The drought is still biting hard in and around Wellington. More and more scrubs on rocky slopes are now dying. Farm ponds are baked dry. Creeks have ceased to flow or are down to a trickle and a lot of horse people are carting in food and water to keep their charges alive. I visited an apiary the other day and found only the water-carriers flying, collecting water from moist areas in the creek bed.

Further north the areas that receive rain are marked. The south side of the Otaki River is as dry as a bone and farmers are feeding out. A kilometer further north across the river on the plateau, the whole area is green, lush grass and clover is re-flowering.

Basically the honey flow is over for another year. Autumn is approaching. Days are getting shorter and the dew in the mornings is getting heavier. Any nectar brought in by the bees from now on is being packed in and around the brood nest for winter stores. For commercial beekeepers the long days continue. Honey supers are taken off early in the morning, extracted in the afternoon while its still warm and the wets are put back on hives to be cleaned out ready for storing during winter. On the next visit to the apiary, new queens or cells are put in to set the hive up for next year.

With no intense nectar sources available, the field bees are now turning to a different method of nectar collecting - robbing. Any exposed honey is fair game. Bees will try the defenses of other hives and if there is something wrong with the make up of the hive, i.e. queenless, small or weaken colony, wide-open entrance, alternative entrances that are not fully guarded can all lead to robbing. When this starts, the colony will try to defend itself and a stinging frenzy results but after a while the colony looses its spirit and submits. The result is a handful of bees with no winter stores or the bees will abscond with the robbers leaving the hive open to wax moth and mice perdition.

Wasps are also into robbing hives. They require carbohydrates to produce new queens so will be seen visiting anything with a high sugar content - grapes, ripe fruit and especially beehives. These little horrors fly at lower temperatures than bees and will happily sneak in and pinch the honey and brood to feed their developing queens. They will probe each hive's defenses until they find a weak one, then press home an attack. Once they get the smell of the hive, the guard bees will not challenge them and they will strip out a hive in a week and then move on to the next weakest hive.

Try not to let this happen to your hives especially nucleus colonies you intend to carry through the winter. There are methods to stop these colonies being robbed out. Don't leave them open for very long. Close entrances down to a size they can adequately guard, perhaps as little as a finger width. Some beekeepers put on a device like a triangular bee escape over the entrance. Robber bees are attracted to the mesh over the entrance and can't get in while the bees within the hive quickly learn to use a small entrance away to the side of the mesh. If you notice a lot of unusual bee activity at this time of the year, try tracking down the source.

A poison bait is available that can be put out to kill wasp nests if they can't be found but it's expensive. An alternative is to pay the neighbourhood children a few dollars for each nest they find. They are usually in banks and along waterways and at this time of the year are reaching peak populations so are easily found. It’s a simple matter to dispatch them. A couple of tablespoons of insecticide powder down the entrance should kill them all in an hour.

Cappings should also get processed and rendered into wax blocks. The honey should be separated from the cappings. There are many methods: it can be pressed, spun out, melted out, using a hot top, put on a hive for the bees to remove, it can be washed and the water used in preparation for making mead or just put into a solar melter.

Once the cappings are free of honey, place the cappings in a pot and add a couple of centimeters of water. The water allows the residue to collect at the bottom. Beeswax melts at 64 Deg C, so don't over heat it and process it only once. When melting the wax, pay particular attention to the heat being applied. Watch it closely and stir it occasionally as it can quickly heat up and overflow the container and then there's a real problem cleaning wax off the stove. (It takes days and lots of Handy Andy and causes all sorts of other problems in the kitchen). As soon as it is fully melted, poured the hot wax into a mould through hessin (jute sacking) as a filter or similar to remove large particles of debris. (We use a strainer to support the filter). You don't need to purchase a mold as a 20 litre or 10-litre plastic honey pail will do. (Note; Soft plastic will melt - it must be a hard plastic container). Cover the mold / pail so that it cools slowly. If it cools too fast the wax will crack in the middle and will stick to the sides of the container. Cooled slowly and it will shrink slightly allowing the wax to be removed easily once a little hot water is applied to the sides.

Small dirt particles settle on the bottom of the wax and can be cleaned off when it is cold. This can be removed with a hand plain, chiseled off or melted off with a gas torch, leaving a nice clean block ready for sale. Brood comb wax and frame scrapings should not be mixed with cappings wax as they will darken the wax and reduce your monetary return for it. Hobby beekeepers should pool their wax and exchange it for cartons of foundation.

I was asked how do I mark my queens. Experienced beekeepers can tell by looking at a queen and the brood pattern as to whether she is any good or not. New queens tend to be downy covered while older queens become shiny and the wings get damage with all the attention they get from the attendant bees.

Most beekeepers have a policy of replacing all queens each or every second year so it's not really necessary to mark your queens. However marking queen can be an advantage. You can immediately identify the age of the queen by marking them with colour paint and marked queens are easier to see and find. Quite often you will find an unmarked queen in the hive indicating the hive has superceded. Once you get into the habit of marking queens (or purchasing marked queens) you will notice that having two queens in a hive isn't all that uncommon. I carried a one-frame observation hive through the summer a few years ago with two queens in it (mother and daughter). This was taken into schools and what a surprise when the children found there were two queens in the hive after being told that a hive is always headed by one queen and no rivals are tolerated.

