todays news

[GRIZZLY]

Bees have been very active today,bringing in loads of pollen mostly from the Whins which are now coming into flower although we've got very prolific Snowdrops and a few Crocus.All colonies seem to have wintered well so far but I must keep an eye on their stores and supplement if necessary. :o :o

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Grizzly
As said when we met last year- You are in a veritable honey bee paradise. Watch out for Calum!

Grizzly wrote:
I must keep an eye on their stores and supplement if necessary.

Eric

..............................

[Calum]

Yup Grzzly keep one eye fixed on their wieght.
If it stays warm and they have a good pollen flow they will build up quickly and burn through their stores at a fair old rate.

All mine were out in force over the weekend, but since then we have hardly been above 5°C.
The ten frame colonies were all nice and heavy, so I'll let them get on with it.

Eric is only miffed that I pulled two studies out that have proven that feeding colonies that are in no need of it does nothing positive for them, infact in one study they faired less well.

But I would never advise against not feeding starving bees!

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Calum
Don't I get to make jokes too?

Eric

[Calum]

only if you get written permission!

[GRIZZLY]

Nothing but heavy rain today with very cold strong winds.Bees gone back to bed.Temp to go up later on in the week but heavy rain forcast again.Brrrr. El Paradiso is struggling at the moment Eric!!!--you'll have to stop doing your rain dance.

[EmsE]

We had a beautiful spring day yesterday. It was the first one of the new year when I wasn't at work, it was 6 degrees and it was dry & not too windy. I enjoyed watching the bees hover in front of the hives, some were bringing in small amounts of orange pollen and even my stroppy hive were oblivious to me slightly raising 1 frame in the top box to see how far up they were.

Then today we had a lot of snow throughout the morning which was washed away by the rain which followed...and cold too :(

[Calum]

10 cm snow today here too. Pity the hazel was giving great pollen snowdrops and crocous too.

[GRIZZLY]

Gone warm again 2day. Bees pouring in and out loaded with pollen.Seem very strong.

[Trog]

My lot were all flying early in the morning but the rain soon put paid to the party. I'm hoping they'll get out to the snowdrops tomorrow. Frogs were hard at it in the ponds, though. Looks like a population explosion is on the cards for this year!

[Eric McArthur]

Hi Grizzly
In the words of the song "I can't dance don't ask me"!

Bees well out here today - in the mid afternoon but chasd back in by rain! Tomorrow Thursday is looking good 12 C! We'll see!

Eric

[HensandBees]

all bees flying at last and pollen going in . and just in case I was nt sure saw one bee busy packing her legs on a crocus ...yeeees

[HensandBees]

grrrrrrrrrrrr cold and wet again

[GRIZZLY]

All Colonies flying well today despite the cold.Getting back to the hive with pollen.They've still got plenty of stores although I'll keep an eye on them just to make sure.

[GRIZZLY]

Whins realy coming into flower and won't be long before our 240 willow trees are flowering.Everything else is well into bud and will be adding to the early stores.Colonies seem very strong this year unlike last when the prolongued cold kept the queens egg laying suppressed.Got to keep an eye on hive space to keep a check on early swarming!.Might have to Demaree later on perhaps.

[GRIZZLY]

Still cold but lots of activity. Plenty of stores to finish yet-hives quite heavy when hefted.How are the colonies further north getting on??

[Gscot]

Quite cold yet in Central Scotland Some activity when the temp. gets up a bit and bringing in some light green pollen(think its the alder catkins)but very few days when there out.Not much blooming here at the moment

[Jon]

We had a glorious day here today, sunshine from dawn to dusk.
The nucs at the bottom of the garden were bringing in pollen first thing with the temperature around 6c.
I noticed a willow tree just 20 feet away in a neighbour's garden was covered in yellow catkins and the bees were all over it.

[Calum]

http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=584&d=1300134123
15°C today, checked 15 colonies, sold another three only three to check tomorrow. Lovely day. The bees were even finding nectar from somewhere.

[Hoomin_erra]

Well i'm still under a foot of snow. No activity that i can see, although when i opened them up a few weeks ago when we had the short warm spell i had eggs in one colony.

