Supercedure into Nucs

Soo, our little swarm has come on leaps and bounds over the past month or so but last week we found supercedure queen cells, somewhat annoying given that the new queen has only been in lay for a month or so. We took the chance to try and increase the number of colonies whilst keeping the existing queen. With one nuc and one full size hive split down to take 5 frames we transplanted the frames containing the queen cells into the Nucs, added a frame of stores and another frame of brood to each and topped up the rest with foundation.

If the faint sounds of Laurel and Hardy music can be heard in the background then it's in preparation for the next bit.

Initially we weren't sure if we had a late swarm on our hands, we couldn't find the queen, although we had eggs, and had moved one frame with a queen cell, a frame of stores and a donor frame of sealed brood from one of the other hives into a Nuc and left one sealed cell in the main hive. We removed the other cell and opened it up to see how far along the cell was, with the crappy weather it'd been nearly two weeks since we managed to inspect last. Judging by the very white looking, undeveloped queen inside we still had 4-5 days before the new queens emerged.

Coming back a couple of days later having sought advice that we were probably looking at supercedure we re-inspected the main hive. No eggs, could it be a late swarm after all? But we still had plenty of bees in the hive. The (rather dim) lightbulb went off and we checked the Nuc. Eggs! Typically we'd managed to take our elusive queen and put her in the nuc along with the other queen cell.

Not being too sure how to get a queen out of the Nuc back into the main hive we improvised and made up a second "nuc" out of a broodbox split down to take 5 frames with an entrance block only granting access to that side. We then took the frame with the cell out of the Nuc, leaving the queen, and added some sealed brood, attending bees,a frame of stores and a couple of frames of foundation.

In theory this now gives us 5 colonies. We might not get a lot of honey this year but hopefully these nucs will have enough time to build up for winter or we have an option to requeen one of the other hives that has a lot of chalkbood going on at the moment.

Never a dull moment when the weather is nice enough to do things!

Hallelujah!

I have a laying queen again. Quite how she got out to get busy with the lads given the weather we've had recently I've no idea. Maybe there's some geordie in her.

Our swarm looks like it might have swarmed though and very recently. 3 sealed queen cells, still 3 frames of space to play with and eggs in the brood. Given she's only been laying about a month she's not marked yet and we couldn't find her despite us both going over the frames while looking over each other's shoulders.

This time we've moved one cell into a Nuc with attending bees plus a donor frame from my colleague's hive, a frame of stores and two of foundation. The other we've left in place for now. We broke open the cell we removed and there's a very white, but definitely queen shaped pupae there which means, frankly that I've no idea how much time we've got before they emerge. Either way we intend to return on saturday or sunday, weather depending and see if we've got any new eggs in the hive. If not we know she's definitely gone and we can leave the remaining queen cell in place. In the meantime we try and get some advice as to what the flipping hell is going on.

Update...

I was kind of waiting until I had, hopefully, a happy ending to report, so I'll start where there is good news.

The swarm hive took it's own sweet time, but after 4 weeks the queen came into lay and despite an attempt to swarm seems to be settling in ok. The joys of working with foundation when there's a full flow on, the poor sods just dont seem to be able to draw foundation quick enough, pack the brood area with nectar and pollen, decide they're running out of room and start making queen cells.

My hive remains queenless. I last took a peek on Wednesday and still had my solitary queen cell, sealed, on the frame. We did have the seasonal bee inspector round which we both found incredibly useful, it's the first time anyone with any experience has looked things over since we started back in April. Thankfully there were no major issues to report but the hints and tips given, especially in the context of looking over hives that we're familiar with were priceless.

By my reckoning the queen should have emerged Yesterday perhaps today at the latest, so if the weather holds up, I'm hoping to go take a quick peek this afternoon, check she's emerged and see just how little brood area remains for her to hopefully lay in. There is a partially drawn super in place so I might try and see if I can coax them to move some stores into the super or might consider swapping some frames of stores for foundation to draw and hopefully leave some room for the queen.

Down to earth with a bump...

So far I have learned one very important lesson in beekeeping above all others. Just when you think you're starting to get the hang of things your bees bring you back to down to earth with a bump.

