June has been a washout. Actually, for many colonies, June is a difficult month as the spring flowers begin to die and the summer flowers start to emerge. Nectar and pollen are scarce at this time of the year and bees struggle massively in this period of heavy rainfall.

The little amount of nectar and pollen that does exist is largely uncollectable by Bees in this wet weather. If there is one thing guaranteed to mess up a bee it is a big fat raindrop; weighing much more than a bee, they crash into them at amazing speed, killing the insect and making it impossible for the bees to travel any distance.

So bees go hungry in the rain and have to be fed sugar in order to keep them healthy.

The other problem is that plants are not flowering as well as they ought to. They are either slower to flower or the blossoms themselves are so damaged by the heavy rain they are ruined. A few inches of rain in a day leaves gardens so bashed around, much of the flowers are simply too damaged, too washed out to be of any real value to man or bee!

Let us hope that July is better, and August becomes a heady hot summer time of blossom, floral aroma and busy bees collecting honey. Any more of this and we will have spent a whole year feeding bees just to keep them alive.

I had to visit a friend. She had just bought some bees and then, within a few hours of spending £180 on her first colony, a swarm finds its way to her door.

Housing a swarm is a wonderful sight, one that people would not believe. A board, often a piece of wood is used to form a ramp from the ground to the beehive entrance and is covered with a sheet. The bees are unceremoniously tipped out on to the sheet and because they almost invariably walk upwards, they will march up the ramp and into the hive. Hopefully there they will find a new home.

Sometimes, however, it doesn’t always work – the queen, for some reason, and more usually if she is an old queen, will decide to vacate again, leaving behind a few hundred bees the beekeeper has little use for.

Actually, swarms such as this are not much use – the queen is old and past her best, and never has enough eggs left in her to develop a really strong colony, and frequently, such bees do not last the following winter.

With the bees left behind, well there is not much you can do with them. You can join them to another already existing colony, which is yet another Heath Robinson affair where you separate the bees from each other by sheets of newspaper soaked in syrup. Once they have nibbled through the paper, they are usually friendly towards each other.

If there are enough bees, it might be a good idea to introduce new queen to them – something that beekeepers learn to do from their earliest days of beekeeping – needless to say; it’s not as simple as you might first think.

The moral of the story: Bees are wild animals and will do what they do without reference to us beekeepers!

Stopping the splitting of colonies, a process millions of years old, reduces the number of times the genetic material is  changed in the process of producing the eggs and sperm that  might eventually become a new, genetically active queen.

So another year goes by before a chance at improving the genetic stock of bee kind, but beekeepers are happy if they still have their precious colonies, and rightly so. You see, beekeepers are a strange lot. They have, even the most hard nosed of them, a kind of relationship with them in as much as the bees give them interest, hours of thoughtfulness and moments of joy.

But the bees don’t half put up with a lot!

It starts with an artificial swarm. A new hive is placed about 15 metres away from the hive, and a number of frames of bees, eggs and grubs are placed in it – about 5. The rest of the space is filled with new, empty frames in both hives.

Only the flying bees will escape the new hive, and they will return to their home, leaving a lot of bees with no queen. This is the important thing – one of the day old eggs in the new hive will be fed enough Royal Jelly to become a replacement queen.

In a month, the new queen will have mated and you will have two colonies where there was one. But remember, the old colony has an old queen – and she won’t last forever! At some point she will need to be replaced – probably next year – or the year after.

Beekeepers control the way bees do genetics, and I often wonder wether we know best. After all, our current method of beekeeping was more or less invented at a time when we had a very sketchy idea of genetics in the first place.

Beekeeping is at something of a crossroads, so many people are trying new methods – and I suppose only time will tell if they are right.

Colonies of bees around the UK are are entering their busy period, and the desire to push on and build comb, feed young, collect nectar and pollen drives the bees to new levels of activity.

Like humans, bees are affected by what is happening in the wider world. A cold spell causes plants to delay nectar production and therefore there might be little food available. Incessant driving rain makes whatever food there is out there for bees difficult, indeed dangerous to collect, and therefore the colony goes hungry.

Internally, the queen does her part by laying eggs and making a smell. The smell is important because it gives all the workers the feeling they are part of that one big family – they are who they are because they all smell the same.

