Meetings are held on second Monday each month (except January), at above venue

PRESENT: Frank Lindsay (Pres.), Mary Ann Lindsay (Treas), John Burnet (Sec.) and 37 members as listed in the attendance book.

APOLOGIES: John Robson, Fritz Fuchs, and Amor Walter

NEW MEMBERS & VISITORS: David & Sam Shillson (Northland)

MINUTES OF PREVIOUS MEETING: Minutes of meeting held 12 November as detailed in the December newsletter were read and confirmed.

MATTERS ARISING:

Varroa Update – Frank Lindsay advised that the infected hives at Jerusalem on the Whanganui River have now been moved north across the varroa boundary line. The Waimarino "bubble" had now been removed. Tweedale’s hives at Karioi, where 3 mites had been discovered, have been moved north of the line. There was some evidence that beekeepers in the infected zone were failing to report infected hives. Beekeepers in the buffer zone including Wellington should now be monitoring their hives for varroa by checking with a capping fork all drone brood at the pink-eye stage. A cheap but effective monitoring method is the use of horticultural windbreak, plastic fly screen or course net curtaining. Beekeepers should be aware that pollen mites may be discovered however these are harmless.

TREASURER’S REPORT: Club’s bank account details were outlined to members and members authorised the annual payment to the Johnsonville Uniting Church for the hire of the hall (anticipated cost approx $400).

GENERAL BUSINESS:

Western Australian Honey – President advised WA honey would shortly be available in NZ owing to NZ exports of honey to Australia and a reciprocal trade agreement between the two countries. MAF were currently seeking submissions from beekeepers on the issue. On a separate matter President reported that the current wholesale price for Manuka honey (in the drum) had reached $7 per kilo.

Swarm Control – members reported there were currently plenty of swarms available for collection and because the honey flow was now underway, uniting with newspaper was not now necessary. Collection of swarms at this time of honey flow was generally considered desirable to gain maximum number of field bees. Air freshener was suggested as an effective alternative for uniting colonies or swarms as it masked differing queen pheromones.

Swarm Collection Stories – Ivan Pedersen related an experience where, while collecting one swarm, he attracted another. Richard Hatfield advised he had recently collected a 5-year-old swarm from a wall and the honeycomb extended from ceiling to floor. Because honey attracted moisture and eventually deteriorated it was generally considered better to remove all comb from wall and ceiling cavities in houses.

GPS – It was agreed by all members that the Club’s GPS (and instruction booklet) would be available for hire to members for $10 per hire (plus battery replacement where necessary). Treasurer will record & monitor borrowers in the same manner as the Club extractors.

Plastic Frames – There was a general discussion on the use of these by members. Cost was reported as $1.70 plus GST for ¾ depth compared with $1.10 plus foundation cost for conventional frames and wax. Plastic frame users agreed that their use reduced amount of drone brood and it was suggested that the height of the runners on the bottom board should be increased by 50mm to give bees additional brood space.

Meeting closed at 9:pm and was followed by the customary Christmas supper.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) and The National Beekeepers Association (NBA) are responding to a find of the Varroa bee mite at Pauatahanui, near Porirua north of Wellington.

A visual confirmation of the Varroa mite was made by Paul Bolger, MAF's Varroa Programme Coordinator, after the likelihood an infected colony of feral bees had been transported across MAF's movement control line was reported by a member of the NBA. A sample of the suspected Varroa infestation is being tested by MAF Laboratories to confirm the diagnosis.

MAF's control programme for Varroa includes a movement control line which extends across the North Island from Taranaki to East Cape which is designed to restrict movement of live bees. The Varroa mite was found in a hollow log in a load of timber transported to a timber mill at Pauatahanui from the north of the North Island.

Don Bell, NBA President, says the detection is a big disappointment. "Beekeepers have fully supported the movement restrictions. The NBA has also done its best to raise public awareness of the risk of live bees being accidentally transported from one part of New Zealand to another as appears to have been the case here".

"We issued a release in December which warned holiday motorists about the risk of picking up "bee hitchhikers" and would expect the wider public to show a high level of responsibility to guard against spreading the Varroa mite".

