Catch up Thursday

Yesterday was a glorious warm and sunny evening so all the beekeeping jobs managed to get done here is a brief list.

 1) Two colonies were set up ready for Q. Rearing, this effectively meant doing a vertical split on them, a new technique I learnt this year and will try and put it in a diagram for you at some point, very easy to do, difficult to explain.  What at the end of the day we are looking for is a very strong q. less unit for raising our queens which will be doing next Thursday.

2) Swarm on the bottom of the Rose Hive -  The swarm on the bottom of the mesh floor was only small most of the flying bees had already returned to the main hive. Therefore it was possible for us to find the marked and clipped queen pull her out and cage her. Once caged we made a nuc up for here (from  a different hive, as we don't have a rose nuc box). And reintroduced her using a queen cage and some newspaper.

3) There seemed to be virgin queens flying around everywhere, as it has been two weeks since our inspections many of the queen cells where just popping out.

4) A lot of feeding and removing of empty supers went on because many of the bees were very low on stores, I expect we will have to undo all of that next week.

Finally to show nobody perfect, I had caged one of the queens whilst we were doing the manipulation, unfortunately I chose a queen cage I was not familiar with and whilst the queen was in my top pocket she walked straight out of the queen cage and and when I came to get her out I had to pick her of my suit..... thank goodness the bees never found her and she did not fall on the floor.  Lesson to learn always know how a queen cage works before using it.