Someone asked me this week what I make of VSH queens. We sell a lot of VSH queens, so here’s the answer. VSH stands for varroa sensitive hygiene. It’s a proven trait for finding and removing infested brood from the cells. It doesn’t mean the colony has no varroa, and it doesn’t mean you can stop treating.
What it does is give you a helping hand and some options you wouldn’t otherwise have. I’d like to see far more funding, trials and testing go into it.
What I won’t do is let colonies die to work out which ones are tough. Someone catches a swarm, decides it’s special, leaves it untreated, and three years later it’s dead of damp or cold and the weather gets the blame. The chances of catching genuinely varroa tolerant stock are incredibly low, and there are kinder ways to test genetics than waiting for colonies to fail. That thinking runs through nearly every question in this late summer beekeeping Q&A.
What this episode covers
- What VSH queens do, and what they don’t do
- Why the swarms you catch keep swarming instead of filling supers
- How to fix a honey-bound brood box
- Why I ditched running everything in one box size
- Wasps, underfloor entrances, and a piece of wood that sorts it
- Apiguard timing and the hive configuration to use
- Winter feeding, and why I do almost anything to avoid fondant
- Making splits this late in the season
Why the swarms you catch never fill your supers
One beekeeper raised a queen from a spring split, couldn’t get the colony to expand however they moved the frames about, and then watched her swarm off into a bait hive. Kill her, or will she work it out?
This one takes people two or three years to work out. I went through the same frustrating process myself. Beekeeping is expensive. Buying nucs and controlling your own genetics costs real money, so most people do the cheap thing. You get a nuc, you make a split, your mate down the road has a swarm and you take that too. Before you know it you’re on ten colonies and it feels like you’re winning.
Then you notice they all have one thing in common. They’re excellent survivors. People selling feral swarms use that as a selling point, and they’re right about it.
The problem with survivor stock is they’re built for survival. They’re not built for what you’re asking them to do.
What you’re asking them to do is build a big brood nest and then pile honey above it. They’re not fussed about that. They build up, the varroa load climbs faster, and swarming becomes the sensible option because it gives them a brood break. Off they go with a huge mite load into somebody’s bait hive, and the whole thing repeats. One lineage can swarm three times in a season and never touch a super.
People buy Buckfast queens, the colony still swarms, and they tell me the low swarm tendency didn’t work. Low is the word doing the work there. In a video that went out on the channel this week, exactly that happened. The colony swarmed and left four supers of honey behind. I left a single queen cell in, she got mated, and they produced a crazy amount of honey for the rest of the season. That’s the trade. You might still get a swarm, but you get something very valuable left behind.
If you’re in this position, you can requeen with calmer, more prolific stock or combine the colony back down. Swarming is easing off now, so either way, get them settled for winter.
Bees are lazy, so build the brood nest for them
Seven of eleven brood frames packed with stores and partly capped, an empty super of foundation above, and F1 queens arriving that day. What now?
Bees are lazy. A forager comes home, hands the nectar over, and the next bee puts it wherever is closest. Why would they go to level four of the hotel when there’s tons of space in the reception? The only thing that pushes stores upstairs is brood in the way. Bees set themselves up with brood at the bottom and honey above it, as far from the entrance as they can get it. No brood, no reason to climb.
So build the brood nest for them. When the new queen goes in, put a couple of empty frames in the middle, drawn comb or foundation. As soon as those two are drawn, take the outer frames of stores away somewhere else, move everything out, and drop fresh foundation into the middle again. Two or three weeks of that and you’ve got a full brood nest with all the honey upstairs where you want it. It works very well. It does need you to keep at it.
Why I went back to deep brood boxes and shallow supers
Someone asked about running everything in medium boxes. The answer is the same whether you’re on National or Langstroth. I ran one box size for two years and then ditched it.
The logic is sound. One frame, one box, cheaper to buy, easier to stack in the back of the pickup, and you decide how much honey the bees make by choosing where the queen excluder goes.
Two things killed it. First, treatment. I use Apivar, and amitraz taints the wax, so any box that has sat on a brood nest can’t give you extractable honey. The interoperability I wanted disappeared the moment I treated. Second, maintenance. Let the queen lay in every frame you own and you’ve got a maintenance regime for every frame you own, most of them supers, all going dark and needing replacing.
I converted those deeps back into brood boxes and bought a load of shallows to keep exclusively as honey supers. They never see chemicals, they never see brood, and unless one gets damaged it goes back on again and again. Before you commit to one box size, ask what you treat with and whether it will contaminate your honey boxes, and ask honestly whether you’ve got time to manage that many frames.