MAF immediately destroyed the host bee colony found at Pauatahanui and is confident all reasonable steps to contain the presence of the mite are being followed.

A meeting of MAF Biosecurity's Varroa Management Group was convened today and further preventive measures are being put in place this week. These include placing an immediate restriction on live bee movement by beekeepers within a 5 kilometre radius of today's find and undertaking a programme of preventive Varroa treatment of all beehives within that radius.

MAF and the NBA are continuing their efforts to slow the spread of the Varroa mite into the lower half of the North Island which has been "Varroa free" until now. "We can only hope this is an isolated incident. Beekeepers are making progress in learning how to deal with the damage the Varroa mite causes and we are encouraged that an NBA member helped to alert MAF to this suspected find," says Mr Bell.

The honey crop over most of New Zealand has been reported as being well down, perhaps the worst honey crop in years. The continuous rain and cold weather we experienced from mid October to mid January put paid to the possibility of good crops for most commercial beekeepers. A lot of hives in the manuka have dead drones in front of them indicating that these hives were forced to expel drones to survive. IE no honey or pollen coming in therefore the hives go into survival mode. Brood production stops and in extreme cases, the bees start eating developing larvae to survive. Under these conditions, the hives quickly reduce in bee numbers. There are always exceptions. How is it that one or two hives in an apiary seem to find a nectar source and cap all the honey frames in the hives yet the rests of the hives in the apiary produce only winter stores? They are incredible things these bees.

All this rain has meant that paddocks are green and honey sources that would have normally dried out by now are still flowering. A walk through an empty calf paddock a few days ago revealed a host of honey plants flowering. White and Red Clover, Catsear, Thistles and lots of Lotus Major. The bees were all over the Lotus Major. Penny Royal and Willow Weed were sending up flower heads. Around our house the Lancewood (Pseudopanax crissifolius), Koromiko (Hebe stricta) while up the coast, Fennel and pink and red varieties of Eucalyptus are in full flower. Perhaps some hives will manage to produce a crop after all.

However hives in some suburban areas have done very well indeed. The major difference being that one or two beehives do not have to compete with other hives therefore are able to continue to gather the nectar and pollen. The other main contributing factors are shelter and multiplicity of nectar sources. Hobby beekeepers can tuck a hive away in a sheltered garden and they will do extremely well.

Urban hives are full of brood and this has triggered late swarming so keep an eye on your hives, get the capped honey off (after a disease check) and the wet supers back on quickly (in the evening) as this stimulates the bees to gather more nectar. Its also important to get into the habit of removing honey early (by the end of January) as at some time in the future, you will have to treat your hives to control varroa mites around this time.

One of the main problems with urban beekeeping is disturbing the hives. Angry bees in a city environment is a recipe for disaster. It is best to work the hives on a sunny afternoon when you neighbours are away at the beach. By the time they get home, the bees would have settled down again. Another alternative is to work them early in the morning when it’s still cool. A little smoke and the bees are easy to keep under control.

Honey is best removed using escape boards. Brushing and blowing just disturbs the bees and the neighbours and chemicals such a benzhaldehyde are now being frowned on as a source of chemical residues. Use as little smoke as possible. Heavy use of smoke taints the honey.

There are conditions where escape boards don’t work. If there are any patches of drone brood along the bottom edges of the frames, the bees won’t leave them. Cut these out with your hive tool. A similar situation occurs if there are cracks or holes. The bees will defend the honey and won’t leave the super. Bee escapes can be blocked with wax particles when the honey supers are put on top of them. This can be prevented and dripping honey eliminated if the honey suppers are "cracked" a day beforehand. Take the hive tool and lift each end of the honey super off the one below. Any bridging wax between the frames is broken and the bees quickly clean up dripping honey. Next day when the honey supers are lifted off to place the escape board in position, they are easy to remove.

