hatched queens and assement day 2 - manic

Sheer exhaustion of beekeeping is now kicking in, I do have a couple of great photos and things but will post them maybe later in the week...but need to clear my memory to allow a few more thoughts in.

Thursday 24th June

For once a fairly quiet evening. The most memorable event was at the end of the evening, (no not the beer) but the apidea's, a certain unnamed person was getting so excited everytime that I was watching how high the job was and then I knew the outcome. Five out of the 6 queen's hatched successful which is brilliant as we droped the 6th queen cell so that was no surprise.  Elsewhere in the apiary many attempts where being made to find, and then mark and clip our newly laying queens, although we really should leave them lay for a couple of months before marking and clipping them but then everybody has then own ideas... that is after all beekeepiing.  Also the other main event was the hiving up of the nucs  but this was done in such a way as to prepare the collonies to be ready to run two queens simultaneously, one in the bottom then 3 suppers and then one on the top, will try and explain more later on.

Assessment Week Two

Now I arrived just after 10, and by about 11.30 three swarms had emerged from various hives. Not what you want when the assessor is on the bees. There was an huge swarms from what I think was hive 14 they were just coming out when I arrived and settled beautiful at the bottom of the hawthorn tree. We thought great they will be there for a couple of hours.... oh how wrong you can bee!  Only 1.25 hours after they where out they were off over the fields and into the woods. Oh POOH  all that honey to the pooh bear. At the same time that swarm went out, I vaguely noticed another swarm, just out side the fence, not sure where they came from but think they were a cast swarm from hive 14.  It is a testament to how much noise the first and second swarm made that did not notice them come out.   How the 2nd swarm was from hive two which was a queen which was clipped and marked last Thursday. so all the bees did not go far, they did not as normal, group under the floor and on the ground, she has managed to crawl back in which we confirmed later when we went through them. The surprise was that in hive 2 there were only queen cups with eggs in no royal jelly, NOT ACCORDING TO THE BOOK again.

Anyback to hive 14.. after the assesor has gone home we had some fun going through the hive. We heard and saw 2 queens pipping.. and running loose. Wonderful noise they were also checking out all the other queen cells which were about to hatch.  We managed to help hatch SIX virgin queens into butler queen cages.  It looked to me that the 7 day check was forgotton and the hive was riddled with queen cells, and would most likely have swarmed out, let count the queens

2 swarms

2 virgin queens seen running around and left in there

6 queens harvested

4-5 viable queen cells destroyed

I make that 24 or 25 viable queens.  Wow.... don't know why I bother queen rearing.

Anyway what happened to the harvested queens

1)- run into baby nuc one where the queen had not hatched on Thursday

2&3) -  Our swarm guru took them away with him to use some how

3 & 4) I brought home and made up small nucs and put newspaper over the butler cage now hoping they will go out and mate

5) gave to my beekeeping neighbour who did the same as me.

Whilst at the apiary we briefly checked the babynucs (apedea) one had absconded.. another was all on the front.. maybe waiting the return of the queen. the other seemed happy will wait till Thursday to see if they have mated and are laying. fingers crossed.


UPDATE 
Here are some of the images and videos I promised.

1) successful hatched queens

Queen rearing natures way. How cool in that!

The Huge swarm that go away!

Assessment Day 1

Saturday 19th June

Today was the first day of assessments, the chap doing the assessing "Roger" is great and friendly everything you could wish for, puts you right at ease with conversation off topic and does not hover over your shoulder.

Anyway there were a few bee keeping jobs to do as well. Mostly they are boring but essentially jobs like building supers, cleaning boxes and generally sorting the shed, but hey ho it looked really neat and tidy when it was done shame it will need doing again next week.

Queen Rearing stuff.

