Saturday 30 June 2012

Meanwhile back at the Apiary

I've only missed a week of bee keeping classes at the Apiary ( last Saturday I skived at the Sandown quilt show) but it felt like AGES since I'd been there. It was such a lovely day, 23' and bright sunshine with lovely fluffy white clouds scooting above us in the wind and with the gentle sound of the infant school summer fayre drifting over us we set to work....

Steve had brought 2 colonies from his Apiary which needed to be homed in new hives....

 

As soon as we opened the first colony it was apparent there were lots and lots and lots of bees in there!! 

 

Just look at how many were hiding in the roof!

And as soon as we started going through the frames we found lots of queen cells,  this is the colony indicating to their existing queen that they are running out of space for her to lay eggs so would she mind laying them a new queen and, then taking some workers with her as a swarm, would she please go and find somewhere else to live. (This is not a good thing for bee keepers as they lose a lot of bees and honey and its even less of a good thing for nearby neighbours of bees) Before she goes, the workers make an extra large cell (it looks like a peanut still in its shell) which they pack with more than the usual amount of brood food to grow a new queen......we stopped counting when we found eight queen cells....


We clearly needed to do something to prevent this colony from swarming, there was no sign of an actual sealed queen cell - but there was a rather fat grub in one of them...


But before we could decide what to do we needed to establish the existing queen was still there... now she had been marked (with a yellow dot to indicate she'd hatched this year) and had had her wings clipped so her chances of flying away were low and our chances of spotting her should have been high, and indeed - there she was....

 

So with the queen safe in the hive we decided to move some of the queen cells into the colonies that had lost queens in all the miserable weather in April.  Carefully re-loading the frames that would stay in this hive and brushing the bees gently off the frames we were going to move - so there was no danger of crushing the queen cell or damaging the grubs developing in them.

Shake the last of the bees in from the roof of the old hive box and jobs a good 'un.


Now it was time to move onto the (previously feral) colony that we homed into a new hive 2 weeks ago (see this post)  now it was time to see what they'd been up to!  It seems that old habits die hard with bees...


They have built a pile (that's a technical term) of brace comb straight under the crown board...These girls clearly like building wax! and as for them breaking down the old wild comb and re-organising themselves ...well err....


No.....quite simply NO.... these girls haven't got a clue how to organise themselves, never mind a booze up in a brewery (mead anyone?) so in true "grasp the nettle" style we decided to re-organise the hive for them. Normally a hive starts at the bottom with a brood box, then "supers" are added on top for the bees to store honey "upstairs". So, we wondered, if we reversed the normal situation and gave them another week to sort themselves out - could they? Here's how it looks now...


That's a super of random honey comb on the bottom, a brood box in the middle and a super of empty frames  at the top...so tonight's $60m question is can they sort themselves out? 

Phew!  What a busy couple of hours bee keeping... but today we got a traditional reward for bee keepers - a finger of fresh honey straight from the comb....


.. yum yum yum....nom ...nom....nom

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...