Causes of Absconding

Causes of absconding in African bees

When bees leave as a whole colony and leave the hive empty is what we call absconding. There are many causes of absconding and here we can point out a few of them.
1. Hive location.
The location of a beehive is very important because bees normally don't want too much heat therefore the hive shouldn't be in direct sunshine. This applies to bees in African setting. And also bees don't want damp areas therefore the temperature should be balanced. a beehive shouldn’t be located in direct wind direction which normally inconvenience bees.
2. Pests
Pests like rats, mice, beetles, lizards, birds and many others can easily force bees to leave the hive to run away from the inconveniences caused by these pests. Therefore a routine hive inspection is recommended to stop these pests from invading the hive. Termites are known for destroying wooden hive bodies as well as other crawling insects which nest in the hive.
3. Poor harvesting practice.
This involved 2 ways; when you harvest all the honey and even the brood when annoys the bees and when you poorly and aggressively handle the bees during harvesting like hitting the hive, scorching then with fire and crashing them. Bees should be manipulated gently without panic and hurrying. This will not destabilize the bees so much hence avoiding absconding.
4. Bad hive conditions.
Broken hive bodies and leaking hive covers can easily lead to absconding. Hives with no covers which allow wind and rain to enter into the nest freely and inconvenience bees eventually lead to absconding.
5. Size of the bee hive
The size of a bee hive is very important especially a small bee hive shall be abandoned by bees when their population grows big and strong, they will look for a big hollow to stay in than a small limited hive. Also bees may abscond from a too big hive in search for an average to nest in. This is due to cases like bees may not be able to regulate the temperature in the big hive and defend it well; they will leave it in search for a good size.
6. Nectar sources
When bees have to move a look distance in search of water and nectar, usually get ware out fast and tired by the end of the day. This will in no time drive away in search of a better location, situated near nectar sources and water.
7. Pesticides
Some pesticides used in spraying in gardens and animals are very poisonous to bees. For example when cows are sprayed with unfriendly pesticide and are grazed near an apiary, the bees will get affected and will consequently abscond. Spraying crops near apiaries with a bad pesticide will cause absconding to nearby affected colonies. Beekeepers are advised to use only bee-friendly pesticides with words: Non toxic to bees.

Note:
Naturally, African bees are known for absconding easily even when conditions are equally favoring.
African bees also abscond frequently from KTBH or modern hives than from logo hives or traditional hives. This has lead to many beekeepers say that modern beehives are less productive than traditional beehives. This has been confirmed in various parts of Uganda by experienced beekeepers and beginners.

Beekeepers are advised to use both traditional and modern hives for transitional purposes.

Bees in a Termite hill

Rescuing bees from a termite hill

On 18th March 2014, I was invited to extract bees from a termite-hill which was in a plot of land where constructing was going to take place very soon. And this termite hill was just a few metres (10metres) from the road.  Bees normally nest in termite hills when abandoned by termites since they have possess hollows enough for bees to live in. this is also common because a few bees are domesticated and most of the huge trees have been cut down due to urbanization and charcoal burning. Well these were the traditional nests for bees and bees could nest in the hollow parts on these trees. Bees cannot easily nest on branches of trees in an open (as swarms) because there are a lot of predators like birds, lizards, insects and human beings!
The person who called me said; if you love bees, come and rescue them or else I am going to buy petrol and use it to set fire on them! Of course as a beekeeper and a hobbyist, I had to run fast and rescue the bees.
The manipulation process was simple and easy. I dug a hole on the side of the hill. Note, the bees had their entrance right on the top of the hill and this helped when I covered the entrance with a box as I manipulate.
After opening into the nest chamber, I began puffing smoke into the nest which drove bees up into the box where they collected. This lasted for over 30 minutes until all bees including the queen abandoned the combs in the nest chamber to seek refuge in the box.
When all bees were in the box, I removed the combs which I tied on the bars which I put in the hive where I moved and installed the bees.
I covered the box as bees when on the upper side and carried them into the new hive.. All this happened from 6pm up to 2pm. I decided to use that period of time purposely to collect all bees including the foragers since by then all have come back and the place of scene was too close to a road therefore I didn't want to inconvenience people using the road. Likely some people stopped by to watch the proceedings though I and Amos we constantly requested them to keep distance.