When they leave the hive, they return to the same aroma, the hive next door is different – they’re a different family, they smell different. Next year, when the queen is a year older, her queen smell will be less pronounced, and the family of bees won’t like it. The desire to swarm and reproduce a new queen, to make a stronger colony, a more close knit family, will be strong.

But for now the new colony is simply waiting for the weather to improve, so they can start bringing in the stores to feed all those new grubs – one tiny mouthful at a time.

There are some advantages of living at the top of the hill. You can see all humanity below you, going about daily business. The motorway that bisects the valley is always busy, the white lights coming towards us, going to work, and the red ones travelling away from us – going home. Well, that’s how I like to think of it – but it’s not that simple is it.

Some of the white lights – the cars coming towards our little cottage on the hill, might just as well be going to their home as to work. Some of the cars will be taking their passengers to the shops, some will just be passing through. And of course, there are the police and ambulances and then what about the cargo laden lorries, and the gritters and cleaners?

The motorway, and the associated side roads and car parks and dead-ends are not as simple as they seem at first – in fact they are wonderfully variable. And to make it even more confusing, there are drivers that have taken their vehicles the wrong way, have to stop and get back on track.

Open a beehive and you get exactly the same effect.

There are bees that seem to be intently going somewhere, to fulfil a task – often to collect nectar and pollen, maybe water. Still more are returning from much the same journey. Some, like our road cleaners and gritters are keeping the colony free from congestion and mess, and still more are making new honeycomb and capping cells where grubs are parked or honey is stored.

The colony has its juggernauts too, carrying pollen to storage bays and nectar to and from hungry bees, and then there are the police, making sure the colony is safe from attack.

You can push analogy too far, but living in a colony of thousands of individuals, bees face and have solved many of the same problems we too face. One wonders if our solutions to making our society work are as good as the bees.

I can remember vividly my early days,  reading Dan Dare under the covers in my bed – too scared to peep into the daylight, just in case some enormous alien was at the bottom of my bed. The comic arrived on Saturday, and I read it cover to cover before breakfast.

One time Dan Dare (you could never call him Dan) was being attacked by some huge bees, as big as a house, and to be honest, that put me off bees forever. I managed to avoid being stung until around two years after I started keeping bees. I still keep myself as covered as I can, and have never liked being stung.

So why is it impossible, enormous bees chasing people around the streets?

There are two reasons why it is fairly impossible. The first is related to insect blood. They don’t have blood in the mammalian sense, it is a clear liquid called haematocele. Our blood is filled with corpuscles that whiz around the body exchanging oxygen for carbon dioxide in the system we called respiration – that gives us the energy we need to live.

Insect blood is weak and thin, and is not driven about their bodies by an efficient heart. So insects cannot do their chemistry half as effectively as we can.

Another disadvantage  is not having lungs. Instead of the tennis court sized oxygen machine we have stuffed into our chests, bees and all insect (spiders too) have a series of small tubes called spiracles. These are not attached to a pump, but the movement of the body forces air in and out of the body. The flexing of the exoskeleton helps this, and if you see a bee on a flower, wiggling its abdomen in a rhythmic way, it is gasping for breath.

So bees have an oxygen debt nearly all the time they are flying, because they simply cannot get enough into their sluggish, thin and watery blood.

Looking at bees makes me really thankful I am built as I am!

But there are some queens for whom this lack of activity is not enough.  Some queens lay eggs, only a few, when the  raging weather outside the hive is at its worst, and there is brood to look after in the deepest winter. This is no mean feat for workers. Adult bees are good at keeping warm and dealing with freezing temperatures.

Brood, that is eggs and grubs, are not so good, and have to be kept warm. Not all the young bees make it! It’s a monumental effort to keep the young alive, but if they die in their cells, they might just begin to rot and introduce disease into the colony.

In some colonies there will be no bees making wax, and pupating grubs will not be capped, and consequently will not survive the process.

Of course, beekeepers hope there is no brood in the colony in the winter, so they can treat the bees for varroa. They use a 3.2% solution of oxalic acid. This kills mites unless they are locked away in cells with brood. Consequently the  treatment is much less efficient. Oxalilc acid is poisonous to bees, and you have to be just right when treating – otherwise the bees themselves will die from the treatment.

