A Visit To Derwen College 🐁🐝🍯

Today I'm at Derwen College and we are gonna go through every single one of these colonies to see if the bees have survived winter. Let's jump straight into it. So let's jump into this beehive here. Derwen College is a special needs college specifically for 16 to 25-year-olds and they do absolutely everything here. There's gardening, there's greenhouses, there's catering courses. I'm gonna jump straight in now and as I do it, I'm just gonna introduce Will, who is the garden centre supervisor, and Matt, who is the founder of Woodmore. So Matt, as I'm doing this, do you wanna tell people a little bit about Woodmore Foundation and why it's so important?

Yeah, brilliant, Laurence.

Foundation, created in lockdown, is primarily designed to give people the opportunity to showcase their employability. So we created a load of programmes, one of which is the beekeeping programme, and that's running agricultural SEND colleges just like Derwen all over the country to give that individual a purpose and a year-long experience. And then at the end of that experience They get to evidence all of their achievements into a Mii movie, which is then theirs to keep. And it's basically a digital CV proving that all of their abilities and their outputs and their outcomes.

So bees up in the first super, very, very good start. I'm going to introduce Will as well. Do you want to tell us, Will, a little bit about what you do and a little bit about Derwen College as a whole?

Yeah, so I am the garden centre supervisor here at Derwen College. primarily run the garden centre and stock it full of plants, but as we've partnered with Woodmore and Matt, we get to run the beehives as well.

So tell me about the Bees Wheel. We've got a double super configuration here, a brood box at the bottom with 2 supers on and bees. Just tell me about how you run the apiary and how it started and how you think it's going with the bees.

So yeah, when we partnered with Woodmore, this place that we're stood in at the moment was very unloved. Full of weeds and overgrown, and since the partnership with Woodmore, we've put some love into it and we've cut all the weeds down and we've created this lovely apiary that the bees are thriving in.

We'll have a little tour around in a minute. I'm amazed at what you've done here. It's absolutely beautiful. Obviously you've got the bees, but I just love that you've turned it into like a community enterprise, almost like you're selling things to people and raising money and And it all goes back in, doesn't it, into the pot to kind of provide for those pupae. So quickly show you the setup that we've got here. Swienty boxes, we've got a floor, a national deep brood box here, a national shallow, and a national shallow. And the bees are kind of all the way up at the top. Hopefully they go all the way down to the bottom. Let's take a look and see what we can see. So all I like to do first when I'm going into a colony for the first time of the year is just to tease apart those frames a little bit, make sure that I'm not damaging anything. And for me, all I really need to see here is what's on that middle frame. I suspect that we're just going to see kind of some empty stores up here, and I suspected wrong because there's brood up there. So that's good to see. You've got some brood on the first frame. Personally, I don't like overwintering with the shallows on. It's something that I never do. I always condense down to a single brood box, only because it just makes the management a little bit more challenging throughout the season. But you can see there, really good start. We've got capped brood, we've got larvae, we've got eggs. Really, really nice start. Let me See if we can get a close-up there. So you can see capped brood, larva, brood in all stages, lots of eggs. A very, very good sign. So Will, tell me about kind of like what would happen in a single year for the people coming on this course. Like how do you start them off? Do you do training? How do they build up their confidence? Like go on, tell me from day one through to the end.

We let the students know that we've got this course of beekeeping running and it's used as a wellbeing activity. For them, so a 4 to 5 session at the end of a day. And when they first start off on the programme, we start very slowly. We go through all the— an empty hive to have a look at the parts and sort of become familiar with the different parts of the hive and the frames and the wax and all that kind of thing, and the tools that we use with the smoker, and then the kind of dangers that we have to be aware of, like, you know, the dangers of the blowtorch and all the health and safety that goes on with that. And then depending on the needs of the level of students, so yeah, we've developed an initial assessment programme that we put the students through. So it's full of very colourful pictures of what a worker bee looks like all the way through to a queen bee, and then all the tools. So that starts us off with the students knowledge and understanding of a beehive and all the equipment used, and then we can plot how far they've come at the end of a year, because we'll put them through that assessment again to see their knowledge, to see whether they've improved in the knowledge of the hive parts and things like that, and we get a picture of how much they've learnt over the year.