The operation was successful and the bees are happily living in their new home and we rescued them from killers.

Bees turn into flies

Bees Turn into flies.

Wampiti Beekeepers Association has its roots in wampiti but it covers very many communities where members come from and we don't stop members from outside the community of wampiti to join WBA because we are interested in developing beekeeping and sharing knowledge.

Before I continue, let me take this opportunity to thank you very much for everything that you have done for us to see that our beekeeping truly move to a third stage of Beekeeping because we were on a second stage of bee-having! You have extremely changed our primitive beekeeping into modern beekeeping.

You know we have three stages of bee-human relationship ie; bee-killing, bee-having and beekeeping! 

Currently we are moving from bee-having into beekeeping!

Fun and Buzzes

Wampiti was full of fun and buzzes of bees as we were moving to different individual apiaries for inspections and practical trainings.

I read from the internet, i get ideas and notes from friends, this applies to other members who attend workshops, visit other members outside WBA and also read literature. We also have ambitious members who are too innovative in beekeeping practice.

So when i got to  in late January 2014 Wampiti, we all members of WBA agreed to pull the resources together so that we all benefit equally. And fortunately, members agreed to contribute money in pairs to pay to one of our members who is a tailor to sew bee suits and we also pay to make more smokers too.

All these were successful and we were able to get suits ready and the smokers. For the bee suits, pants were separated from shirts which have veils. 

Now we have enough suits and smokers for the members though they have to share but it is better than none. Members had veils but they were not confident enough to work with bees at any time of the day. And thorns could easily tire them.

We also didn't know that it is very important to smoke ourselves heavily so that the smoke can stick on our bodies and so that the bees don't smell us quickly! 

Teamwork is very important!

You know veils are less durable especially in our environment where there are hooky thorns which tire them very fast, in fact most members' veils were torn. Though veils are torn but at least some members had developed confidence through working with bees especially in late evenings and very early mornings and there has been less members going in bees during night hours.

Can you believe that we have been working with bees during noon hours (11:00 am to 4:00 pm)? And throughout the whole exercise only 20 people got stung and only about 60 bees stung people! And we also had one live incident where bees absconded from the rustic hive we were transferring bees from into a new top bar hive!

From that incident, we started covering beehives with a piece of cloth so that bees and especially the queen is exposed to less direct light.

We were training on job!

All members now know how to light smokers, puff and smoke themselves heavily before approaching a bee hive. They also learned that bees should be worked gently without hurrying and apply small smoke at intervals.

Members also learned how to transfer bees from old damaged rustic hives into new top bar hives, when they tie combs on bars.

Lemon grass was also considered as one of the best baits when you rub it in the hive, so members started using it immediately.

Members also bought wood which was taken to machines for making top bars and cutting the wood into proper dimensions so that they become easy for members to join. Actually every member got a new KTB hive.

I was so amazed with all what members were doing. Members had good harvest last November and that's why they happily invested in beekeeping.

Of course not all of them contributed equally, but all the equipments were distributed evenly because we agreed and formed groups where every group had to raise an agreed amount of money for their additional smokers, suits and for wood.

During practical sessions, most members finally discovered that working with bees in a humble way makes the bees docile. And the members finally said; "bees have turned into flies"!

We discovered vorroa mites in two separate hives at different apiaries; to discover mites, we rubbed bees in icing sugar (confectionery sugar, which members had read about). We were not sure that there could mites but we finally found them!

I recommended members to hold such practices every after 3 or 4 months so that they can learn more from each other deeply.

Every time we could transfer bees, we were supplying the bees with sugar syrup and this was very useful because there was no honey in the hives since this is a dry season (January to March). And some colonies didn't have brood and honey at all!

We also mapped calendars for nectar flow, honey flow, rainfall and colony build-up. This was very important because some members didn't really know when to go and check in their hives for honey.