Last week I found queen cells. Rushing back to solicit advice from my internet mentors on the BBKA forums I returned the following day and took the, with hindsight, misguided decision based on the fact that the hive isn't full to simply knock down the queen cells and see if removing the QX from beneath the Super supressed the urge to Swarm. While removing the cells last week I found a sealed cell in the middle of one of the frames. At that point I stopped removing the cells and re-examined every frame to try and find the queen. There she was, the showers last week had presumably held them off from swarming and I thought all was well.

Yesterday I re-examined the hive. Reaching the brood nest, it was immediately apparent that I had no eggs in any of the frames and checking each frame twice confirmed my fears that I had no queen.

Further examination also revealed another Sealed queen cell and 4-5 uncapped cells. I removed the sealed cell as, given the time frame (it definitely wasn't there last weekend), my fear was it was an "emergency" cell made with an older larvae.

I've currently left the "best" 3 uncapped cells in place and my intention is to return tonight, reinspect the frame and reduce this down to a single cell in the hope of reducing the chances that I'll further weaken the hive by allowing cast swarms to leave.

I'm really annoyed with myself at the moment, I've lost a queen, and a number of bees although not so many that I actually realised they'd swarmed until I couldn't find any eggs and I could have prevented it by trying to manage their desire to swarm rather than bulldoze over it. Given their overall size, still only covering nine frames in total I didn't want to try and split them this year, but instead I've probably put them in a worse situation than if I'd just taken the queen, a frame of brood and a few bees and stuck them in a Nuc.

On a brighter note, our little swarm that we hived a few weeks back, now has a mated, laying queen in residence, so we do at least still have two queenright hives on site.

Bee Web Cam

Not mine, but if you point your browser to: http://www.sysonby.com/beecam/ You should find a webcam pointing at the entrance to a small observation hive. I believe that at night it switches to an Internal IR camera so you can see what is going on inside.

Very interesting just watching the comings and goings.

I found a bunch of queen cells in my hive yesterday so I'm going back in a bit to try and sort it out, more news later...

Bees in your hair.

Pop Quiz.
A bee flies into your hair, you hear its buzzing getting more and more frantic. What do you do? What do you do?

A) Attempt to brush the bee out of your hair using your fingers, an uncapping fork or that comb you carry for just such emergencies?

B) Administer a slap (or two) to your Noggin in the general vicinty of the buzzing noise

C) Enquire politely and calmly whether the guy stood laughing next to you will remove the offending bee.

D) Run off down the path, arms flailing, squealing "It's in my hair! It's in my hair" at a pitch audible only to bats and dolphins while your half de-veiled, Beekeeping SO attempts to catch you up.

In my experience the most effective are: B, C and A in that order.

D, while not effective at all, does provide significant entertainment to all around within sight/earshot of the afflicted party. No, I did not laugh as I removed the sting. Certain tender areas were well within striking distance.

Hiving the Swarm

Well, I was disappointed for a while that we didn't get to collect the swarm, then it turns out that it was a school playground. I know they can be about as gentle as they come, but I'm pretty sure the current Laurel and Hardy of the beekeeping world would have found some way to wind them up.

I did at least remember to take up the camera, unfortunately the location of the hive didn't really lend itself to letting them walk up the ramp and looking at them, there aren't a great deal of bees in the box so they might yet end up boosting the two smaller hives.

Swarm!

Fortunately not one of ours. As ever events conspire against us. Last time the allotment key was on its way to Oxford, this time the Mrs has the car with all my kit in it (ready for a swarm) and my colleague is in a meeting. While we were trying to figure out how to get to this one, still sat happily in a tree, a Commercial Beekeeper has agreed to collect it and hand it over to us later today.

Now where did I put that camera?

Playing with Photos

OK, I thought the page looked a little dull as is. I'm not entirely sure that sticking that particular photo behind the title pane necessarily works that well, but I'll leave it like this for now.

Progress!

Well the donation of a frame of capped brood from the other hive worked a treat.

Rather than swap a frame of eggs/larvae from mine I took a gamble on taking capped/emerging brood from the donor hive and replacing it with foundation from my hive. The donor hive is now definitely leaving, we're babysitting it until then and I'm trying to slow it down a little rather than have to try and super it with my kit. I wasn't 100% sure it was going to work and feared that I might not have enough bees to look after another full frame of brood, emerging or not.

