Well at Lydney we have spent the last four weeks doing the Varroa treatment - APILIFE VAR or as I wrongly called it apivar Life.... I don't it is horrid smelly stuff that takes a good few hand washes to get off your hands even when you handle it wearing gloves... anyway it kills the nasty varroa mights...
It comes in packets and you need two packets for one hive and it is a treatment of 1 block - (there are two blocks in a packet) cut into four pieces, with a piece placed just above the brood in each corner. If you had a double brood hive then it was necessary to put all the brood into one box for effective treatment, which is fun, and as you need two people really and then you play pass the frames, one of brood being switched with one of food, and you just about squeeze them all in. Then comes the feeding, most of the feeding takes place with a JUMBO feeder. Although if after one week they had not taken the food down then we changed this to Frame feeders.
In the past two weeks we have also being taking samples of 30 bees, and "deheading" (sorry if you are a bit girlly, but we do kill them first in the freezer... it it is for the greater good, and the bees would only have a couple more weeks to live... as we take the older flying bees) and testing for Nosema. So far only one (out of four) has had a very minor infection, the langstroth. But we will be doing some more tests during September.
The more fun bits has been the queen movements. If you can remember we split hive 1 into a circle of 5 nucs, well unfortunatly not everything has gone to plan... only ONE, bless her, queen manage to get mated correctely, with 3 having DRONE layers (OH BUM), and one being queenless. Luckly for us in our apideas we had 3 queens to use, and as we merged a couple of other colonies, there was another queen to spare... so we were back to 5 nucs again.... then disater again... one of the queens from the apidea was another DRONE layer... how much bad luck can you have... well this time there were no more spare queens, and by now a couple of the nucs are looking short on bees, so we had to "squash" her whcih I took great delight in doing although I have to admit I did look around to make sure no body was watching, just incase anybody got the wrong end of the stick and swung a smoker in lieu of a handbag at me. Then we had to combined the two nucs together using newspaper. There was some improvisation as, because we have solid floor nucs... we could not put one on top of the other, so we had to put them both into full hive boxes, using frame feeders as dummy boards either end, with the five frames in the middle, and then same in the bottom with a layer of newspaper inbetween... will be a job to sort those out nextime. I hope it has worked.
Also in the last month, we have merged a couple of the colonies into double broods, primarlily to make sure that they are strong enough for the winter, and also because I took as disliking to one of the queens, as she seem to make the one hive cross and sting people... although of cause the day the deed was done she was good as gold so we did not have the heart to kill her and she was one of the queens used in the nucs as above.....
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