I'll start this month with a couple of don'ts.

Don't lick at a sting site on the back of your hand to reduce the pain without first checking that the sting has been completely removed. Otherwise you are just transferring the pain to a different area and stings are not all that easy to remove from the tongue.

At 2 am, if your dreaming you have bees under your arm, don't roll over and go back to sleep. An hour later I woke up again and this time scratched the area and the dream stung me. A particularly painful spot, the armpit and with nothing else to concentrate on the pain was intense. Moral - take notice of dreams and don't bring bees into the house.

This can be particularly important when there are children around. Bee suits and other clothing used while beekeeping should go into the washing machine as soon as you enter the house. Left lying around, the venom on the suit dries and particles circulate with dust around the house. Constantly breathing in venom could lead to sensitivity in some teenagers. Bee aware of the unseen dangers and protect your children as there are too many beekeeper's children with sensitivity to bee stings.

Around the Wellington area, the flowering of the bush seems to be all mixed up. That cold spell in October delayed the flowering of some trees and now they are really getting into gear. Rewarewa (Knightia excelsa) is in full flower (it's late), early Whiteywood (Melicytus ramiflorus), Wineberry (Aristotelia serrata) is doing well. Kamahi (Weinmannia racemosa) has just started (our main flow) but so are all the introduced species like Barberry (Berberis glaucocarpa) and Hawthorn (Crataegus oxyancantha). Pohutukawa has budded up well and in some hot areas - along roads is starting to flower, (it normally flowers around Christmas). This means that we could have a real mix of honeys this year.

Another thing I have notices is that there have been very few swarms so far this year. Lots of hives superceded early in September due to the warm winter and are now headed by young queens. Normally we would be receiving five or 6 swarm calls a day however we are only coordinating one call every other day at present. If your conditions are similar to ours, keep an eye on your hives, reverse the brood super and give extra room by adding honey supers ahead of time otherwise all the effort and attention you have put into your hives will have been wasted. Some old timers used to tell me that when you see the white wax covering most of the top bars of a super, its time to put on the next. This is far too late. Once the bees start working a flow, keep them working by either adding supers or extracting the honey when it's almost fully capped.

November is a patchy month and there is often a dearth of nectar to keep the hives going. Some hives around the bush fringes and cities have taken advantage of heavy nectar flows and are brimming with bees and have half filled a super in a week of fine weather. We get strong early flows around the city.

In other areas, bees depend upon ground flower species like Dandelion, Wild Turnip and Buttercup, and hedge species such as Barberry, Hawthorn and Boxthorn. As the Gorse finishes, Broom becomes the predominate pollen source. When all these finish there is little to support the bees before the clover starts. Without care, these hives can quickly starve.

November is also a windy month and it is quite surprising the difference a shelter can make. If your hives are exposed, try proving them with shelter. City hives can be placed behind a runner bean frame. As the beans grow up, the bees are forced higher into the air and are less of a nuisance plus the beans screen the growing hive. Otherwise shelterbelt material forms an ideal protection. Bees will fly during windy days provided they can take off and land out of the wind. For a few extra dollars, you can increase your honey production quite a lot.

When you look inside the hives, new nectar is evident all around and about the brood nest. This looks a lot but in fact when reduced down to 17% moisture, it isn't very much at all. Where possible keep at least three frames of honey in the hive all the time. If the hives have less than this amount and the weather changes, feed sugar syrup. I do not visit my hives on a weekly basis and therefore add two scoops using a 2 kg honey pot of raw sugar to the top feeder as an emergency supply. Add a little water to the edge of the sugar and the bees will soon get the idea to use this as a feed source. If another source is available they will work this instead of the sugar. Raw sugar in fact retards the development of the hive, as it requires so much work to convert. Hence this system is not much good for feeding weak or nucleus hives.

Even in the apiaries that require feeding there is the odd hive that is full of brood and still has a fair amount of stored as well as fresh nectar. These are the bees I like (good over-wintering ability and honey production) and show up under these conditions. Mark your best hives and try raising a few queens from them in January.

