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.