We introduced an idea which seems to work perfectly; moving a hive that is going to be worked on into a shade and far away from its original location. When the old hive is taken, we would immediately replace the position with a new empty box to catch the forage bees that come back from the fields. And also some bees that fly from where we are working from would comfortably fly back to their original hive location. This enabled us to work with a few bees and the bees couldn't defend aggressively their colony from a new location. The place where we working from was chosen considering the following:- there should enough shade, no bee hives close by, should be closed from old hive location so that bees cannot easily locate where their hive is and ample working space.

We saw drones, drone cells, worker cells and only on our last day that's when we saw a queen moving around.

During this time bees are collecting cassava flour so much and water. 

However WBA has greatly improved and solved most of the challenges, there are; 

Many of our members don't have suits and smokers.

Members are not so much convinced that KTB hives are more productive than traditional hives because bees colonised log hives very fast than KTB hives, bees can easily abscond from KTB hives compared to log hives and many of them claim that they harvest much from log hives than from top bar hives!

Since all this is part of our experience, every member is will to improve on the production through improving the management skills.


Go to photo gallery for more photos.

Lessons to learn from bees

Here are some examples of lessons we could learn from bees:

Honeybees live within their means. There are no loans or credit cards in the bees' world; only the resources they themselves gather and store. Their ‘bank’ is their store of food, gathered when conditions permit and stored for lthe times when foraging is not possible. Like us, bees need to eat every day, and they do everything in their power to ensure a constant food supply by storing it – not so much for themselves, but for bees yet to be born.

Honeybees achieve extraordinary things by working together. Fifty thousand workers can shift a lot of stuff. Co-operation is the key to their success: tens of thousands of individuals behaving as a single organism.

Honeybees demonstrate that division of labour can be highly efficient. And everyone knowing how to do the full range of essential jobs makes for flexibility and adaptability. Bees move through a series of jobs in the hive before finally emerging as food-gatherers. In an emergency, they can revert to their former occupations to make up for losses.

Honeybees make honey while the sun shines. Bees are opportunists, taking advantage of available food as soon as conditions are right. Even when their stores seem full, they will find odd corners to pack with food.

Honeybees behave as though individuals matter, while the common good is always their first priority. Ego is not a feature of honeybees: their first duty is to their family and bees will sacrifice themselves without hesitation if they perceive a threat to the colony.

Honeybees understand that hard times happen, and they are always prepared for short-term interruptions of supply as well as the more predictable seasonal shortages.

Honeybees share: they know there is plenty of food out there for everyone, including other bees and other pollinating insects. Honeybees do not compete head-on with other species: there is overlap in their food sources, but they do not need to drive others from their territory.

Honeybees adapt to their surroundings. This extends even to their use of propolis, which varies according to local conditions, and can protect them against localized pathogens.

Honeybees behave as if they understand that honest communication is at the heart of community. Bees are highly effective communicators, using vibrations and pheromones to pass complex messages around their colony. As far as we know, they are incapable of telling anything but the truth as they understand it.

Honeybees' survival depends on selecting high quality, untainted food from a variety of sources. Because we have assumed control of much of their territory for our own purposes, we are responsible for ensuring that they continue to have access to flowers untainted by toxic chemicals, against which they have no defence.

For almost all of the last 80 million years or so, bees have had flowering plants to themselves. Only in the last 100 years has their natural diet been contaminated with substances they can never before have encountered: man-made chemicals designed to poison them and their kind, some of them cunningly incorporated into the very bodies of the plants they feed on. More and more of these toxins are being spread on crops and on the soil, and the bees have no chance of surviving their onslaught.

If we care about the survival of the honeybee, we must reform our farming and food production methods. The alternative is a world dominated by a handful of powerful corporations, intent on bringing the food chain completely under their control.

Swarms from unknown lands

Bees colonize empty hives.

Top bars are considered as the mondern hives because they simplify beekeeping actvities right from manual colonisation, insepction to havesting. They also yield much more honey compared to traditional hives.

Colonising topbars has been the most tricky activity in beekeeping, whereby bees do not easily colonise them by themselves though they are easy to colonise using colony split method (manually).

besides colonization, they also build combs across the bars! WBA members have learned and tried a lot of tricks and ideas to solve some drawbacks like this.

