Sunday 27 May 2012

Moving house (sort of)

All this non droughty weather we've been having has led to a lot of swarms of bees just lately, so all the kit that I've been happily borrowing needed to go back to its rightful owner to resume is rightful position, on standby ....ready to used if a swarm need a new home.
So I needed to switch out all of the borrowed kit and swap in all my own boxes and frames.

Do you remember the little boxes? well I decided they needed to be jollied up a bit...somewhere in my head I have an image of bee hives lined up like pretty coloured beech huts...so some colour had to be introduced.....zesty lime seemed like a good place to start.

So on with the job...

With hive number one I needed to take everything off the existing floor and rebuild from the bottom up...switching out the borrowed brood box and swapping in the new zesty one.  Starting with everything to hand.
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I stacked all the pieces up and then started searching for the elusive queen....

  

There's plenty of sealed worker cells surrounded by stores of pollen and honey but not a sign of the elusive queen anywhere....


Well anyway things seem healthy enough so I just re-stacked the super box on top and popped on the brand new roof..


Hive number 2 with the brand new swarm in was a little different .... there's no where near as many bees so they don't need as much space - too much might confuse them and faced with too many choices they might not start to use the frames in the best way so I needed to convince them that they didnt really have a whole brood box to play in.  So starting with the mesh floor....


Then adding a new zesty brood box


and simply moving the frames over...seems this hive also has an elusive queen...but they are beginning to draw out some wax cells so it looks like they are preparing the hive to welcome a mated laying queen....

 

This really is only a small swarm - they barely cover 2 frames so I gave them 5  -so they hopefully get the hint that they need to start making wax cells and dropped in a dummy board to reduce the size of the box and popped the lid on...

 

There now - don't they both look smart?


And as soon as the last few have walked out of the nuc box I shall pop it back home.  Then it really must be time for a cuppa...



1 comment:

  1. Can't believe the first hive is up and running and you are now starting your second!!! When we chatted March time you were keeping your fingers crossed for one hive in 2013. This rate you will have a set of beach hut like Bognor by the end of the summer!!

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