Urban Beekeeping Beginners:
Our Triumphs and Failures (part 3)

In this concluding part of our journey into urban beekeeping, we recount losing a second swarm only days after losing our first and explain why we were forced to introduce a new queen at considerable financial cost. We then recount both the high we felt after harvesting our first honey crop and the sickening low we experienced after a devastating Varroa mite infestation caused the ultimate loss of our bee colony. We conclude with the lessons we learned from our experience and why, despite the setbacks, we hope to continue with our beekeeping journey in the future.

Owen & Lorna x

1. A queenless colony

In our last post on urban beekeeping, I described how our bees swarmed into a neighbour’s garden. Losing a swarm was a difficult lesson to learn for us, particularly as we knew we only had ourselves to blame.

To make matters worse, the colony swarmed again a few days later, taking with it the new (virgin) queen that had emerged to replace the old one (this smaller, secondary swarm is known as a cast). This meant that our much reduced colony was now effectively queenless.

2. We introduce a new queen!

At this stage, we could have allowed the bees to raise a new queen from one of the larvae laid by the old queen, but we realised that this process could take weeks—from the emergence of the queen to the laying of eggs, and that was assuming she survived her mating flight (many queens are killed by predators).

Given our concerns over the diminished size of the colony and the fact that worker bees only live for about 5 weeks in the summer, we decided to cut to the chase and purchase a new “mated” queen that could be in our hive and laying eggs within a week. Introducing a new queen can be risky, however, and must be done gradually to avoid her being killed by the workers, who will naturally see her as an outsider.

Urban Beekeeping fact check: Queens are usually sent by post in a plastic, matchbox-like cage, known as a queen cage. At one end is an opening blocked up with fondant, which the worker bees have to eat their way through to release the queen. It takes them 2-3 days to do this, by which time, they are sufficiently used to her pheromones to accept her.

Our new queen cost about £50, so not cheap to buy, but she did turn out to be a prolific egg layer and it didn’t take long for our bees to recover their numbers. We even started to see honey being stored in the supers.

This was helped in no small part by the fact that the summer of 2022 brought heatwaves in both June and July and some of the highest temperatures ever recorded in the UK. This meant that, though unbearable for us (I can’t stand hot weather!), the sun-kissed days of high summer gave our bees plenty of opportunity to forage.

3. We Have Honey!

By September, traditionally the last month of the beekeeping season, it was time to see if our bees had made any honey worth harvesting.

We knew there was a lot of honey in the broodbox, but we had to leave this so the bees would have food through the winter months. We would also need to supplement this with sugar syrup and fondant going forward, so they would have enough to make it all the way through to the spring.

It was the surplus honey (if any) upstairs in the supers that we hoped to harvest and to our much joy and amazement, we managed to get a solid four full frames of the stuff! Not a huge crop (there are 9 frames in a super), but better than we expected, given how small the colony had become after swarming.

Because ours was only a small crop, we never bothered with a honey extractor, (though, for anyone interested Amazon has a great selection). Instead, we went for the cheaper, manual method and let gravity do the rest. All a bit messy (and sticky) but at the end of the day we had our crop of delicious honey jarred up, ready to give out as Christmas prezzies!

We returned the harvested honey frames back to the hive, where the bees greedily lapped up the leftovers. We also thought it prudent to offer a jar to our neighbour, in whose garden our bees had swarmed earlier in the summer.

4. Hive honey and off-the-shelf honey

As anyone who produces their own honey will be quick to tell you, there are some pretty dodgy production methods attached to the over-priced, off-the-shelf honey found in our supermarkets. Here are just a few of them.

1. Commercial honey is pasteurised (a process that preserves shelf life but destroys enzymes, vitamins antioxidants, pollen, yeast, minerals and other beneficial nutrients found in natural honey.
2. Commercial honey may contain artificial sugars, such as fructose and corn syrup to increase volume and profit and may also be sourced from more than one apiary (or country!).
3. Commercial honey might have been produced by bee farmers that medicate their bees with antibiotics, such as oxytetracycline, tylosin and lincomycin (whatever they are!).

