to spreading desease than sourcing relatively local bees and anybody who tries to persuade me otherwise is fighting an uphill battle

 

[Into the lions den]

I dont buy it, these "health certificated" bees are going into areas where both AFB and EFB historically occur and the possibility/probability of picking up some desease over time by robbing or drifting is very real and yet these valuable health certificates are essential for the project ?!

Absolutely. No way I am spending the budget I do buying high risk stock. I want to start clean, and then run a system to keep them that way. No matter where you go there is a risk of incoming infection, but if you start with high risk stock your investment can go up in smoke, and WOULD have done if I had followed the strident demands of quite a few people.

In England and Wales any internal bee sales can be preceded by an inspection by the NBU upon request and yet this is inadequate in the face of a bit of paper and cheaper bees from abroad, mmh .

CAN be, yes. Ever thought of trying it on 600 units from a range of suppliers and getting a sensible and timeous outcome? Its completely amateur hour.

Logic tells me internationally traded bees pose a greater risk to spreading desease than sourcing relatively local bees and anybody who tries to persuade me otherwise is fighting an uphill battle

I do appreciate that and will not bother, though just what it is that is the big scary beats me. I hear SHB, Tropilaelaps etc all time, but we are not allowed imports from ANY territory where these occur. You are only allowed anything other than queens from the EU and New Zealand (which has special status). In addition you are allowed queens, under license only and with very stringent import controls, from Argentina and Western Australia.

Local nucs have caused many a transfer of AFB and EFB to new units here in the UK, and recently in Scotland a number of outbreaks (AFB in this case), a good distance from source, were down to a nuc vendor who genuinely believed he had sold good clean LOCAL stock. Lovely mess for the inspectors.

I am not just going to tar UK bees with that brush though and it is quite true that one guy imported a couple of hundred nucs on combs into the Home Counties area from Spain maybe four years ago, and upon a full inspection a small number (like 2 or 3) of those had a light AFB infection. Likewise a trader in the UK did the same ( NOT the normal whipping boy on the forum in this case) from the same supplier and sold them all on. So, not saying disease CANNOT be carried on imports. It can, but these are the only cases I know where this happened, and something just did not add up about the way it happened.

Oh, and just for your info, the NZ bees have the most incredible health precautions attached to their EXPORT. They are just not allowed to be shipped out unless the full range of tests are met. NZMAAF guard their reputation for high health exports jealously as their national agricultural industry depends on it. Just a piece of paper???

AND

The NZ bees are NOT cheaper than EU bees, and in fact from certain UK beekeepers I know they would also have been cheaper than the NZ stock as packages, at least for the numbers involved.

 

[mbc]

The "big scary" for me is the flooding of areas with foreign genetic material and the unsustainability of importing masses of bees from the other side of the world.
These "the full range of tests are met" interest me though, quite what they are to make these bees so viable as opposed to local bees is beyond me. As to the argument that "but if you start with high risk stock your investment can go up in smoke", well statistically you would be very unlucky to lose more than 1% to foulbrood even if you specifically targeted "high risk stock" as the NBU inspectors do.

 

[Into the lions den]

These "the full range of tests are met" interest me though, quite what they are to make these bees so viable as opposed to local bees is beyond me.

The tests have nothing to do with the viability. Thats comes from their excellent ability to work in our climate and the joy....yes JOY....of working with them. You just have to visit these bees and see them first hand (although I have had comments that people do not want to see them as their views are not moveable.). Maybe you would like to meet these bees some day, maybe not. Maybe you also missed the bit way back at the very start of the negative comments way back over a year ago. The unit must be able to receive visitors, some of them parties of schoolchildren.Thus MUST have ultra calm, and reliably so in all weathers, stock.

As to the argument that "but if you start with high risk stock your investment can go up in smoke", well statistically you would be very unlucky to lose more than 1% to foulbrood even if you specifically targeted "high risk stock" as the NBU inspectors do.