I learnt another important lesson the other day. Don't work late into the evening. I have been changing frames, clearing a way burr and brace comb and piling this into an empty super on the back of the Ute. Next morning this is transferred to bags ready to melt down. Imagine my surprise when I found a queen sitting amongst this rubbish surrounded by half a dozen bees. Some where out there is a hive without a queen, however she was put too good use and has now replaced a rather old girl who was only just holding her own.

Reminds me of another thing I did wrong the other day. I mark queens as I come across them as an indication of age and sometimes it makes them easier to find. This seasons colour is blues. Shows up well on yellow queens but not well on black queens. Anyway I was marking a queen and a blob of water based poster paint went all over her head and thorax. Now a queen has got to be able to see so I immediately picked her up and washed her in the nearby creek. Most came off but when I put her back on the frame she had come off, the bees attacked her. Either the smell of the water (it was rather swampy) or the fact that I had removed all her pheromones meant she was treated as an intruder. I caged her and after finishing with the other hives released her again but she was immediately balled again so left her in a cage for the bees to release later.

The same happens when breeding queens. Checking a hive within a week of the queen emerging will often result in the queen being balled. You see a bundle of bees on the bottom board. I'm not sure whether this is a defense reaction where the bees are protecting the new queen or whether they realise she is a stranger. I do not take the risk and cage her for her protection.

New beekeepers may have only frame of foundation to put on a hive. Unless the hive is very strong, the bees will not readily go up into it. Encourage the bees to move up by taking a frame of honey from the outside of the super below and placing it in the middle of the new super. Similar techniques are used to get a lot of frames drawn. Interspace these with drawn combs and the bees will come up into the super quicker. When the hives gets above four supers high put the new super above the third, (under supering). They are build out quicker above the second super however bees tend to store pollen in the third super after a spell of wet weather so if you want nice clean frames, put your new super above the third box.

Generally we collect a few swarms that are handy but most are collected in bait hives in each apiary. These generally are from feral colonies being black in colour and only cover three frames. I like to get the queen laying before disturbing the hive.

Two reasons.

If left to their own resources, the swarm will gather enough honey to winter on but will never amount to anything because the queen is old. Order a new queen and when she arrives, give her a drop of water to refresh them. Remove the attendant bees by opening the cage slightly (inside) in front of a closed window. If the queen gets out, she can be easily caught and put back in the cage.

Proceed to the swarm hive and find the queen. Use as little smoke as possible and go gently through the hive. Feral bees tend to run off the edge of the frames and once this has started, the only way to find a queen is to force the bees through a queen excluder. However if you are gentle enough you should find her on a brood frame. As you remove each frame, look down on to the surface of the next frame and quite often you'll see her scampering away from the light. When you have found the old queen, don't take your eyes off her and run her through with the hive tool. I have wasted many hours over the years continually looking over a frame for a lost queen. They are very good at hiding when you especially want to find them.

Place the new queen's cage into the hive, candy plug covered and leave for four days. When opening the hive, observe the behavior of the bees on the cage. If the are all tightly clustered over the cage assume there is another queen or the bees have begun building queen cells so look through the hive again. Dispatch these and either repeat the exercise in another four days time or if you are confident, release the candy cover and let the bees emerge by eating through the candy plug.

One tip I use when putting cages in hives is to half cover the cage by wrapping tape around it. Research has shown that 60% of queens are damaged by bees chewing at their footpads, antenna, etc, which result in the new queen being superceded. Give the queen somewhere to hide and you'll get less damage and greater acceptance.

There are other safe ways to introduce a new queen. One method is to use a push in cage. After dispatching the old queen, the queen is released under a wire mesh cage that is pushed into a patch of emerging brood. The young bees will feed her and accept her immediately. Another way is to make a four-frame nuc. Introduce the new queen into it and after a couple of weeks when she is laying, kill the old queen in the swarm hive and unite both colonies together (with the new queen colony on top) by using two single sheets of newspaper.

If you do not want extra hives allow the old queen to start laying, dispatch her and then unite the colony under a weak hive. This will boost its strength and give you a honey crop.

Check honey and pollen reserves (early morning is best), BL check, raise queen cells, super hives to give room, swarm control - look for queen cells along the bottom bars of the second brood super (remove some frames and bees or split hives once cells have been started). Cull or move old frames to the outside of the supers. Fit foundation in comb honey frames.