Dear friends

Our cover picture shows the view inside a top-bar hive belonging to Margaret Ano, one of the Mukuyu women beekeepers in Kakamega, Kenya. Margaret made this hive in December and a swarm settled inside in January. In February Jan Koeman was able to take this nice picture, showing how quickly the bees have built combs and developed their colony.

A swarm arriving into a freshly-baited hive is the very best way to start a new colony of bees. The hive has already been selected by the scout bees as a good nesting place, and thus the swarm arrives with full enthusiasm to establish their new home here. Every worker bee in the swarm filled up with honey before she left their original nesting place. The honey is for food – and to convert into beeswax with which to build comb on arrival at the new residence. This is how nature intends for new colonies to be created: building comb is healthy behaviour for bees – pathogens and toxins present on the bees or in the honey become incorporated into the wax and rendered safely out of harm’s way for the new eggs and larvae of the developing colony. Thus the new comb provides a perfectly clean nest for the new colony.

Safely inside their new hive, the swarm cluster hangs from the ceiling (in this case, the underside of the topbars) with the bees linked together into chains, each bee exuding wax from four pairs of wax glands on the underside of her abdomen. As each tiny droplet of liquid wax solidifies, it forms a pin-head sized ‘scale’ on the surface of her abdomen. The bee now uses her legs and mandibles to pass these scales to the top of the cluster, where bees accumulate and knead them with their mandibles, ready to use as building material.

At first a few tiny mounds of beeswax are deposited on the ceiling, gradually increasing and built into the sophisticated, delicate, double-sided hexagonal matrix of comb – one of nature’s miracles! When the first comb has been built sufficiently to be a few inches wide and a few inches long, bees start building adjacent combs. The bees keep building comb over the days and weeks ahead until they have sufficient for the colony’s needs – for rearing brood and for storing honey, or until the cavity is full of comb – whichever situation first arises.

Towards the end of the hive in our cover picture, you can see a locally made queen excluder. Beekeepers sometimes endeavour to make top-bar hives resemble frame hives by attempting to make queen excluders for top-bar hives – yet they are unnecessary and never work well. In this case there are fortunately still plenty of gaps and the queen will not be obstructed, as is essential for a newly developing colony like this. A major benefit of a top-bar hive compared with a frame hive is being easy to make and low cost – adding things like queen excluders just adds cost and makes life more complicated for the bees and the beekeeper!

With thanks to Jan Koeman for this beautiful picture. And you can read more about attracting and working with swarms in the article opposite.

Nicola Bradbear Director, Bees for Development