Our October talk

The Queen Bees – our October talk by Esther Coles

The Queen Bees is a podcast by Esther Coles, our October speaker, with her friend Jane Horrocks. Also at our meeting were producer Claire, a friend and former patient of our president Sally, and her daughter Eve. Claire had introduced Jane Horrocks to Esther after she had suggested making a podcast about her bee-keeping project in lockdown, as Jane had an allotment nearby. The podcast ran for three years and guests included Paul Whitehouse. They currently promote the podcast and bee welfare through talks, recently at Somerset House and Kew Gardens, and workshops in candle rolling and candle dipping.

This month, bees are seeking out ivy, the last nectar source of the year, so plentiful that it can make enough honey to store through winter. The ivy bee, which lives in tiny burrows in the ground and eats only ivy pollen at this time of year, is being out-competed by honey bees. There is a movement towards replacing European honey bees with British black bees, which produce less honey but are smaller, sturdier and well adapted to our natural climate.

When bees collect pollen they get it all over their body hairs, groom it off and put it in their knee pockets to take home, They also eat it, secreted as wax to build the cells. In early spring, one of the main jobs for bees is to collect water from puddles. They also circle the hive and cool it with their wings.

Honey bee keeping became popular cities, particularly in London through a campaign called Plan Bee, led by the Co-Op sixteen years ago, which is how Esther got started. There are now too many hives and too many honey bees for the forage available.

Esther advised us not to buy squeezy honey from the supermarket – it is watered down with sugar syrup for mass production – but to look for local honey instead. Esther's honey, from her Crouch End hives, had a distinct, delicious lime flavour from her local linden trees. 

We tried Zandax honey from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, which had a strong smell of caramel. Arbutus honey had a bitter flavour and a smell that some thought like disinfectant – it is being tested on cancer cells. Honey has historical uses in medicine, usually as antibacterial dressing for wounds. Sally had seen this in action, and said that while it's incredibly effective, it also stings a lot. Esther mixes a bit of honey with vodka when she has a sore throat. 

There was also a jar of propolis – the glue that sticks the hive together. This too has antibacterial properties. 

Esther explained the structure and use of the hive and the spinning machine used to pour out the honey from all of the frames at once. We heard about common practices to maximise production and things Esther allows – swarms, and wax moths, considered an infestation but in the wild they help clear out the wax in the hive without hurting the bees. 

Esther's local gathering place for bees is the Alexandra Palace golf course. The drones and queens meet for mating in late summer, before late August - September when the drones are dragged outside by the workers and killed before winter. 

Through winter, the colony forms a ball around the queen to keep her warm and the beekeeper needs to check and rearrange frames to keep them close to the bee ball in winter. 

Once fertilised, the queen produces around two thousand eggs a day. The larvae hatch in their cells and are fed by the workers before being shut inside with a wax plug to transform into a bee. A worker bee’s first job is to clean out the wax from its cell, ready for another egg. In summer the life cycle of a bee is about thirty-six days. The queens can live up to eight years, although most professional beekeepers kill their queens after two years, when their egg production slows.

Bees can produce new queen cells simply because they don't seem to like the current queen, or they produce multiple queens, usually because the colony is too big: they swarm to increase odds of survival while looking for a new site. 

Bees may ball around an unpopular queen and overheat her until she dies, or a new queen may challenge her. During the fight, the other bees will produce a high piping sound. When queens die accidentally, beekeepers can allow an 'emergency queen' to develop or order one through the post. Signs of a declining or unpopular queen can be increased aggression – if bees are flying around you near your eyes, ears, mouth or nose, or in your hair, they are considering sensitive areas to sting you and you should inform your local beekeeper. Esther had an aggressive hive in an allotment area that she had to rehome.

A hive has a shared pheromone for identification, though bees separated from their colony are sometimes allowed to join another if they give a snack of pollen to the guard drones. The hive is very dark inside. The bees communicate, usually about the best new sources of pollen, by standing on the combs and waggling their legs about, producing vibrations. They will argue, drowning each other out, secreting stronger pheromone or pushing each other off the combs. 

The Queen Bees is available on Apple Podcasts. 

And perfectly timed for our talk, our member Christine had received in some change that morning a new pound coin – featuring honey bees.

A big buzz of thanks from East End WI for a fascinating (and delicious) talk with a chance to try some candle-rolling.

Thanks also to Hannah for this month’s notes and to Christine and Heather for pictures.

Our monthly coffee morning and meet-up – Café Crème

Friday 24th October, 10.30-11.00, 566 Roman Rd, Bow, London E3 5ES, bus routes 339, 276, 488 or No.8.

It's back to one of our favourites this month. The welcome is always so warm here.