Luckily I didn’t have long to wait to get hold of bees again, thanks to Faye’s extremely successful over-wintering of her colony.On Saturday, with the final group of EMBA beginners, we performed a Pagden swarm on Cleo. All the brood frames, and most of the bees were put into the hive that had previously held Poly, with the old queen and empty frames being left on Cleo’s site. The flying bees should return home to keep the queen company, and be convinced by the lack of brood that they’ve swarmed. I get to try to bring on a new queen and take care of this new colony! They’d helpfully already got a queen cell lined up with a grub and royal jelly in it, so hopefully I won’t have long to wait.
Now I just have to give them a feed to keep them going until they start foraging properly, and think about marking the queen once she;s up and laying (all of which relies on some good weather!).
It also looks like we’ll get 2 successful nucs out of our earlier split of Cleo, with a ‘maybe’ for a 3rd one, so we’ll be back on target with 3-4 hives going into winter… much better than last year!
Now all I need to do is see how my new colony turns out, and give them a name… I think I’ll keep going up the alphabet and this time choose Rebecca!