There is another way of keeping bees that  doesn’t involve treatment at all – an organic way that tries to keep bees as they would be in nature, with a little helping hand from mankind too. It is a completely different idea. You see, people keep bees for the honey – but the organic way is to keep bees for their own sake, and any honey we get from them is a secondary consideration.

I have to say that it is hard, as a conventional beekeeper, to suddenly stop treating your bees. A bit like stopping taking the tablets!  But then, I have a sneaking feeling that the bees must be getting a bit fed up with being messed about by humans, and I am wondering if, at the end of the day, they know best how to live as a bee.

There is a lot to learn about so called natural beekeeping – but if it works, maybe it is worth the effort.

Bees are fastidious when it comes to draughts, and they glue up every nook and cranny with a special substance called propolis, but what fascinates me is how they live out of the hive in the wild. They are sometimes in colonies that are quite exposed. They  have comb exposed. In the winter you hardly see the bees of a wild colony.

But then, these days, you hardly see a wild colony. They are becoming rare mostly because of varroa infestation. The colony might swarm in the Spring and do quite well in the first Summer. But in the second summer the mites will take their toll on the colony, which will not grow well enough and following that they will hardly be able to collect enough food to get them through the winter. Consequently, they will likely as not die off due to starvation.

Hive design has some impact on how bees survive the Winter. The WBC hive comes in two parts. It is the old fashioned  hive that British people think of when a beehive is first mentioned, with slats on the outside. To the bee, the basic idea was that it gave extra insulation. To the beekeeper it was a complete pain. In order to work with the bees you had to dismantle the slats on the outside and then you could dismantle the hive. A lot of work, and generally these hives have fallen out of favour.

I did some research about hives, how the varroa floor affected bees in the winter compared to solid floors. Varroa floors are just mesh, and I supposed they would be cold for the bees. Actually I noticed hardly any difference between colonies with varroa floors and without. It just goes to show the bees can cope with cold.

However, this week is cold, wet and windy.  I’m a bit worried.

Colonies with not much honey will run out and the beekeeper has a difficult job to keep these bees alive. The first thing done at this time of the year is to feed the bees  sugar, often in the form of syrup – more likely in the form of candy.

Syrup at this time of the year is made by dissolving 3 parts ordinary white cane sugar to 1 part water, and the resulting liquid has almost the same concentration as honey – which is important because any weaker and it would ferment.

The liquid is placed in a feeder and the bees simply take it down into the waiting honeycomb, and use it when they need.

Candy is harder to make, being 4 parts sugar to 1 part water. Also it is almost boiled, like toffee and then whisked, the resulting cake is then allowed to cool before placing on the top of the frames in the hives.

It is important the beekeeper keeps an eye on the amount of stores in the hive because they might run low at any time, and extras will then be needed. A cold snap can devastate the amount of honey in the hive – so  be on your guard.

The death of colonies in the winter is to be expected – and every year some 10% will perish. This is a natural occurrence, and nothing to worry about. However, the  current levels of colony death – some years as high as 30%, is unsustainable, and bees still need our care and concern.

So, when the weather is horrid, give a thought for the bees. They may be snug and warm in their hives, or having difficulty because of lack of supplies – you can’t tell by looking. But you can get an idea. Beekeepers ‘heft’ their hives. This is simply lifting them a little to guess how heavy they are, and consequently a decision can be made about the amount of honey inside. A super frame of honey weighs 15 kg, and that is about how much honey they need to be sure of getting through the winter. Even so, most beekeepers give their bees a lot extra.

A good insulating layer at the top of the hive is a great idea to help preserve whatever stores the bees have. When the bees get cold they make heat by consuming honey and giving themselves a heat boost. They are quite unique in the insect world in being able to raise their own temperature almost at will. Consequently they can keep the hive considerably warmer than the outside, something really important when it comes down to the 20 degrees of frost they often have to survive. Bees are really good at surviving – despite all the losses they have to put up with in our modern world. It always fills me with wonder when, on one of the coldest days around Christmas, we treat them with oxalic acid against varroa. In the hive there are normally dozens – if not more – of dead bees, but a healthy nucleus of healthy ones ready to start work as soon as the flowers appear. In a way, the hive is like a miniature Noah’s Ark – the bees inside waiting for the sun to shine, the days to warm up and the flowers to open.