Recently, Esau one of the beekeepers of WBA used honey to bait bees to colonize his topbars hives (In fact these hives had stayed empty for the last 13months).

He soak a piece of heavy cotton cloth into honey which he hung in one of his 3 empty hives as a new idea to bait bees. 

Note: He had tried baiting bees using wax starter strips and smoking propolis, baiting grass in the hives before but none attracted bees to colonize the hives!

Fortunately within 4 days, a swarm of bees had already occupied his hive!

He didn't stop, he did the same trick to 2 more empty hives and they also got colonized within almost the same dates!

 He thereafter, shared the new trick to other members where 6 out of 17 members who tried the same trick on their hives have sucessfully got some of their empty hives (1-3hives) colonised in just a period of 1 month!

This is amazing and everyone is asking where do these bees come from to colonise the new empty topbar hives.

Of course log hives can not last long with getting colonized since bees are more familiar with them than more modified hive structures like topbar hives.

 WBA members scheduled April 2014 as the next season for spliting colonises to get new colonises for empty hives.

Thanks for such an interesting simple trick!

African bees!

Is the African bee worth keeping?

In recent years, however, a number of private enthusiasts have begun working with the tropical honeybee (Apis mellifera adansonii), better adapted to African ecological conditions. Although this local honeybee does tend to be aggressive, it has the considerable advantage of producing several honey crops a year. It gathers its own food all the time. There is little or no need to feed it. This contrasts with temperate-zone bees which only work between six and nine months a year. Colonies are then over-wintered (kept out of the cold) and are fed with sugar or corn syrup, making management expensive and tedious.

All bees in the world are feared, because all of them sting painfully. There seems to be no difference between the stings of the European and African strains. But while the African bee is more energetic and quick-tempered than most others, it is not as dangerous as some people think. It is gentler than the "Africanized" bee from South America which is threatening American beekeepers.

Differences between the African bee and the European bee (A. mellifera) of interest to beekeepers include the following:

a) The European bee is slightly larger than the tropical honeybee, and therefore hive dimensions for A. m. adansonii are somewhat smaller.

b) The tropical African honeybee colony produces more drones than the European bee colony. Drone cells are usually superimposed on worker cells. They are found side by side and at the base of one or more combs on opposite sides.

c) The European bee can be managed easily. Most African bees are unmanageable. Even the manageable few are not very reliable in this respect and may desert the hive when greatly disturbed.

d) The African bee migrates if meteorological conditions are unfavourable. It absconds when disturbed, a phenomenon which exists to a much lesser extent among European bees.

e) The African bee is aggressive during the hot hours of the day. The warmer the period, the more aggressive it is. In contrast, the European bee ignores the beekeeper during the warm period of the day but stings him when the temperature falls.

f) Very little smoke is required to cool down the Italian or the Carnolian, but the tropical bee needs copious quantities of smoke repeated at short intervals.

g) Several African bees take to the air immediately when their comb is removed from the hive.

h) African bees hate noise. Beekeepers are advised not to talk or make noise when they are visiting them during the daytime. In contrast, the Californian beekeeper, working with European bees, drives his truck to the apiary and uses motorized mowers to cut weeds. The bees never take any notice of the great noise unless the hive is hit by the blade. They are not as sensitive to noise or vibrations in the same way as the tropical bees.

i) The alarm pheromone of the tropical honeybee seems to be more powerful than that of the European bee. When a victim is stung, he is anointed with the pheromone around the spot. If he then refuses to move away, more bees will follow and sting him on the same spot. Within a short period, he will be covered with angry bees.

j) The European bee will not punish the beekeeper who kills a bee near the hive, but dozens of the African bee will chase and sting the culprit, especially when one of them is crushed near the hive.

k) The African bee may chase its victim for more than 200m in an open place. The European bee does so for not more than 50m.

