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.