That Reminds Me

We recently acquired some Dell PowerEdge servers (r410 and r510) at work and I wanted to try playing around with IPMI to see if this is a useful tool to add to our armoury. Turns out it is very useful indeed. Not only do we get access to ‘chassis-level’ information (power states, sensor information etc) we can configure Serial over LAN with Console Redirection to get remote access to the boot screens, BIOS etc.

Just a quick visit today to put supers on Rebecca and Sarah, and a varroa tray in Sarah. I’m not expecting a high varroa count at all, since this is a recent artificial swarm of a parent colony, but if it does show signs of varroa then we need to worry more about the others too. I’ll be doing a count after around 7 days and using this varroa table to check mite count.

Its a little late now to be picking elderflowers, but there are still a handful growing in shadier places, so with that in mind I’m sharing my elderflower cordial recipe.

I’ve noticed recently that a lot of websites give information about swarming bees, but most do it in vague terms, assuming that the person doing the swarm is knowledgeable about one way already, or using names for swarm methods without explaining in any detail how they work.

As a beginner I had to spend a lot of time with books spread across the table, drawing pictures to properly understand how to do even the simplest of swarm methods - the Pagden swarm. As a result I thought I’d write it all out step by step here to make it easier for anyone else trying to split their beehives for increase.

Despite our terrible losses over winter, we seem to be doing well to recover with the warm spring we’ve been having.

Today we went through the strongest of the original nucs we took off Cleo back in the spring, marked the queen (who is laying very strongly) and upgraded them into a full (wooden) hive, as they were rapidly running out of space. I think its time to Christen this hive Sarah!

We put in drawn frames to give her plenty of space to lay, so hopefully she’ll come on well. There was no sign of the marked queen in the other nuc, but there were eggs and larvae, so either she’s adept at hiding, or the capped queen cell that had been there has hatched and taken over.

No signs of eggs in the swarm nuc, or in the split hive from Cleo, but its early days yet - queens seem to be taking their time mating this year - possibly due to a lack of drones coming out of the winter?

Cleo however, despite us taking off 3 nucs, and splitting her (a split that swarmed!) had wet queen cells in. We knocked these down to slow her down for a week, but a Snelgrove is looking like an option here.

After having a nuc stolen at the start of the week it was time to bolt everything down to try and stop it happening again!

We attached fastenings to one nuc, then gradually swapped nuc boxes with all the remaining nucs, adding a fastening to each box as we removed it from use. In doing so we got a chance to go through the nucs.

The captured swarm from yesterday is packed to the gunnels, and will need a full hive box very soon.

The strong nuc box is well-stocked with bees, and has one central frame covered in eggs (upright and leaning over) - which means that its taken that queen the best part of 3 weeks to start laying, from when we saw the attacked queen cells at the last beginner’s inspection. It will probably also need rehousing in a hive in the next 2-3 weeks.

The weaker nuc is less well-stocked, and had a small smattering of eggs, but enough to let us know that the queen is ‘up and running.’

Now to just wait and see if either of the split boxes decides to swarm again!

Visiting the apiary today we discovered that one of our nuc boxes has been stolen!Whoever it was just took the one nuc, and left the rest of our hives alone. This implies that its a hobbyist just starting out, rather than a professional team looking for bees (who might have taken all the hives), but its still disheartening. What is more annoying is that this was an ‘extra’ hive we were bringing on for a fellow beekeeper who lost all of their bees over winter.

However, in a reverse karma effect, we did have that artificial swarm shortly afterwards, so its not all doom and gloom :)

Up until now I’d obtained all my bees the easy way - either getting them from other beekeepers, or by artificially splitting a hive to suppress their swarming instinct. However today, completely by chance, I ended up dealing with a natural swarm.

About 20 days ago we split the main hive in 2, as it was starting to develop queen cells and would have swarmed unless we took action. It was a double hive, so we put all of the brood into one box, along with the flying bees, and left the queen on the original site, to which the flying bees returned. All well and good we thought.

However, what we’d not accounted for was that we’d put 2 boxes-worth of brood into a single box. This meant that when the first queen hatched (probably yesterday) she was pressured into swarming straight away by the flying bees who had obviously decided it was all too overcrowded.

At lunch, we were sat at the apiary enjoying the sunshine, not doing anything with the bees, when I noticed a lot of activity in front of the hive. A lot of activity. Suited up, I went through the hive and sure enough there was one open queen cell, and another 10 capped queen cells, untouched. This told me that the swarm was a virgin queen, since if she’d planned to stay she would have destroyed the other queens.

Within 10 minutes the bees had settled in a tree about 30 feet away, fortunately not too high up, and after much shaking, climbing, pulling and cutting we managed to get most of them into a nuc box, and the rest onto a sheet in front of it, from where they all gradually walked their way in the front door.

The nuc is now back at the apiary, and hopefully tomorrow we’ll see whether or not the queen has taken to her new home, or swarmed off again to look for a nicer place. Hopefully if she has, it won’t be somewhere that will give us beekeepers a bad reputation!

Its luck of the draw really - if we hadn’t been having lunch, we would never have seen the swarm, and they would either be off somewhere new, or we’d have been getting phone calls from angry neighbours and had to go a mile or so to retrieve them. Lesson learned - don’t leave more than one queen cell in a box after splitting, and don’t overcrowd them with brood!

Today we inspected the 3 nucs we brought on at the start of the year, our aim being to expand as much as possible after our terrible losses over winter.The weakest nuc had a queen laying, but was in the process of superseduring. I have a feeling they’re now drone laying, but we’re giving them one more week to ‘come right’, or they’ll be merged back into another nuc.

The strongest nuc showed no signs of eggs, but the queen cells had been torn down, and they seemed to be acting as normal, so we’re hoping the queen is mating as we speak. Again, they get a week.

The 3rd nuc was very angry, with a lot of drones coming in and out. Again, we’re hoping that the queen is recently hatched and out mating.

So not much to report, other than its touch and go for all of them. However the hive they came from is strong, and we’ll find out about the artificial swarm from that hive in a week’s time as well.

Last autumn I collected a large number of plums from some old plum trees near where I work - they’d not previously fruited much, but the combination of a warm spring and a wet summer seemed to set them off. With around 7kg of plums I’ve been making jam and bottling them, but the need for some more freezer space led to me making plum wine.