Changing the bedding

I was at home by myself today so I spent most of it writing up a new page, summarising key observations from all our bumblebee studies. There are a lot and although they are all contained in this blog somewhere, you'd never be able to piece them together. So the page is long overdue. 

It's again been a showery day on and off, so the bumbles have been thwarted. This girl spent most of the day in the entrance stopping the others from leaving (yes, even the big queen!):

Our two little indoor invalids (secretly I'm calling them pinky & perky, but they're not official names) are doing fine, drinking plenty and general mooching along fine:

I did attempt some macro photography using my zoom lens and macro extension tube - here's the setup:

It turned out to be completely useless (which is why they invented macro lenses), though it did but my tripod through its paces (that kit is HEAVY) and momentarily scared me. ☺

Despite best intentions I got no chance at all to review CCTV so I have a massive backlog of 5 days. Eek. but I kept an eye on the nest - really not a lot happening new today.

Tonight however, this bunch of bees have gone nuts over re-arranging the bedding under the camera. Don't know why, and I certainly wish I knew how they co-ordinated themselves on it and what they want to achieve. So, I've been taking lots of before and after shots:

"before""after"I'm trying to work out which pots are sealed - because some are empty and not sealed (centre bottom) and some are honey filled (easy to see with the catchlights). The seal pots will contain eggs and so may hatch at a later date. So, one theory is they are dragging the bedding to cover the sealed pots and keep them warm (30C). Just going to have to keep an eye one what happens under that bedding over the coming days / weeks!

Phase 2 box preparation

Having put the first coat of wood stain on our new "Pilkington" nest box last night, I was left with the second phase of preparation, namely a further coat of wood stain! Not just that, but also the internal preparation of the box and the assembly of the components. 

First I decided to fit an internal liner in the box. The reason for doing this is because bumblebee nests get rather messy! As a general rule the bees themselves will not use the same nest site twice - once the colony has expired there will be a lot of dead bees and wax and debris in the nest, possible invasion by other predators and bugs and so on. For this reason most nestboxs are only recommended for a single use. 

However, the Pilkington box is a particularly fine and sturdy box and more expensive than other smaller versions, so ideally we would like to get multiple uses out of it if a colony decides to take up residence. Hence the liner will protect the inside of the box to a degree and allow a better clean up job. No guarantee it will work, but it's worth a try for the sake of a piece of cardboard!

liner template for Pilkington box

Here is the liner fitted and tape down. I'm using High Visbility cloth gaffer tape. The hi-vis colour is irrelevant as it will pretty much be almost pitch black in there, but I've chosen it because it's strong tape, and importanly is fabric, so easy for the bees to grip. I know from experience that they find silver gaffer tape harder to walk over. 

liner fitted in nestbox

Next job is to load the box with its bedding. This comes in two sorts - some paper shreddings, part of which can be used as a toilet area and some soft bedding for insulation. We were fussy last year about how this was organised, but having seen how the bees can arrange it as they want (video) we can leave it fairly loosely and roughly organised. This is all supplied with the box, as is a small amount of "mouse" bedding, which has mouse scent on it. This helps to fool the queen that the nest cavity has been used over winter for nesting by a rodent, which in bumblebee world seems to give it a seal of approval, providing Queen feels she won't find herself under future attack again. 

I didn't actually use all the mouse bedding in here - instead keeping some back to put in the entrance tube and to add to some of our other boxes. 

bedding installedNext job was to install the "cat flap" entrance system. This is a plastic flap on two wire hooks that prevent intruders getting into the nest. Any bumblebees from inside the nest learn how to operate the flap for themselves. 

The additional longer piece of wire stops the flap closing at the moment - the flap isn't needed until there are residents. And is also used as part of the training process for a Queen by gradually lowering the flap each day. 

The side buffers on the entrance stop the bumblebees from using the sides of the flap, because if they do they will think this is the correct system and then be unable to get back into the nest (rather distressing to watch, as we discovered when we experimented with different flap systems last year). 

Finally, the buffers are marked with a bright colour to aid memory and navigation in low light - the high viz tape is perfect for this also. I fitted a piece of tubing, about 60cm for now. The tubing is very cheap and readily available on eBay, and is just 2cm "cable-tidy" designed for keeping wires together and tidy (I must get some for my CCTV cables!).

A bit of tape holds the tube in the entrance well using friction.

initial entrance setupI then temporarily sited the box - just for the afternoon on the offchance it caught some passers by, as I didn't have time to complete the next phase (tech!).

You can see the general idea with the tubing is to route it so it forms an entrance in the "undergrowth" and convince the queen she is going down underground to the nest cavity. 

This is not the final location, nor the final set up of the tubing. 

temporary siting of nextbox

I still also have to paint the base struts and fit the wax-moth box.