Well dotted all over the place are images from the queen rearing. The task for today was to populate the apidea's hence forward know as "baby nucs" cause I can spell that. The important thing is not to get any of the male boys in there that is the drone bees, the big chubby lazy ones who live to mate. So to ensure we only get the nurse bees, (worker who are just born but not yet guards or foragers), at lunch time we shook all the bees of 3 frames of eggs and lava and placed them in another brood box just above the brood chamber and below the supers and then all the lovely nurse bees come up to look after their sisters & half sisters. This was left till late afternoon at which time we go back to the hive and shake the poor ladies into a bucket spray them with water. (on a side track would like to try water instead of smoke it seems to calm them just as well.) Then with the baby nucs all set up with their fondant food supply we scoop up the bees 250 ml, using an old milk container, they are just like black currents when they are wet so they are easy to handle and then we though them in and seal it in. Once this has been done for all 6 baby nucs. we put the hive back to normal. Moving on to the queen cells, (this should be the 15 day but we break the rules because we were there on the 13th day, but needs must.) we take them from the frame (see image) and place them through the hold on the top of the baby nuc. All are now sealed up for a few days whilst the queen hatches and to give them a chance to bond. We have to spray them with water every day and keep them in a cool dark place as possible to find. They are very very noisy if they need water... could not believe that so few bees could make so much noise when I went down Sunday to spray them

Well looking forward to another busy day tomorrow when the baby nucs go to a new home and are finally let out.

More splits and Queen rearing update

THURSDAY 10TH JUNE

Weekly Inspections
This was a horrid evening, but not wet, just cold. So the choice was given to the leaders as to whether the hives where opened or not and the decision was to open only hives we really needed to check.  The outcome was that to my surprise we did four splits. Hives 14, 8, 4, & 20. The Split on 8 was moved to a new site because it is a little high to work when there is a double brood and two supers.

Queen Rearing

First job is to set up the receiving rearing colony, which is hive 1; arriving as early as possible we go through the collony and knock down any queen cells, insert the cloake board and open the rear entrance, and leave a gap in the top middle of the hive where we will insert our prospective queen cells later.


The Second job was to check the jenter cage from hive 10 hoping that the queen had stayed and laid some eggs, so at the same time the weekly inspection was done. Unfortunately the queen had not laid in the jenter, but this was not unexpected; due to the trial nature that was used the previous Sunday. So undaunted,  we temporarily stole a frame of eggs, and lave, so that we could have a go at grafting with the Chinese grafting tool. What we were looking for as the smallest lava possible, so that you can almost only see them with a manginfy glass, with lots of royal jelly and just in the "c" shape. Once we have selected a possible cell, we carefully slide under the back edge of the "c" of the lave making sure we do not roll the lave and put it on the tool; (not that easy). Sometimes we found it eaiser to cut away the edge of the cell to allow better access. This done we careful place the lave on the cup of the jenter and put it together with the other three parts.  Repeat 10 times... allowing other to have ago. Then insert into hive 1.  Finally return the frame of eggs to hive 10 as we are sentimental and don't like to kill bee babies.

Sunday 13th June

General work

Today was mainly another training day, for those taking their Basic Assessment in the following weeks. However we did take the opportunity to do a couple of jobs.  All hives which were split were given their initially check and knocked down all but one queen cell. (hopefully the one we decided to leave last Thursday) This is a slight change from our normal methods as following a consultation with "snelgrove" book, he suggests checking the hive after 5 & 10 days for queen cells after a split, previously we had only done 7 days. Also some feeding was done; on the new nucs, and topped up on the swarms.

Queen rearing

Just to build the tention to an extreme level we left checking the queen cells until last. I was feeling almost so nervous that I was glad in the end when J. said he would look. What a relief we had SIX accepted and I was over the moon. As one of the cell had fallen down, I think we had 6 out of 9 which I make 66% not bad at all for a first effort.  That discovered we let the get on with it. But we did make the colony queen right again by removing the cloake board. 

Thursday 17th June

Weekly inspections

Well in complete contrast to the previous Thursday the weather was almost perfect, well for me as a beekeeper it was because I would not swelter in the heat, and it was warm enough for the bees as well. 

The session began with a surprise when one of the members turned up saying "I just caught a swarm which is in the back of the car" So this was the first job, to hive a swarm... I did not really see what was going on, but I got the impression that they were walked into the hive. This is done by putting a board in front of the hive sloping up to the entrance and then dumping all the bees on the board and they all just walked calmly into the hive. An absolutely fascinating watch, well worth doing just for the sheer amazing seen. 