And how long has it been going? How long has it been running for?

So we partnered with Woodmore in 2022, in the May of 2022, I think it was. And ever since then, it's sort of grown into what you see today, which is lots of thriving colonies and a lovely place to be.

Just for the benefit of people watching here, this is often what happens if you go with such a big configuration. So they started off with a national deep and then 2 shallow supers. with no queen excluder. And what's happened is all the bees are living upstairs in the 2 supers and the brood box down here is empty. The aim of the game is to get all of the bees back downstairs into the brood box, queen excluder on the top, and have that kind of demarcation between where the bees live and where the brood's reared and where the queen is, and then honey for upstairs. Now there's— with beekeeping, there's never a right way, there's never a wrong way. Everyone does it slightly differently. But what I do over winter, I overwinter just in a single, single deep like that. Plenty of space for the bees there. So I take off all my supers, extract the honey, And then feed into this box here. So all of my colonies just look like a single box like this that's full of bees. But if I open up some of these frames here now, I suspect what you'll see is just empty frames. Yeah, so just empty frames, which are fine. So the bees will go back down and fix those. Not a problem. So in terms of getting this colony kind of where it needs to be, simple as just leave them until they're filling all of those boxes, find the queen, put the queen downstairs, queen excluder in the middle, and then all is good. Okay, so one hive down. We're going to go down to the next hive now that's not looking very good. Let's jump in and see what the issue is. So this is the hive we're gonna have a look at now, and this in front of the entrance is what leads me to believe that we have an issue in this hive. Lots of detritus, lots of wood, lots of scraps of wax. I suspect that there's not gonna be any bees in here, and also we're gonna see some mouse damage. Let's take a look inside. So what are you thinking when you take off the box and you don't see any bees?

So there's not much action in here at all.

Not much action.

So there's a few bees in here, but I suspect they'll be from a different hive.

Almost certainly, yep.

Robbed honey, I would presume?

Yeah, robbed honey. So you can see how they've broken the wax there. Let me just show the camera. Kind of, you've got a bit of crystallized honey there, and then you've got robbing here. So the bees would've come in, tried to kind of like break that down as much as they can. And the big thing, the big issue is disease. So as soon as you identify a dead out, what you really should do is like close the colony down. Any stealing, any robbing like that is just the ideal way to spread disease.

We seem to have lots of propolis around this area.

Oh yeah. So first inspection of the season is always going to be crazy. Wow. Right.

Okay. I love it.

So very, very clear indication of mouse damage there. Holes, random holes. You can see where they've bitten it out. They've bitten it back to the midrib as well. You've got shreds of wood that they brought into the hive or they ripped off somewhere else to kind of make their bedding. And then what you've got in there is just kind of like mouldy pollen. Nothing sinister at all. Classic mouse damage.

Okay. I think this is the main nest here. Yeah.

By the looks of things.

Yeah, it looks like it.

Yeah, leaves and cardboard and all sorts.

So you can see why I go on about it a lot on the channel. Mouse guards are really, really important. Putting them on in the right time of the year is important as well. But if I was looking at this in my colony, what I would think is the colony's absconded or the colony's dwindled away due to a drone laying queen or something like that, and that's when the mice come in. Very rare to get a big kind of mouse nest like this in a strong colony of bees because they'll just, even in winter, they'll take most of it down. But this is a very, very mature mouse nest. What a cozy place for them there. Very nice.

Yeah.

Wow, look at that. There you go.

Oh, there's lots of poo.

Lots of leaves, lots of poo.

Oh, oh, there you go.

Wow, so there was a live mouse nest. Well, that was a big mouse as well. That might have been a rat, but the poos are quite small. It might have just been a chubby mouse. So there you go, you can see the damage that can happen if a mouse or a rat gets into your colony like this. So a couple of suggestions: late on in the season, I'd put entrance reducers on. That means that they can't get in and can't get out. Early mouse guards on, I would say around kind of October, back end of October for mouse guards. And then I'd leave them on all the way through until March. In terms of all of this here now, so you've got the floor, you've got your hives, you've got your frames. What would your plan be for this now? I know I'm putting you on the spot.

