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.
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