Up in smoke is just one aspect of the inconvenience of buying in such a problem. Standstill orders, intrusive and persistent inspections, inability to move to the heather, local hostility. Even though you would buy them under local pressure you would forever be condemned as an entity that brought diseased stock into the area, irrespective of the truth of the matter. So instead we go with totally virgin gear, not even a single frame had ever seen a bee, and for really good stock of the very highest possible health status. Absolutely zero crossover of anything from our home area. You cannot seriously be suggesting that the guard against setting these units up with clean stock should have been relaxed? To buy lesser and uncertain stock at stupid prices, with unreliable delivery schedules on top? Sorry, but the UK is just not a safe source due to the lax and voluntary nature of its health provisions. All this 'can' have inspected or 'might' just sucks. Inspection for nuc/package sales should be compulsory. Only exception should be for small local sales within the amateur sector. All the rest should have mandatory inspections in the 10 days prior to sale and it should be like everywhere else.............vendor pays. In other words a full and proper health certificate issued by the inspectorate should be part of the deal. Not some 'piece of paper' to borrow your phrase, issued by the producer themselves.

 

[REDWOOD]

Phew I did not realize the was so much involved in the sale of bees a BIG eye opener for me, I think I would rather stick to the spanners than become a commercial beekeeper.

 

[mbc]

I can see the obvious benefits of starting with a clean sheet as it were, and putting in place procedures to minimize the risk of contracting or spreading disease if you're unlucky enough for your bees to catch anything, but going to NZ seems to me to be too convenient a washing of hands and a passing on of responsibility. As previously mentioned, these bees are going into areas where disease crops up ( there are no areas that I know of in the UK that would support 600 colonies where disease doesnt crop up occasionally) so chances are, disease will sneak into the unit at some point, which to my mind does bring into question the validity of the arguments for going all the way to the land of the long white cloud for bees.
The calmness argument is easy to understand though. I recently saw a WI poster promoting beekeeping showing a 1950's photo of a group of ladies looking through some wbc hives wearing flimsy veils and dresses, no gloves or worries about bees up the skirt ! What's happened to our bees in the intervening years ?( or is it our hardiness ?)
Personally I'm always grateful of the opportunity to learn by looking at bees of all hues and I fully agree we should have more professional procedures in place here for bee sales, it would do a lot for consumer confidence.
What does a "full range of tests" involve with the bees from NZ ?

 

[Into the lions den]

I have seen these posters too. I have also seen postcards from the USA with almost exactly the same scene, could even be the same women. Means I am not sure where the pics were taken. If it was a US picture then they may well have been using Italian stock, if in the UK its late enough for it to be some of the early buckfast. However, also have pics of old timers here, and I think your mention of them being a tougher than we are today hits the nail on the head. Working with their veil back over the face so they can drop it down quickly, yet I could see the stings and in one case a bee was trying to get away with its sting embeded in the keepers nostril attached by a string of its own internal 'bits'. (Technical expression!) Seemed unfazed by it. Wonder how many of them eventually went down with allergy? There were many stories of old beekeepers who used to have to carry 'heart tablets' in a phial round their neck that they had to take if stung. They also simply did not have the range of protective gear we have today.

As for the disease bit, well yes of course transmission from outside is a constant risk, and EFB was found last year, and again this year, in a unit less than two miles away and AFB not much further away in hives belonging to the same keeper. Total vigilance and elimination of risk of cross contamination is the order of the day for my men on site. Find anything, deal with it immediately.

As for going to NZ. Reversed seasons and reliability are a key factor, and the bees are simply bred there to take advantage of that. They are actually European stock, mostly from Germany. Their list of tests is bigger than those done here, and were so severe that for three years they were actually unable to export to the EU because of their own export rules, which rendered it impossible to ship (technicalities regarding testing and timing issues, where the tests on all colonies and the shipping out had to be done inside 24hours, which can be fully explained but will make your eyes glaze over.). I worked with them and NZMAAF, plus the UK authorities, and the issues were resolved. One thing about their certification that might be of interest is that no foulbrood whatsoever must have been found anywhere within 6 miles of EVERY apiary of origin withing the preceding three years, and the shipper has to pay for a survey to be done and for every beekeeper to have been visited and checked. An onerous task, although less so than here as there are far fewer beekeepers and those that are there keep bigger lots. Also means they need to keep better relations, because of even one in the 6 mile circle will not co-operate (try that here!) then the certificate cannot be issued. (And its only AFB btw, as EFB is not found in NZ).