No, that's okay. I would clean all this out, get rid of it all, renew the wax, I would imagine, because of all the mouse poo is not probably good for bees either. And then see if there's any other damage and put those as spares.

So you'd expect to see that in the brood box normally, but no harm in seeing it in the, in the super, running it as a brood and a half. Yeah, that's quite nice actually.

So that's your system here, isn't it? You're going to run these on brood and a half. So if anyone doesn't know what that is, that is a standard national deep and then a standard national shallow, or any other configuration. If you've got Langstroth or commercial or Dadant, it's just one deep box and one shallow box combined together In order to form a brood and a half. Always worries me when I see that early on in the year.

Was that drone cells?

Yeah. But the other frame looked okay, didn't it?

Yeah, it did. Yeah, probably raising a queen or brood-laying queen. Okay, we'll do one more on here and go into the brood box. Nice and heavy, that's 3/4 full.

So a good amount of stores, that's nice. Yeah, that's nice. So what are we thinking, we're going to find all the bees and the brood down in the I think so.

The rest of those from view are stores.

Okay, so that's a nice strong colony. We saw nothing up in the top box, and then the second shallow, there are a few frames with stores and some bees. And then you look down in this one here and you can see a few, few bees and hopefully a bit of a cluster. Got some drone larva there.

Yeah.

Which I wouldn't worry about because it's probably just a slight bee space issue. But let's pull out a couple of frames. Hopefully we see some nice worker brood down here. So there we go. Matt just pointing it out on some recently uncapped drone brood, which is often where you'll find them. We've got a varroa mite there. Going to see varroa in all colonies across the UK. Nothing wrong with seeing it there. And of course, if I wasn't treating, I would very much expect to see it. So that's good to see. Capped worker brood, decent pattern. I suspect we're going to see some eggs in there. And you can see how the queen started there and she's moving out and she's backfilled around there. Pollen coming in as well. Open nectar coming in, which is great. So I don't think we need to pull too many out there. That's a success, that hive. It's on brood and a half configuration. You've got everything you need there. The queen's clearly laying, plenty of food still to go. No more action required.

Laurence, what's your thoughts on slugs?

Don't like slugs, but— No, I don't like slugs. When you see the video that I release in a couple of weeks, if you have a slug phobia, you will not like it. I had about 20 slugs under the crown board.

Yeah, we have a lot of tiger slugs down in Surrey.

Oh really?

They're just—

oh, they make them sound well hard, tiger slugs.

They just look like tigers.

Okay, stripy, I suppose. Okay, so Will's going into this one here. We think there might be an issue, and as he's going to look through it now, Matt's going to give us a quick overview of what the Woodmore Foundation does and an appeal to support future expansion of this wonderful charity.

So one of the many learning curves you have with, um, uh, with beekeeping throughout the whole year is you get to They experience maybe 50, maybe 80 different types of tasks and experiences, and we believe that all of those are transferable skills that you could apply to employment. So for example, the deadout with the— where the hive suffered and the colony collapsed, that's a learning experience, and you can learn from these things. So the whole idea with the beekeeping programme is to take complete novices With zero experience and knowledge, and then to train them all the way through the beekeeping year so they have those, those failures, those successes, those learning journeys, those experiences, and then they can apply those to future potential work or paid employment or even unpaid employment if it's voluntary work they're looking for. And the whole idea around the programme we're doing here with Derwent is to take the students who wish to join the programme on that year-long journey so that they can benefit from all of these experiences, learn, and without having to sort of do a traditional exam, as by proof of learning and outcomes. So their outcome is having a successful colony all the way through the year.

So this is a J-tool hive tool, and you see people doing what you saw there, which is putting it in and kind of like forcing that up. And as you've seen, that's the risk with that. So a lot of bee farmers, they just, they curse these.

Okay.

They hate them. So, but the first inspection of the year is always like the most challenging because as you can see, everything's just so well propolised together. So if you use the J-tool like that, like you did, and you lever it up, 2 things that can happen. One, you can pop the top bar off like that, and then you've gotta clear everything up. But normally what happens is you kind of go in like that and you just pop the lugs off. And then once the lug's gone, you've got no frame. So what I like to do, and the way that a lot of bee farmers work, is they work kind of like this. So you're just, you're levering in between the 2 strongest parts there, and this here is really like stuck down together. So you just go through, see how like you can move it, but you're not really going to break anything like that.

