Saturday 4 May 2013

Un buzzy buzziness.....

The best advice for beginner bee keepers includes keeping two hives as a minimum.  That way you can compare how they are performing, which helps reveal if something isn't quite right and also means you have some extra bees to hand ...which might....at times be very involved in an action plan to remedy a problem.

I hadn't realised just how soon I might need to call upon that best practice....

New hive number one doesn't at first sight appear to have many bees....


But there were more than enough to run over and repel this bumble who thought it would sneak in and pinch a suck or two of honey...


So maybe its just that the queen has yet to feel the warmth of spring and get into the groove of laying lots and lots of eggs....

Onto hive number 2:  Almost straight away the queen was visible...


C'mon now - you can see her can't you?
But what can't you see?

Let me shake some bees off and look again - what's missing?
And what can you see instead?


That's right...there's no sealed worker brood cells.  All those lumpy cells have been extended to accommodate a bigger larva. In bees, this means drones (males) all developing from unfertilised eggs.

This is most definitely NOT A GOOD THING.  

The colony needs workers...and workers develop from fertilised eggs....and I can't find evidence of fertilised eggs...
If the queen is not viable because she didn't mate well enough last year ( and who could blame her for not going out in the rain!) it could be curtains for this colony, sadly there is no such thing as honey bee IVF

Its time to call in reinforcements....and a second opinion...


But try as we might to find fertilised eggs the only thing we could find was drone brood...and then more drone brood....

 


So now the only hope for this colony is to introduce a queen who has been well fertilised and hope that she can take over these bees.  
Where can I find a queen who might be up to the job?
I should check on that small colony and see if that queen is laying well....


Never has the sight of capped worker cells been such a welcome sight!
So on with uniting two colonies.

First locate and kill the redundant queen.  
I'd like to say I observed this routine procedure with due ceremony and dispatched her with a solemn heart.  
But the b*tch was really annoying me so I resorted to flick and stamp.

Secondly I needed to deploy a really high tech piece of bee keeping kit.
Something perfectly designed to allow the permeation of the good queens pheromones gradually across the boxes both colonies have been living in.  That way, they will all gradually be convinced they are all from one happy colony and live together happy ever after.
What a good job I've got one of these gadgets handy....


Yup - its a piece of newspaper!
Pierced with a few holes to aid the circulation of pheromones the bees will gradually tear it up and push it out of the hive, and every hole torn through is a bit more pheromone that will circulate more easily.

So now I just have to re-stack the hive boxes and leave them to chomp newspaper.
Time for this bee keeper to practice patience.

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