Hive honey (aka, raw honey), on the other hand, comes straight from the honeycomb, just as the bees intended it and is thought to hold antioxidant, antibacterial and wound-healing benefits. It may even enhance the immune system and reduce joint inflammation. But we’ll leave these arguments to the scientists. All we know is our honey tasted absolutely heavenly!

5. End of season high!

Harvesting our own honey left us on a high and as we approached the end of our first season, we took stock of what we’d achieved and how far we’d come. And, despite the setbacks, we were still pretty satisfied with our efforts. We had learned a lot about beekeeping and had acquired valuable new skills, such as how to introduce a new queen to a colony. We’d even managed (against the odds) to crop a little honey. All that was left to do now was to prepare the colony for winter.

Or so we thought.. Because the end of September brought one of the greatest threats a beekeeper can face..

6. Varroa Destructor!

Even before our honey harvest, hubby had become concerned by the increasing number of flightless bees clambering around in our lawn. We’d read that this phenomenon was not always something to worry about.

Old, sick or unproductive bees are often carried out of the hive by special workers called “undertaker bees” and are literally dumped up to 20 feet away and left to die. Drone (male) bees too, by the end of the season are ejected from the hive in their dozens (having now served their reproductive purpose) to conserve food stores.

But the number of flightless bees in our grass at the end of September was not dozens but hundreds! For advice, we contacted our bee supplier, who said our bees had either been poisoned (e.g. by the use of pesticides) or, more likely, were suffering from an infestation of Varroa Mite.

Urban Beekeeping fact check: Scientifically known as Varroa Destructor, the Varroa Mite attacks both bee and larvae. Originating in Asia, it has now spread to every continent, arriving in UK apiaries in 1992. The mite feeds on the fat stores of its host but also transmits deadly viruses. Symptoms of Varroa Mite include crippled bees (like ours were) deformed larvae and disorientation (where foraging bees can’t find their way home).

Our bee supplier advised us to use a Varroa Mite inspection board to see how severe our infestation was. This is just a thin sheet of plywood inserted at the very bottom of the hive. Mites dislodged by jostling bees fall down onto the board, which gives the beekeeper an idea of the level of infestation. After a couple of days, we checked our board to find it plastered with a mites.

We had already bought some Varroa treatment strips that we inserted into the hive between the frames, as this is standard practice for all beekeepers after honey supers have been removed. But it was all in vain..

Over the ensuing weeks, our colony shrank to a few hundred bees and, one morning, we found our queen dead outside the hive.

7. Urban beekeeping – colony collapse!

We were into October by this time.. too late to requeen and there weren’t enough nurse bees left to care for eggs and larvae anyway. Also, what stores remained had been decimated by robber bees, as the colony was now too weak to defend the hive.

On October 25, his birthday, my husband opened a silent bee hive to find all our bees dead. We were devastated.

A combination of things had brought about this collapse.

Inexperience was a factor, certainly; as was our poorly cat, distracting us from our hive inspections, resulting in two swarms. Perhaps, if we had joined a beekeeping association from the beginning we may have averted some of the mistakes we made in our first season. Or perhaps, if we’d not had the hottest summer on record, our Varroa infestation may not have been as severe.

Whatever the truth of the matter, our urban beekeeping adventure was over, at least for 2022. Initially devastated by our failure, we became more philosophical as autumn slipped into winter.

8. What we learned

As two earthy pagans living a simple life, we’ve learned that working with nature is never easy and often challenging. Extreme weather, pests, disease and predators all play their part to undo our best efforts, sometimes to disastrous effect. Whether you’re keeping bees, chickens or just growing your own veggies, mother nature is always the one in the driving seat, something we humans tend to forget.

9. Conclusion

After much soul searching, we decided not to give up on our new hobby. Despite the setbacks and ultimate disapointment, we felt our beekeeping adventure had given us new insight into the role bees play in the natural world. They had also given us a lot of pleasure and (we felt) had brought us closer to nature. First though, we would need to invest in another colony if our beekeeping adventure was to continue.

But that is another story..