Finding queens is easier in the autumn as they tend to be in the centre of the brood nest. Steve Taber's book on" Breeding Super Queens" offers this advice on finding the queen. A better description than I gave last month.

The following technique will prove useful. Start by placing a queen excluder between each box. Remember the egg just laid won't hatch for a little over 3 days and just hatched larvae are very hard to see, especially if you wear bifocals as I do. After placing the excluders, do not look for the queen for 5 to 7 days. This is especially true with a big hive with lots of brood in different places. Then, when you do start looking for the queen, you are in total control. Check for eggs and young larvae by removing the centre 2 or 3 frames in each section. Don't forget to look on the excluder for the queen trying to get through. Continue searching until you see eggs and young larvae. Then go through all combs in that section carefully. If you still don't find the queen, even in the bottom box, don't despair. Put the hive back together, but put the box with the queen on the top (it will probably be the bottom box), and put the box that was on top on the bottom board. Why? Well, the mean bees are always in the bottom box next to the entrance.

Again, after 5 to 7 days, examine the combs for the queen. This time you should easily find her. Remember, in about 5 percent of all colonies there may be 2 or more queens. Another thing to consider is that you may find eggs but no queen. In this case it's a pretty good guess that they have been laid by workerbees.

After finding and removing the queen, record both the date and the colony. This is so you will know when the colony became queenless. I use coloured tacks - a blue tack impaling a piece of paper with date of queen removal; a yellow tack impaling the same piece of paper indicates that a caged queen is in that colony. Remember the biology - after removing a queen, her last egg won't hatch for 3 or so days. So if you come back and destroy all queen cells in 6 days the bees will still be able to build queen cells.

So to repeat: Find the queen quickly, expect more than one queen and keep good records of date of queen removal and new queen introduction. Finally, come back in 2 weeks and check the performance of the new queen. From long experience I expect that 1 in 50 newly introduced queens will need to be replaced.

Steve Taber prefers to mark queens with light colours such as white, pale blue, pink and light green as they tend to stand out. I use the colours recommended internationally by the International Bee Research Association. There are 5 basic colours and they rotate at five yearly intervals. 2001- White, 2002 -Yellow, 2003 - Red, 2004 - Green, 2005 - Blue

There are many types of paint available. Some use aeroplane dope, waterbase correcting fluid or water base paint. If the correcting fluid is spirit based you have to be careful as the spirits can suffocate the queen, however I don't recommend using this type. If you use this sort of paint, blow on the queen until the paint is dry. Our beekeeping stockists have kits available that are safe to use if you are not sure. I use a waterbase poster paint pen I picked up in the UK. These are fine point pens that work well until you loose them. Some use a fine paint brush, but a match or tooth pick works just as well. All that is required is to put a small blob of paint on the thorax. Too much and it can kill the queen.

When you locate the queen, she is not going to stand still while you mark her so she has to be restrained. She can be picked up by the wings and then held gently against the thumb by the forefinger, marked and released again after 30 seconds back on to the section of frame she came from.

Because young queens tend to fly when disturbed, I pin mine gently to the surface of the comb using my thumb and forefinger. Mark her and pop the draw of a matchbox over her for about a minute. This allows the paint to dry and also allows her to settle down in the dark. If she is placed on the surface of the comb amongst the bees they will immediately clean the wet paint off. There are also little devices you can purchase that hold and pin queens to the comb so they can be marked.

Practice on a few drones to start with, as they are bigger and don't sting. If you are marking a number of queens, wash your hands between queens so that the pheromones from one queen are not transferred to another. If you don't, the bees may think their queen is a foreigner and ball her.

Some unusual things happen when marking queens and thinking back, it's mostly associated with dark queens. They play dead when you pick them up. I had marked a queen and thought I had killed it (squashed or overcome with paint fumes) as it didn't move when placed back on the frame. I watched it for a minute and nothing happened so picked it off the frame and put it on the lid of the next hive. I was looking at another frame for eggs when I notice this queen quickly come to life and scurry off the side of the lid. I must have thrown away a few queens before I realised they did this little dying act.

As I noted at the start, its not really necessary to mark queens but it can be interesting and it certainly makes it easier for hobbyist to find their queens.

For most hobbyist everything has been done. The honey is off, extracted and distributed to neighbours and friends.

Bee club activities now turn to honey competitions. These are a marvelous way to teach new beekeepers how to present honey. Honey is a unique product in itself but it will also take in any adverse taint. Too much smoke while taking off honey can be detected in the honey. The faint hint of pickled onions comes through when a jar is reused as a honey jar without thoroughly cleaning the lid. Tiny specks and flakes of wax can bee detected under strong light. Fine granulation in the liquid honey section can be detected using polarized filters. Producing a fine grain of granulated honey that dissolves on the tongue takes time, patience and constant temperature to achieve.

All the little mistakes we make when we first start beekeeping are quickly rectified through trial and error, learning from others, which results in a better product being presented to the public. The idea is to produce a product that we can all be proud of.

Things to do this month; Remove comb honey, continue with extracting honey, requeen hives, winter down hives in the cooler areas after a final disease check (after robbing has finished) and keep an eye out for wasps.

Frank Lindsay