That Reminds Me

Today it was out with the old, in with the new in the wood hive with a supersedure in progress.Last year the bees in Wood decided that the old queen wasn’t right, and planned a supersedure - creating an ‘emergency’ queen cell around a freshly laid egg, while the old queen is still i the hive, and letting the new queen kill off the old one. However, their plans failed, and the old queen was still there with no sign of the new queen-to-be.

Today, I was planning a quick inspection, but it turned out to be rather longer. On the second frame, I spotted the queen, but on the third, a single emergency queen cell, with no further cells anywhere else in the hive - and it was capped over. I borrowed a nuc from Faye, and moved the old queen into this, along with some stores and drawn frame, to keep her occupied. Hopefully the new queen will hatch tomorrow, mate this week (drones were seen in other hives) and start laying fairly soon, meaning the old queen can be put to rest. If not, then the old queen is still available for replacement. I also took the chance to remove the remaining smith frame in this hive, so its all national ones now. Poly still has 2 smith frames with capped brood which I’ll remove later.

Todo

Check Wood in 2 weeks for signs of egg-laying and larvae from the new queen, and mark her if all is well. DONE - no egg-laying.

Remove smith frames from Poly and replace with nationals. DONE

Put supers on Poly, since the sycamore is about to flower, and the hive is looking quite busy.

Now it the start of April, and I’m off on holiday, I thought I better check everything was in order before I disappeared.The bees seem to be happy enough in both hives - the queens have obviously been laying well, with at least 2 frames of eggs, larvae and capped brood in each hive. Both hives have smith frames in them still (2 in Poly, and one in Wood), which need removing, but since they’re currently being used for some egg-laying and as food stores its best to leave them til I get back. Each hive appeared to have approximately 2 brood frames, 4 stores frames, and 2-3 empty, but being drawn, frames.

The Queen has now been marked in Poly - yellow, because we couldn’t find the red pen :) She looked quite large and healthy so here’s hoping she has a productive year!

Todo

Remove smith frames later in April, and return all the equipment to their rightful owners. DONE

Move Wood’s queen out into a nuc and bring on eggs from a ‘calm’ hive later in April. DONE.

Its very important to do a varroa count twice a year, in Spring and Autumn, to check varroa levels.We had a good look at all the trays from the apiary, which we put in 2 weeks ago, and we only saw 1 varroa on a tray from one of Faye’s hives. While the counting by eye can be marginally inaccurate, this is still a good method.

To calculate the varroa levels in the hive, take the number of mites found (be a pessimist, call it 3) and divide it by the number of days the insert was in (14) to give the Daily Mite Drop (0.22). If the count is higher than that given in the following table, action is necessary:

Luckily for us the count is well below 1, so no treatment is needed at present.

Went back to the hives today to show some students the basics of beekeeping, and give us a chance to inspect the hives now that spring feels well underway.A quick check of poly showed everything in order - the bees nicely nestled over 4 frames, which appeared well-stocked with honey, and a good amount of candy left on the frames untouched.

Wood was also very busy, so I had a proper inspection. I removed 3 smith frames which were virtually empty, and pushed the remaining frames up together. Spotted the queen, and also capped cells, and Faye’s hive had emerging workers, so they are well on the way to another year of business. Again here the sugar block was untouched.

We also fitted the tray inserts on both hives to do a varroa count over the next week - hopefully the numbers will be low and we won’t need a second treatment. We’re also planning to give Fumidol B in the spring feed in case of nosema problems, though we’ve not seen any signs of disease in any hive.

I’ll also need to make up a batch of brood frames - 3/4 for Wood, and 2 for Poly to replace the smith frames that have been in over the winter. Hopefully this can be done soon so I can return the smith frames to their rightful owners.

Today really felt like a spring day going up to the apiary - 9 degrees, with sunshine - warm enough to not need a big coat on!Faye and I systematically went round each of the hives - which have been fairly untouched since we locked them up for the winter. We’d taken sugar and feeders along, just in case any were on their last legs.

But we were in luck! All the colonies seemed to be thriving, with most still having at least a full frame of capped honey untouched since last year. They were bringing in some pollen too, and some cells seemed to have liquid honey in them - although its difficult to know if this is fresh, or just recently uncapped.

I moved the bag of sugar off the poly hives (they’d not touched it, or much of the hardened feeder pieces) and put it into the wood hive - although in all likelihood it won’t get eaten there either. We’ll put a stimulating feed on at the start of March to get the queen laying and a fresh batch of bees ready for the spring blooms.

This last week has been fairly warm, with temperatures up to 7 or 8 C during the day.Its good to know that Faye reported seeing bees flying from my Poly hive today - obviously the warmth and sunshine brought them out. I’m not sure if there’s much around for them at the moment (maybe some Ivy pollen?) but at least they’ll be having clearing flights so the risks of dysentry and other diseases later on will be less.

Today seemed the best day we’ve had so far this year, being above 6C for the first time and not raining, so I decided to go and have a mid-winter look at the hives.They’re all still standing, which is a major plus! I had a quick peak in Wood, and saw the bees happily moving around, with no signs of hunger or a lack of supplies. I’ll give them a hard sugar-bag feed some time later on this month.

Poly was equally active - with bees even starting to fly when I took the cover-board off. They hadn’t eaten all the hardened leftovers from the autumn feeds, and the top of most of their frames were still capped over, but given they didn’t have a full stock of honey to start with, I gave them an extra sugar bag to be getting on with.

We took samples of floorboard scrapings at the end of September to send off for analysis for bee diseases. We collected a weeks’ worth on an insert over the mesh floor.The results came back over the Christmas period - nothing to report except varroa, but then we already knew about that.

We took the samples after applying apistan, which skews the results slightly, but the count of varroa on the poly hive was 2, and on the wood hive, 23. This is not unexpected, since the wood hive had a much bigger colony and had been established for longer.

Looking at the [Graphs provided by EMBA](http://www.edinburghbeekeepers.org.uk/downloads/Kate%27s%20Integrated%20Management%20Notes.pdf “” ) we can see that this equates to a mite population of around 320 in the wooden hive. This is not an amount to be concerned about, but I will be taking floorboard scrapings again in March to see what state they are in going into the new year.

I spent some of Sunday afternoon soap-making - something to give people as presents. This time round I used a recipe for ‘Honey and Beeswax Oat Scrub’ - which turned out really nicely. The soap has a lot of beeswax and honey in it, as well as some oatmeal to roughen it for a good clean. This got me thinking this could be another direction for the hive products I end up with next year. Now I just have to wait 4 weeks for it to mature before its ready to try out!

Nipped up to the hives today, partly because its been very windy the last 2 days, but also to remember to fit a mouseguard to the Poly hive.I fitted one to the wood hive a month or so ago, to stop the wee beasties from getting in and trashing the hive over winter. However, I’d read at that point that you didn’t need mouseguards on polystyrene hives, since they have a shallow entrance as standard. However, having now learned that mice can squeeze through gaps as small as 12mm, and seeing that the hive actually came with a mouseguard, I thought I’d better fit it.

No sign of any bees out today, although it was quite still and sunny. It must have been just too chilly for them to venture out (around 7C), although they did come onto the doorstep to have a look at what I was doing!