Not only do they seem to have had no problems with the donated frame, theyve drawn out another frame and a half of foundation since last week. I'm now officially an owner of a hive of bees (rather than a Nuc) as far as I'm concerned.

Over the last couple of weeks I had been seeing two eggs in each cell. They weren't scattered around and I've spotted her Maj on every inspection. Someone did theorise that it might be a case of the queen getting "frustrated". Either way, every cell today contained a single egg again.

I've removed the feed from my hive as well. In the middle of Spring/early summer with the amount of forage that's available for them it seems silly to be topping them up with Sugar Syrup although they do seem perfectly capable of doing something with it as it's not being stored in any great quantity within the hive.

Playing at making videos

Don't think the BBC Natural History unit will be quaking in their boots just yet, but I offered to try and put together a few clips of bees doing their thing for some 5 year old kids. I've had to shrink it down and reduce the quality to make it fit here but hopefully it will come out ok. I think it might be time to add a tripod and frame stand to the wish list to try and reduce some of the shaky cam footage, it's not easy holding a camera in one hand and a frame of bees in the other while trying to look through the viewfinder wearing a veil.

I'm like the bees...

When it's raining I don't get to do much interesting, well not in terms of writing about at any rate.

The third hive on site at the moment is finally going to move to a new home. The owner had hoped to place it on his allotment but somewhere along the line fell foul of "The Committee". A visit from the president of the local beekeeping association, giving his seal of approval to the site, held no dice so we've let stay in situ until he found a new site or sorted the situation out.

A few weeks ago I spotted an ad offering to host a hive or two in an orchard that looked like it might be close enough to where he lived. As it's turned out, the site is ideal and both he and the owner of the land are looking forward to the bees arriving.

On the downside, his hive is much stronger than either of ours and we were hoping it was going to be a donor of brood frames into the smaller hives. We will at least get a chance to do at least one swap into each hive over the next two weeks before his leaves for pastures, or Orchards, new.

Basically, what we're looking to do is to take a frame of mostly emerging sealed brood, minus the bees, from his hive and swap it for a frame of mostly eggs and larvae in the smaller hives. As a rule of thumb, one frame of brood will produce 3 frames of new bees; so by swapping immature brood for emerging bees we'll get a quick boost to the number of bees in the smaller hives which will mean they can draw new frames for the queen to lay on sooner and hopefully help them expand a bit quicker than just left to their own devices.

That's the theory at least.

*drumming of fingers*

When it stops raining I'll go and so something interesting, I promise.

I did go to a Bee health seminar over the weekend, but I forgot my camera; not that a series of photos of beardy, grey haired people sat round a microscope or wrinkling their noses at frames of Foul Brood infected comb and brood would make for that interesting a picture.

With the big 40 looming in the not too distant future, it's nice to be a young maverick again. If only my knees didn't crunch when I sit down and ruin the illusion.

I am thinking of marketing a line of hair dyes called "Just for beekeepers", it will effectively mask your natural hair colour to match your grey.

Missed out on a Swarm.

Got a call from the Association swarm officer. He had a skep with a large swarm in it looking for a new home. In our apiary we have a [bait] hive, new frames all ready to go and another package of frames with foundation on order to prepare up another spare brood box into a hive ready to go.

Only problem was, key to the Apiary was halfway to Oxford, with my colleague, when he rung.

Having mulled my options over, torn because I really wanted to house the swarm and increase to two colonies, my aim for this year, I had to let the swarm go. If I couldn't find someone else up at the allotment to let me in, and more importantly be prepared to wait for me to finish and let me back out again, I'd have a problem in the form of a basket of bees and nowhere to put them.

Hopefully they'll have gone to a new guy without bees and another one will come up soon.

Starting to come along.

Today is the first inspection since we carried out the shook swarm that I've come away reasonably happy. There are at last signs that the colony is starting to build up again. The queen appears to be in rude health and is laying across 2 and half frames right to the edges. It's a little light on stores, but while they build up I'm keeping a feed on and there does appear to be plenty of pollen coming in.