Wasps only beat an underfloor entrance if the colony is weak
Do underfloor entrances need adapting against wasps? No, with one big caveat. You need a strong colony.
An underfloor entrance runs the full width of the hive, which sounds like a lot to defend, but it’s easy for bees to hold. They line up along it and take out anything that isn’t a bee. Put a two frame split into a full size hive with an underfloor entrance and the wasps will overrun it fast, because there simply aren’t enough bees to line up.
When I have seen a colony struggling, the fix is almost too simple. Cut a piece of wood to fill the entrance slot completely, then cut 10mm off one end and put it back in. You’ve taken 460mm of entrance to defend down to 10mm, same design, no new kit. There are plenty of variations on that idea.
While we’re here, the thing I love most about underfloor entrances is how quickly you can move bees. The landing board is recessed inside, so you’ve got a tight confined space to work with. Take a strip of old sofa foam, roughly four inches square in cross section and a bit longer than the entrance, dunk it in water and squash it in. Not a single bee gets out, and the wet foam gives them air conditioning for the journey.
If Apiguard is your treatment, this is the year for it
One beekeeper has a WBC that swarmed, requeened from a Black Mountain Honey queen, and filled two supers being harvested this week. What configuration for the varroa treatment?
Apiguard isn’t my favourite. It’s a thymol based gel, it’s proven and it does work, but it’s very temperature dependent and timing dependent. Most people in the UK put it on too late in a cold autumn and then wonder why it underperformed. This year has been warm, so it could be a good year for it. Thymovar is the same idea in a different format and the same logic applies. I had problems with Apiguard, which is why I moved to Apivar, then Apibioxal or Varroxal later in the broodless period.
Worth saying because it catches people out constantly. Apivar, Apiguard, Apistan. They all sound the same and they are not the same product. We tell someone to use Apivar and they come back having bought Apiguard.
Thymol is strong and it lingers. You can still smell it in the colony the following year. I quite like the smell. You will not like it anywhere near your honey, because it contaminates it.
So take every super off and shake the bees out first. Then a single brood box, an eke on top, or an empty super if you haven’t got an eke, gel in the middle, roof back on. That four inch gap lets the vapour permeate the colony properly, which is why the eke matters.
Feed enough syrup now and you’ll never need fondant
Winter feeding next. Fondant straight onto the frames, or through an Abelo crown board?
Before I answer, I avoid feeding fondant wherever I possibly can. The only time I’m keen on it is supplementing a queen rearing colony with heavy protein fondant. Otherwise fondant is an emergency feed, and 99 times out of 100 the emergency is a starving colony that wasn’t given enough syrup. Feed them the right amount and the question never comes up.
As the honey comes off they want one to one to keep them going, then move to two to one or invert, and the final feed should be really heavy. Weigh them. Get them up to weight. The hive that started winter at 40kg and hefts like 23kg in February is the one you break the fondant out for, and only then.
If you do need it, straight onto the frames is my favourite. The bees find it easily, it’s simple to clean up, there’s no isolation starvation risk, and I flip a poly Ashforth feeder over the top for warmth. With an Abelo crown board, fill an upturned takeaway tub with fondant, take the mesh out of one of the holes and sit the tub over it. The central hole if you’ve got the five in a square, and over more than one if you want. Use the kit you’ve got. A wooden super, a homemade eke or an insulated multi purpose crown board will all do the job.
What to do next
This is the point in the season where a few small decisions decide how your colonies come out the other side.
- Making a split from here on. Three frames of brood, one of stores, a really good shake of bees, two shakes if you can get away with it. New site, leave eight days, take down the emergency cells, add your mated queen, then feed them and keep feeding them. Earlier in July, two frames of brood was enough. It isn’t now.
- Adding a nuc to a hive. Still fine this late. Go ahead, and reduce the entrance to suit the number of bees.
- A weak colony waiting on capped brood. Hold off merging. Reduce the entrance to a trickle, and put fondant straight on top of the frames where the bees are, which is far less attractive to robbers and wasps than syrup. Two or three good frames of brood emerging and they’ll be fine.
- Every time you lift the queen excluder, look underneath. Queens end up on there more often than people think. I found one on an excluder this week. Set it down somewhere she can’t wander off.
- Brood in the supers above an excluder. Something specific has happened. A small new queen from a swarm or supersedure has got through, or you’ve got laying workers, which you spot by multiple eggs sitting off the bottom of the cells, or the excluder is damaged or badly seated. Work out which before you do anything.