At this time of the year, bees do not readily move out of the honey supers if there is no room in the hive. This can be overcome if another super is added above the brood nest. Also the warm evenings don’t encourage them to move down either and it can sometimes take a couple of days for most of the bees to move through the escape board. I have found a quicker way to do this. Place a crown or split boards on the ground beside the hive and place the honey supers on top of this then put the escape board on top of this with the escape mechanism upwards. Provided the honey supers are sealed, (tape over any holes or cracks) the bees will leave the supers within an hour or two. Late afternoon you can pick the honey supers up and remove them to you house without disturbing the bees. This operation works best with porter bee escapes. The homemade diamond type with mesh will attract robber bees, as they can smell the exposed honey. If you use this type of escape device, you may have to leave the super until flying has ceased. The only bees left in the supers will be drones and these can be shaken on to the ground in front of the hive.

When the honey flow finishes, the field bees start looking for additional sources of nectar and what is more efficient than taking it from an unguarded hive or nuc. I found out what robbing can be like a few years ago. I leave my hive entrances restricted all year round due to the wind in our region but used to lift the roofs or set a top honey super slightly askew to give additional ventilation. In this apiary I failed to reset the roof at the end of the flow and when I came to remove the honey off in March, I noticed dead bees in front of each hives. There had been a real battle but all the hives were flying so seemed ok.

After lifting the roofs off the hives I got a real surprise. All the honey in the hives had been robbed out and there was a layer of dead "black" bees about 50-mm thick between the frames of the second and third super protecting the brood nest below. My nice yellow bees had put up a fight against these invaders and had survived but lost the battle to save their honey crop. I changed my management after this and found that so much added ventilation was not necessary. A 25-mm cut in the crown board now provides sufficient ventilation. When the honey flow come towards a conclusion, close down the entrances by putting on your winter entrance boards.

The idea when removing honey is to never leave combs exposed. Cover these with a cloth or a crown or split board. Once the bees start robbing ever thing and everyone gets stung. If you do get into a robbing situation, block all the hive entrances with grass to restrict bee flight. If your bees are being attacked from another hive outside your property put a garden sprinkler on top of your hives and turn on the water. This quickly stops any robbing activity. After bee flight activity has ceased reduce the hive entrances to 100mm.

February is also the best time to start setting your hives up for winter. Order new queens and make a few nucs or replace the old queens in your hives. All swarms gathered should be requeened, as the queens are likely to be old or have a propensity to swarm. If there is still a honey flow on, the queens will quickly be accepted. If the flow has finished, sprinkle a little thin sugar syrup over the frames and bees just after introducing the caged queen. This gives the bees something to do and they don’t seem to worry the new queen.

Requeening black hives is often a little more difficult. Apart from being defensive, these bees are "runners", i.e. they are not steady on the frame and tend to run to the bottom of the frame when it is lifted out of the hive. If you cannot find the queen on the first look through the brood frames, shake all the bees on to the ground in front of the hive and put a queen excluder between the floor and the first super. The bees will walk through the excluder into the hive, leaving the drones and the queen below the excluder. In an hour or so, lift off the supers and find and dispatch the queen. Introduce the new caged queen but don’t remove the protective lug. Splash a little sugar syrup over the bees (but not outside as this could start robbing) and close the hive.

In three days check the hive again. Look at the reaction of the bees on and around the queen cage. If they are feeding the new queen, release the tag to let her emerge once the candy is eaten through. If they are aggressive to her, pulling at the bees and trying to sting, go through all the brood frames and look for queen cells on the surface of the brood frames and wipe these off with the hive tool. Close and check in another three days. Once the bees are feeding the queen, she can be released.

As a general rule I put a strip of adhesive tape around the middle of the cage to reducing the amount of surface area exposed to the bees by half. This allows the queen some where to hide if the bees are aggressive and also stops the bees eating off the pheromone pads on the queen’s front legs. Dr Jerzy Woyke from Poland told us about this trick at the 1988 Australian Bee Congress. Nosema and foot damage is the most common cause of queen supercedure.

Things to do this Month: Extract Honey. Remove comb honey (there won’t be much this year). Rear autumn queens. Introduce purchased queens. Produce Nuclei. Check for AFB before removing any honey or brood frames from a hive.

Ask yourself if you have ever seen an unhatched egg in a partially built queen size cell. No, but you have found eggs in play cells from time to time. Actually we see this pretty well daily, sometimes dozens of times daily, from early May through to our cessation of swarm control in the early part of July. Pup cells (never heard them called play cells except on this kind of medium) are certainly not made for fun. They DO use them when ready to do so.

