Using Mated queens

Here is an image from the circle split, which was the topic of last weeks post.  The update this week on this is that most of the nucs where fairly evenly split and we only swapped two of the nucs in position so that the flying bees would strengthen the weaker nuc.

As well as doing a lot of general bee work and discovering that there are happily laying queens in a couple of hives that had been in shut down. The main interesting job this week was the caging and using of the mated queens from our queen rearing. It was quite hard to find the queens and capture them into queen cages, we used butler cages.... the baby nucs where then re-populated with any sealed queen cells we could find around the other hives, primarily hive 10 which was split last week so they were going to be knocked down if we did not use them.

Two mated queens were sold the other two have been introduced into the hives in the apiary.  There are lots of methods of introducing queens and we used a slightly different approach in each hive. In hive 20; where the queen cell we left three weeks ago had failed to hatch, we put FOUR layers of newspaper over the end of the cage and left the bees alone until next week.  The other hive 13 the queen was introduced with the wooden block still in and then on Sunday, TWO layers of newspaper was to be put over instead of the block.  To insert the cage in, use a cocktail stick and insert into the side of a frame, preferable near the center of the hive.

One useful tip I learned if you are using a queen cage, is to make sure there is an area in the cage where the queen can shelter, just encase any of the bees decided to try and bite her legs off, this is easily achieved by wrapper a piece of tape around the cage.

Spliting a hive into a circle - creating five new nucs

Thursday 1st July

This was a grand day of Fun, and nearly everything went to plan. Besides the weekly inspections, which did not reveal anything horrible, apart from the possibility that a couple of hive may be queenless, but then it is too early to tell. Highlights are:

Hive 10 - was split, this is the last hive that I expect to be split at the apiary this year, and means that all but one hive has a new Queen, mostly by splitting but a one by supercedure.  The lonely hive, is hive 12, who has made steady progess from a weak start but does not have lots of HONEY.

Queen rearing success
We checked the baby nucs today and the four remaining all have laying queens;  not news yet on the virgin queen which we ran into the baby nuc.  So that is a real success story. We put queen exluders on the front of the baby nucs as the new queens are quite likely to abscond   due to lack of space. So next week we will have to do something with them.. either use them to re-queen a couple of colonies or sell them!

Splitting a hive into a circle

This is something which I have been wanting to try for the past twelve months. The basic principle is to place a number of nucs around the site of the original hive in an equally space circle about 4-5 feet away. You then spread the whole hive around leaving a means for the new nucs to generate a queen, or introduce a queen if you have been queen rearing.  Well we did this to hive 1 which we split a few days earlier, and therefore was full of uncapped queencells,  The hive was a double brood chamber, which means 22 frames, therefore splitting it into 5 five frame nucs we needed only 3 frames of foundation.  A fairly well developed queen cell was left in each nuc apart from one which had just an egg in the queen cell. There was queen cells, extra but of course they are always more than one on a frame so they could not be used.  A lot of judgement went into decided which looked like the better queen cell.  Well by the end of the evening most of the flying bees had returned and seemed to find no difficult in finding a new home the brood in each nuc should hold them there. When we go next week we may do a little juggling in one nuc is much stronger than anthother. Hopeful in a couple of weeks we will have 5 more viable collonies. To go with our burding collection.

General comments and forth coming events
If I remember correctly we started the year with 15 hives plus a nuc.  Well at present on site on think we have 20 full hives plus, 7 nucs - and we have sold 5 nucs, which means we have more than doubled the number of bees; which in a good year like this any half decent beekeeper should be able to do, and still get a  Honey crop. Talking HONEY we had to added another super to Hive 20 which means they now have three supers and therefore will give us the best crop, well they are a double brood so I should hope so.

Plans are now been made for Honey extraction which will take place in Early August; which is followed straight away by winter feeding and varroa treatment.  We will also be starting soon to test the bees for "the bee gut" (the misery of getting older words escape you)  disease; as we can treat this with the winter feed if necessary.