Mm-hmm.

And then once you get the first one out, you can see it comes out nicely. And then all you need to do is kind of come from one And you just push. So you're never touching the lugs and you're never using the J-tool. You never get damage like that where you're ripping the tops off. Easily fixed, and you know, I've seen so many people do it and I used to do it. I used to break so many frames, but it's just, just a bit of technique there will make your life easier and should hopefully stop the frames being busted.

So no bees in here. That's all. Would that be mouse damage again?

Yeah, definitely mouse damage, but no mouse nest in that one. It's interesting. They've probably come along and they've seen— is there another one? Really? Did it jump out? Oh no, 2 hives with mice in. Big mice, big healthy chubby mice, I have to say. So same again for this one. I would recommend steaming everything down, getting it nice and clean, scorching all the boxes, starting again. Entrance reducers in to stop the mice coming in, mouse guards on to stop the mouse coming in over winter. But you will, if you're not treating for varroa, you will have colonies die every year. So to have 2 or 3 colonies die in an apiary like this is not unheard of. I wouldn't worry about it. I would just keep on top of the varroa checks and clean everything up each year. Right, let's jump on to the next hive, and I understand we have a big surprise in All right, that's really good. Really nice.

Wonderful. So it's almost the centre of the hive. So looks like brood in all stages. I'm really calm bees, I have to say, Will. They're not pinging.

They're not—

bearing in mind this is the first opening of the season.

Yeah, lovely. So beautiful frame of brood, plenty of stores, These bees are very, very happy indeed. Yeah, nice active colony keeping things clean. That's what you want to see. Ah, so nice brood up there as well.

Yeah, so brood in all stages, eggs over on to the left.

Nice bit of—

Very nice.

Did you mark all your queens last year?

Uh, yes, we did, I think. Excellent.

Yeah, so we have a WhatsApp group that we share with all our Woodmore aparies. Yeah, we just share loads of knowledge.

Oh, I love it.

Questions, and they can reach out at any time. Yeah, that's really good. It's really nice.

But let's go into the final beehive that we've got here, take a look and see how the bees are getting on. We've also got a couple of nucs to look at as well. So whilst Will is getting this one set up here, definitely worth giving a shout out to a few people here. So obviously the Woodmore Foundation for all of the wonderful work that they do, ACO, which is a company that provides all of the funding for the bees within this apiary, the beehives, the frames, the foundation. Everything you see here is sponsored and supported by ACO, and then everything that is sold from this apiary is turned back around into funding to increase hive numbers or to buy an extractor or to do something different. This colony here looks absolutely brilliant, really like the look of this one. We was going to get inside and take a look at some of those frames. The final shout out that we should do here is for Simon the Beekeeper, who provides all of the frames and foundation at a very competitive discount in order to support a really, really good cause. So as Will's going through this colony here, you can see same setup as before. Brood and a half, the super, the shallow, full to the brim with bees. The bottom, the national deep element of that brood and a half, again full to the brim with bees. This is definitely the best colony I've seen here. We've seen lovely brood in all stages. We've got nice calm bees. I'm intrigued to see these frames coming out of the brood nest here. But a very interesting frame. What you can see there is fresh wax foundation that went in last year. The white around the edges is just where the bees have drawn it out. Tiny bits in that corner where it's not been drawn out. The yellow is where pollen has been in there, so the bees have stored pollen around that darker area brood nest. All of that brood's emerged, but it tells you a story. Not being used, drawn out ready for storage. Stored for pollen, and then this dark area here is where the brood once was. So I feel honoured to have been invited down here today. I'm absolutely amazed at what they've created here at Derwen College, a brilliant facility supporting individuals, giving them life skills. If you're interested in learning more, go on to the Woodmore Foundation, register your interest. Maybe there's a local college near you that would like to have an apiary like this set up, funded by Woodmore Foundation, to pass on those key skills to beekeepers from 16 to 25.