Finally, the last job today was to adapt the internal perspex viewer of one of our existing boxes by adding some red lighting gel to the lid. This means being able to look into the nest in daylight with much less dispruption to any bumblebees inside. We got used to working with them in the beepol lodge under red light last year (as we had cut the lid off) and so this is an obvious improvement to all the nest boxes. The Pilkington box comes with a red lid as standard. 

red filter for existing nestbox

So, now I'm left to ponder the best way to fit a thermometer and camera to the new box - which really means thinking about how much drilling I want to do! Hopefully I'll get that done before the weekend. 

2 Bee or not 2 Bee?

Well, we're back from a 12-day holiday in Scotland, during which time we had to leave our Beepol bees to fend for themselves. 

For a strong colony, of course, this is no issue. However, those of you following the blog will know this was not the case with our nest. Indeed, when we left the colony seemed to be down to about 4 bumblebees, of which one (at least) seemed to be a Queen collecting pollen. So, in fact, we had a "dual colony" situation, where a new queen appeared to have started a new colony in her birth-nest, before going off to hibernate. 

It was hard to tell which bees were in the nest; some were distinctive, so we could uniquely identify them. And we guaged the number by the level of activity we saw at the entrance and the various roles adopted inside the nest. (For example, one bee took entire responsiblity for arranging the bedding we added).

As a set of precautions to help the bees through any tricky weather while we were away and to encourage successful brooding (if indeed that's what was going on), we took the following steps:

• Adding extra nest-material bedding to the hive. This had proved incredibly successful a few days before, with a small worker bee taking immediate advantage and entirely covering the core of the nest with the bedding we provided. So, we topped this up. Not surprisingly, this small be again spent many hours re-arranging it just how it wanted. 
• Adding infra-red lighting below the bee lodge. The idea here was to create some extra heat below the nest area to help with keeping the temperature up to 30 degrees. We'd seen two sick/poorly formed bees emerge earlier and I was concerned about the required temperature for development. 
• Adding some pollen and honey water. This was just to give the bees a little more by way of supplies in case (quite literally) of rainy days. Of course, they drink the honey water immediately, rather than save it. But judging by the CCTV it lasted 3 days for them; every little bit helps. 
• Installing remote-reboot capability to all our CCTV monitoring. My BT hub is pretty lousy in terms of long term stability and often needs rebooting. Since it is required for remote access to the CCTV, I needed to have a system for being able to reboot the hub if it lost its internet connection. The solution was a "Phone controlled" power switch, that allowed me to dial in over the ordinary phone and turn the hub power on and off. It turned out we needed to use this during the first week. I also added an IP power switch to the CCTV system itself. Using a similar principle, I can control the power to (up to) 4 devices by logging in over the internet and flipping the power. As long as the hub is working, then I can log in and power cycle the CCTV. (Though I didn't have to do this while away). 
• Sheltering the lodge with our original hive shelter. We used the shelter from our original Koppert installation to shelter the Beepol lodge. This protected it from wind and rain and improved thermal stability. The bees seemed to cope with the change in surroundings without any problems. 
• Adding a dozen wasp traps to the garden. Although our plastic trap door seemed to have helped prevent wasps raiding honey from the bee nest, I didn't want to take any chances, as the trap was not 100% secure. I tried several designs of wasp trap around the garden, ranging from homemade coke bottle systems to fake wasp nests. Judging by the incredible number of wasps trapped on our return I would say that the Waspinator fake wasp nest is a waste of time and money. 

We didn't get a lot of time to check on the bees remotely while away, though we did see them from time to time. Mainly I looked at the event logs on the CCTV to check that there was some motion being detected (which there was) so I knew that something was happening. We didn't even really get chance to go over the recorded footage while we were away.

When we got back everything seemed to be intact, although one sad discovery was one of the bees dead outside the box, floating in some water. It's not clear if it drowned, but this seems unlikely. More that it died outside the nest and subsequent rain fell. Unfortuntely, its bedraggled state has made it impossible to tell whether it was a large worker or a queen that we suspected was in the nest. It certainly it fairly large and there is evidence of pollen on its legs so it was collecting.

It will be a great sadness if this turns out to be the queen that we thought was brooding inside the nest: while her young are still waiting to hatch, she goes out to collect pollen and supplies both for herself and for them. 

Meanwhile, the CCTV shows that there are two known bees left in the nest. They are both quite distinctive with markings and shape. One of them is busy going out every day to collect pollen, which is mainly bright orange or yellow at the moment. I have no idea where she is finding it, but she is. She is quite fluffy and large, but I don't think she is a queen. 

bedding in the nest after we returned from holiday

The second bee is a little smaller - more narrow and long in shape and much less fluffy. So much so, the abdomen shows up as distinct stripes on camera. She is extremely busy having taken responsibility for organising the bedding as well as maintaining the security of the nest. She regularly patrols inside the nest and comes out to the entrance, sometimes as frequently as every 5 minutes. This involves coming into the entrance vestibule and either coming out onto the ledge or occasionally sticking her bottom out of the trap door! 