 African bee Honey production

Many people believe that the European bee produces more honey than the tropical honeybee. This point is very controversial. Perhaps such statements are made without taking into consideration the following factors:

a) The European bee is fed with sugar and corn syrup. If this is subtracted from the honey yield, it will be found that the wild, unfed tropical bee is also a good honey producer.

b) There are more flowering plants in the temperate climates than in tropical vegetation zones.

c) Bees near the Equator work for 13 hours a day during the honey-flow season. In the rich honey areas of the temperate zone, where the summer days are longer, the honeybee works for more than 18 hours.

d) The introduction of modern equipment (e.g. the Langstroth hive and the centrifugal honey extractor) in the tropics will make a considerable change. Currently, beekeepers in most African countries crush their honeycombs for honey and wax. The honeybee has to produce new combs for every new crop, and comb-building wastes 8-15 kg of honey for every kg of wax made.

A good colony of bees can produce over 100 kg of honey per year in Africa.

African Bees

Why should Africa keep bees?
Honey is money. Honey is delicious and nutritious. How can man obtain honey to combat malnutrition? The answer is in beekeeping. By keeping bees, he can obtain large quantities of honey and raw beeswax for home consumption and for export. Other benefits of beekeeping are as follows:

1. Tropical apiculture is cheap. It does not involve mass feeding of bees, because the insects can provide their own food all year round, and there is no over-wintering bee management.
2. All the necessary inputs required for beekeeping are available locally. Some may be wasted if bees are not kept, e.g. pollen and nectar from flowering plants.
3. Individuals and private organizations such as churches, women's groups, youth associations and cooperative societies can initiate it with only limited funds.
4. Beekeeping is self-reliant. It does not depend on importation of foreign equipment or inputs.
5. In many rural localities, the technology is available.
6. It improves the ecology. It helps plant reproduction. Bees do not over-graze as other animals do.
7. The honeybee produces honey, beeswax and propolis. These are non-perishable commodities that can be marketed locally or abroad.
8. The honeybee provides pollination service. This is an indispensable activity in the food production process.
9. The honeybee is the only insect that can be transported from crop to crop.
10. Honey and beeswax can be produced in semi-arid areas that are unsuitable for any other agricultural use.
11. The beekeeper does not need to own land in order to keep bees.

How can Africa keep bees?
Since we have seen that bees should be kept in Africa, now we are discussing the different ways how beekeeping can be approached. Of course there are many ways of promoting beekeeping...in Africa.

1. Beekeeping industry in Africa- Uganda in particular has just started holding stands for modernization therefore, churches, agricultural departments and NGOs should come-out strongly and promote beekeeping activities in communities with emphasis on preservation of honeybees, pollination purposes and as a source of income as well as the nutritional value from bees products like honey, propolis and wax.

2. Youth and young people from 12 years should be given the biggest priority in promoting beekeeping activities since there is a big % of unemployment among the youth.

3. Organisation foundations and agricultural departments at all levels should help the beekeepers with securing equipment like extractors, settling tanks and looking for good markets for the bee products such as honey and wax.

4. Western volunteers (from western world with modern beekeeping skills) should come and help beekeepers especially with advanced modern beekeeping skills and services like queening rearing and many others.

5. Cultural constraints like women are not  allowed  to keep bees should be bypassed.

6. Loan schemes should be made available for people willing to invest in beekeeping to buy beekeeping equipment like quality bee-suits, smokers and hives.


Is the African bee worth keeping?

In recent years, however, a number of private enthusiasts have begun working with the tropical honeybee (Apis mellifera adansonii ), better adapted to African ecological conditions. Although this local honeybee does tend to be aggressive, it has the considerable advantage of producing several honey crops a year. It gathers its own food all the time. There is little or no need to feed it.

This contrasts with temperate-zone bees which only work between six and nine months a year. Colonies are then over-wintered (kept out of the cold) and are fed with sugar or corn syrup, making management expensive and tedious.

All bees in the world are feared, because all of them sting painfully. There seems to be no difference between the stings of the European and African strains.

But while the African bee is more energetic and quick-tempered than most others, it is not as dangerous as some people think. It is gentler than the "Africanized" bee from South America which is threatening American beekeepers!!!