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 We found a virgin queen in there, and no eggs so it appears they have superseded this queen which was not very good.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.
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