Obviously with the bedding as it is shown above it is impossible for us to now see what is going on underneath. Our hope is that a queen is under there brooding and keeping her wax pots warm, but at the moment we have no real idea. That's why I hope it's not a queen we discovered dead. 

What we can say with certainty, however, is that our two little workers are in there and very active, making the most of their time - and while pollen is being collected we still cling onto the hope that it's for the purposes of a brood that may be about to emerge. 

7 hours to make a bed: inspiring

The dynamic in our nest is definitely changing. 

With each passing day there seem to be fewer queens. We can be certain this is one still in there; and she is collecting pollen. They may be another, I'm not totally sure. They seem to have a habit of coming and going all day long and then mysteriously not returning without me being able to pinpoint exactly when. (This is really down to the limited time I have to be able to scour the CCTV).

Also, we definitely have more smaller bees, that weren't there at all about a week ago. Two emerged and sadly died within about 12 hours, they weren't properly formed: one was completely missing wings. But that gave us a hunch that new births were occuring, and also that they were not being very successful. 

I put this down to temperature so I resolved to help get the nest up to the requisite 30 degrees. 

Over the last few days we have seen an increasing ratio of smaller bees - perhaps one or two in place of one or two queens that no longer seem to be around. But the difference in relative activity and size is noticeable.

So, this adds yet more weight to the idea that new bees are being hatched. 

We can't fully tell whether these new bumbles are workers or males. What we can tell is we definitely have a worker or two: there's definitely some "partrolling" going on around the nest (frequent tours of the perimeter), occasional checking of the entrance and then there's what happened with the bedding...

Homemaking instinct

So, the bedding...

I was concerned based on general properties of the lodge, its location (shady), state of the nest (damaged internally) that there was no way a queen could be getting her brood up to 30 degrees. The two sick bees that emerged and died shortly after were not well formed - a classic sign of too-cold-a nest.  So I took a two-pronged attack to helping get the warmth of the nest up. 

The first of these was to install some infra-red lighting directly underneath the lodge. Ideally I would have liked to have it inside the nest, but logistically this was too much of a challenge due to space, wiring and control/monitoring - there would a risk of making things too hot and I would need to be able to monitor that and respond accordingly. This also means being able to do so remotely while away from home and I've not yet had time to devise a system for doing so (though it would be possible, as I now have remote power control over IP and remote telephone control to reboot the broadband router). So, outside installation was the realistic option. 

Since the IR is outside the wooden lodge I can safely leave it on permanently as it will not be making huge impact 

The second prong of the strategy was to add some bedding material to the nest. This is what we did for queens back in March when we were trying to encourage them to choose our site for nesting and we had loads of hamster bedding left over.  We know it's not their first choice compared to moss from our own observations, but we also know they are safe working with it and don't get tangled up. 

So, last night we put two bundles of it in the nest, in the corners (not over the centre where the actual activity was taking, as we didn't want to cause excessive stress or get any honey from honey pots soaked up). You can see in the picture below how we just tucked it into the corners to minimise stress to the bees and make sure we didn't get it any of their honey etc. We know that they can organise the bedding as they see fit. What we didn't was quite what they were going to do!

the bedding we added, just tucked into the corners initially

So, before I go into what was done, have a look at the final effect. We've taken this picture almost exactly 24 hours later. 

how the bedding was re-arranged by one bee over the course of 7 hours

What an amazing change! The bedding has been drawn into a dome over the centre of the nest; drawn away from the corners and tidied into a single mass. 

All this work has been done by a single bumblebee worker, working tirelessly through the night. 

You have to bear in mind that throughout the the night the nest is pitch black for the bee; it is mainly working by feel. It doesn't have any tools, it weighs less than a gram, but by cleverly weaving a repetitive path through the bedding. And this was done by one worker bee taking on what I call the "Nest fixing" role. Over the course of about 7 hours it put in about 4 hours solid work, stopping occasionally for a drink, and weaved its way through the bedding, tugging and pushing to create this new structure. Frankly, I find it totally astonishing.

I took a video of its activity at 32x speed to show what it did through the night to create this masterpiece:

 You can see she works tirelessly all through the night, alone, to re-arrange the bedding. During the day there is little activity like this and it starts again at night time - my theory is that as the day cools the bees are triggered to make sure the nest is providing warmth and insulation. 

What I also find remarkable is how the bees take on a role when the need arises. We hadn't seen much of this individual until we added the bedding; but then she sprung into action, took on this role to assemble the nest structure, and worked tirelessly through the night to do so. I find it all rather inspiring.