These are my bees, there are many like them, but these bees are mine:


They've got a frame and a half of foundation to play with before the dummy board, which should be more than enough to keep them busy until the next inspection.

Before closing them up again I gave them a dust with Icing sugar. The varroa count has dropped like a stone in recent inspections, but I suspect this just means that it's now in the brood rather than on the bees. Post Icing sugar they end up looking like this:


and you get treated to the sight of "ghost bees" flying around the hive aftwards.

What was I saying about stings?

I've now managed to collect three in the last two days whilst not actually doing an inspection. The first two were up at the local association apiary meet. My hair was stuck in my eyes so I left the apiary to go sort it out, soon as I took my veil off two angry bees ambushed me and got me on the neck and cheek. They're still throbbing away but otherwise I don't seem to have too much of a reaction to them.

On this afternoon's inspection up at my own apiary I got stung before I even got into my kit. I'd already learned that bees love to fly in my hair so I don't tend to get too close the hives without kitting up first. Even so, rogue bee, right in the barnet and a sting to the side of the head before we could get her out. Still not dead which is a positive I suppose

Some Eye Candy.

I've been looking for an excuse to post some of these for a while. They're by a guy called Scott Thompson who frequents the BBKA forums and new posts are always a treat. This is just a brief taster: Just be warned, the full sized images are a screen filling 1200 pixels wide.



There are a huge number of photos in a similar vein of different Insect and reptile species and they are well worth a look. His Flickr page is Here

Playing the odds.

6 inspections on mine, a couple on the other hives and a couple of apiary days at the local association. Apart from the now regular occurence of a bee in the hair I've yet to receive a sting.

Having carried out a lightning quick inspection between showers this afternoon on a friend's hive and closed up we discovered a non leaky feeder, filled it with syrup and made moves to place the feeder on top of the crown board. It's a relatively small hive and we'd replaced two frames, where the foundation had dropped and they'd created a hell of a mess, with new frames of new foundation. No need for suits right? we're not taking the crown board off. As soon as we lifted the cover off the hole in the crown board a little stripey exocet of a bee shot out the hive and stung my friend. Feeder placed, with a new sense of urgency, we closed up and beat a hasty retreat.

Bait Hives

Given that everyone except us seems to have massive colonies of bees at the moment (I'll whine about the shook swarms that were done on both colonies leaving us with little room for manoever later) and is preparing for swarming season, we've put a bait hive out with our spare frames.

When we finally took over the apiary we discovered, in the back of the shed, a pile of old frames complete with old, scabby comb. While our aim is to get these cleaned up and ready for new foundation we decided to place a couple of these in the bait hive following a bit of reading that suggests a swarm looking for a new home likes to find a bit of old comb, presumably as it signals that bees once managed to live there successfully. We've also used a bit of Lemongrass scattered across the top bars. I know it should be oil, but we didn't have any and that was the next best thing.

We've got more spare broodchambers, but no spare foundation to fill them with, but I do have a scabby old home made nuc on site that we could fill with new frames and a couple of scabby ones, wonder if a Nuc would do as a bait hive?

Now we wait and hope we manage to attract a passing swarm.

[edit] A nucleus hive (Nuc) is too small apparently to be an effective bait hive, it needs to be about the size of a broodchamber and I just happen to have two kicking around that I was going to clean up. I'm going to put a couple of frames of the old comb into the "dirtiest" box containing a good amount of brace comb, propolis etc, and try and get hold of some lemongrass oil and see what we get. If I manage to get a swarm, then the other box will be cleaned up and ready to go by then (I hope).

Everyone is interested...

I've done my share of wierd activities in my time. I SCUBA dived for years, Mountain biked, pottered around in the Territorial Army and a few other bits and bobs here and there. Nothing, however, has piqued people's interest quite as much as when it emerges that I keep bees.

There's not one person that I've spoken to when it's come up that hasn't stopped dead in their tracks and wanted to know more. In some cases it's been related to the "OMG teh Bees are dying!!1!" coverage in the press, but for the most part people are just fascinated by these little insects and want to know more about the hive and, especially, the bees themselves.

There's also a, to me, surprising number of people who want to come along to my apiary and watch what I'm doing, I guess I need a spare veil.