As you suggested they are too wide in the mouth when freshly constructed and/or being held in reserve. You can see this relatively easily and your eye learns to spot ones which are still safe and pick out those which are started on. There IS a subtle difference between unused ones and those with eggs in them, and as you suggest it is in the mouth of the cell that it shows. Yes they narrow the mouth down to worker size with fresh wax, and although this is normally by doing a tapered extension (not however the same as the lengthening of the developing cell) it can even be almost like a flat thin membrane of wax across the end. Crucial factor is that the aperture is now worker size rather than pup cell size. You DO learn to spot it almost without looking for it.

Having said that, unless we are pushing for increase at the time we do sometimes tend to ignore ‘pups with eggs’ as even at that stage there is no guarantee they will proceed to raise cells. In any event our next visit is due before anything raised from an egg will be mature and thus we still have time to deal with the swarming if the intent is serious. Once the eggs hatch and ‘milk’ is being placed in the cell for the grub the shape of the cell changes. Again, as you suggest, the temporary extensions get rolled back and extension of the cell from its wider parts begins. Relatively slowly and unobtrusively for the first 24 hours, then increasingly rapidly. We reckon you can prevent/reverse swarming at a stage up to the cells being two thirds long, but after that the action required becomes increasingly radical, and if they are sealed the only proper way to restore stability is to split the colony, either for increase or to raise a young queen for requeening (not necessarily for this colony though).

If you cannot tell if they are in use just roll the edge back with the end of the hive tool and see if there is anything inside. Even some of my relatively experienced helpers get (minor) grief from me for taking ages examining pup cells which I can tell at the most cursory glance to be harmless and empty, so it can take a while to get the knack. (The following bit is with due apology to those who already know it. I am NOT trying to teach my granny to suck eggs’. From some of the posting it is apparent that there are some out there who do not understand.)

Inside dull and empty, then nothing

Inside polished, considering laying in the cell soon. Egg inside, a warning that swarm preparations are in their earliest stages. Tiny larva and royal jelly, then swarming is likely in 9 or 10 days (It is frequent however that there will be successional cells raised and if conditions are not right when the first cells are ready to hatch they will be torn down and the swarm will depart at a time of its choosing from a cell raised later than the first wave).

Cells already extending and with larvae and royal jelly, take preventative action now. Sealed cells, or nearly sealed cells, take radical action now. The old fashioned way of ‘cutting out the cells’ is futile and just prolongs, sometimes for weeks, the period of colony instability during which the old queen does not function properly, thus lays less eggs (if any) per day, and you suffer in the later flows from lack of bee power.

Splitting and reuniting when the young queen lays is far more beneficial. Murray McGregor From The Irish Beekeeping Discussion List

MAF has confirmed the discovery of Varroa on a colony of bees transported inside a hollow log to the sawmill at Pauatahanui. Refer to the full press release on page 3 inside.

The club did not hold a diseasathon in the spring last year, though a decision was made to have one in the autumn. This was planned to cover parts of the Hutt Valley where disease has been prevalent in the past. Look for details in next month's newsletter.

Just a reminder to members that your hive levy payments are due on 20th February unless you have claimed an exemption by filing a statutory declaration to the effect that you own 10 or fewer hives on 3 or fewer apiaries.

If you are not eligible for an exemption, but would like to apply for an extension of the time allowed for making payment, then you need to have applied to the NBA Executive Secretary (Tim Leslie) by 31st January. If you are intending to do this, then act now.

The NBA has prepared a comprehensive submission to MAF arguing against the proposal being considered from the WA State Government that would permit the import of honey from WA into New Zealand. The submission can be viewed on their website at www.nba.co.nz

Don't forget that the club has one (or two?) extractors available for members to hire. These cost $10 per time (ie over a weekend or similar), and need to be returned promptly in clean working order. Contact May-Ann Lindsay (ph 478 3367) for more information if you are interested.

The committee is always looking for interesting and/or relevant speakers for future meetings. If you have any suggestions please contact our secretary,
John Burnet on 232 7863 (or secretary@beehive.org.nz).