Today was the day to check some of the hives that were split almost a month ago to see if their new queens were laying. Well I think out of the 5 original splits 2 have perfect laying queens, 2 we need to leave for one more week, and finally we come to hive 6 which is a slight mystery as for the pasts couple of weeks eggs had been found but nothing much was developing into lava and capped brood. Well this week I saw that there were lava (not sure about capped was not there). But I was told that there were queen cells in the centre as well so the theory is that the bees don't like their boss and there for are going to supersede her.

The Langstroth now has a laying queen, which is unmarked so it looks like the new queen has ruled the roost. An effort was made to find her so she could be marked, but this failed. I did actually see her the Sunday before but at that time there were no eggs, so she was not ready to be marked. We will nab her soon and mark her.  Hive 2 which has already supersesed now has a laying queen called "Alice" and she was marked and clipped. 

Queen Rearing

Today we added the hair rollers or queen guards if you prefer. The aim of this is a precaution against one queen hatching early and then going and killing all the other queens.  This was done quickly with just one minor miss-hap of the one queen cell not wanting to stick back to the frame so if fell of a couple of times, which just may have been enough to dislodge the queen lava from it food let hope not. 

Well that enough for now, off to do some more bee-keeping  today & tomorrow.

Queen rearing update & langstroth update

Thursday 3rd June

I thought it was about time we had another go at Queen rearing at the apiary.  Fingers cross this time we will have some success. Therefore using hive one.  "for those in the know it is a hive with a queen name; now is it "Alice" "Phoebe" or what ever" anyway the important point it is a double brood chamber hive. This is the first time that I have actually set the hive up in step one of the rearing process; and although I thought I knew what to do, I realized half way though that I had forgotten some bits, mainly because there are so many ways to do queen rearing. The principle is to separate the queen from all the eggs and lava - so that in one week time we have a box with out any possibility of raising a queen on their own; but lots of capped brood so lots of nurse bees coming; the queen is kept separate in the other box by a queen excluder.

All this work meant that I rather lost track of goings on else where on the apiary, but I did see quite a few extra supers going out, and there was no further splits.  Also found out later, that the Langstroth which we thought was queenless last week, could not have been, because there was capped brood. However this week there was no eggs and this weeks theory is that one of the new queens has hatched and killed the original queen so we now have a virgin queen in there.

Sunday 6th June

This was extensively a teaching day; so not much was going on but there are a couple of notable things

After being there almost and hour we noticed a swarm of bees hanging in a nearby tree;  This swarm must have come from either hive 17 or 18 but we are not certain because  it came out the day before. Just goes to show that as soon as you leave more than one queen cell; they will swarm if both queens hatch. Had exactly the same thing at my home apiary.  We initially collected the swarm and put it in a nuc box with a queen excluding across the entrance, but damn me she must be a small queen because they were back in the tree in under an hour. So this time they went back into a full hive; but only five frames and a dummy board, and because it has a mesh floor we could seal them in for 48 hours.

Also Hive 2  - this is the hive from where we merged hive 2 and 7 earlier in the year. We found a virgin queen in there, and no eggs so it appears they have superseded this queen which was not very good.  I am amazed that this was not spotted in the last two inspections. How can you miss a queen cell in a week hive... but obviously it was. So that is another two virgins which need to mate. 

Back to Queen rearing; I put the jenter into Hive 10, as soon as I got there on Sunday and put the queen inside, technically she should stay there until the next day, but as we were not going to be there, I left it for a couple of hours and then open the door so that she can get out if she wanted to. I could not see any eggs in there but I am hopeful that there will be lava of the correct age. 

Either way on Thursday will be down there early setting up hive 1 ready to accept the grafts which will use a mix of jenter if any and grafting which we will do latter in the evening. 

As a tester I have spent last week beekeeping and have a couple of reasonable videos which will tell you about soon; all so a very memorable swarm catching experiences.