[gavin]

Had a foray into Highland Perthshire last night for a beekeepers' meeting and there was snow on the ground there too. Survival locally seems to have been reasonable so far - although they are acutely aware of course that winter is far from over.

At lunchtime today the back-from-death wee colony in the garden was out and about in the sunshine. Good to see that it is still alive. Maybe I'll get to have a better look at the apiary on Saturday as it looks like they may be flying then.

That was a cracking picture Calum.

[kevboab]

Finally ! Some sunshine. Good to see my girls flying instead of cuddling a bar of cadbury's fondant with central heating running full pelt. :-) Three colonies looking in good shape with pollen available when weather permits. So chuffed ! :-D

[GRIZZLY]

Cold,dank misty this morning-temperature expected to rise to 11 deg later.A quick peek into the top of the hives yesterday revealed bees crammed into every space.Must give more room to prevent forced swarming plus feed to keep them building up. With a bit of luck I'll be able to take off some early splits this season.
Checked the varroa boards under the floors and found 1 mite under 1 colony after a week-all the others seem clean.I will leave full inspections until the end of the month.Still loads of pollen coming in-mostly Whins I think.Good to have such strong early colonies to take full advantage of the OSR and Sycamores.

[Neils]

Today, well ok yesterday, I resisted the urge to go poking around in beehives. The weather was lovely but still a little cold for my liking.

So we went to B&Q instead, bought some wood and started making some hive stands as per the plans on dave cushman's site.

Time to get ready for this season in earnest!

[Calum]

B&Q? Sounds expensive....
My tip - many large companies that import or export anything are happy for anyone to come and take away their non euro pallets- trailer loads- otherwise they have to pay to get rid of them..
Dave complains they do not provide enough ventilation (half my hives are on old closed bottoms and I hear no complaints) one or two planks can be removed to improve ventilation.
I stack 4 high to save my back.

[Neils]

Got one colony on pallets at the moment, certainly doable and not noticed any problems with ventilation, I just fancied something a little nicer looking this time. 4 Hive stands for £20 of wood and a £5 of glue that'll do for plenty of other projects (like the Thornes seconds brood boxes I've got in the garage).

4 high sounds about right for pallets, mine is on two and despite being a 14x12 it's far too low to be comfortable inspecting.

[EmsE]

Lovely day here in the west managing 14 degrees. Went fishing with the Hubbie and spent my time trying to get pictures of the honey bees in the Gorse flower. Challenge now is to find the usb lead to upload them onto the computer.

[gavin]

Fishing?! I'm starting to realise that one thing quite a few beekeepers do (after keeping chooks of course, which seems almost universal) is fishing. Some even do both.

Of course, we have vegetarians watching too, so I'll shut up now.

Lovely to see that the bees are out everywhere. Get these pictures up! Even a blog?

If anyone has any trouble putting up images (I'm aware that the site can misbehave) I can upload them to an area on the SBAi server if you like, then you can link to them from there.

[Trog]

Fishing!!!!!!!! Ah, yes. 15 March was far too cold here to even think about opening the season. Warming up nicely now, though, and plenty of insect life around. Have tied some new flies ready but likely to be too busy to use them anytime soon. Maybe, just maybe, if I can take a break from painting or assembling kitchen cabinets I might be able to take a closer look at the bees tomorrow if it's really warm again.

[gavin]

My main fishing companion (my son Euan) is far away at the moment in British Colombia, so my trips out may be fewer this summer. It looks like you may get your wish. Should be a reasonable day tomorrow.

[Neils]

Colleague spotted another CBPV corpse outside one of my hives today. Not 100% convinced it's not the same one I saw the other day and we had some (very) light poo spotting on another colony in the same apiary. Think it might be time to get the matchbox out and do the sensible thing. My head tells me that it's probably nothing too much to get worked up about and I was intending to try and get a quick inspection in over the weekend, but the weather's supposed to cool down again, but I'm going to have to do at least a quick look on this one I think but perhaps leave condensing the double brood down to a single box for later in preparation to Bailey change it to a 14x12 as I think that might take more time than I want a colony open for at the moment.

[Calum]

CBPV corpse ? whats that?

[Neils]

Bee that is now pushing up the daisies that appears to have met its maker from Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus.

[GRIZZLY]

What an active last few days.The temperature has been high enough for a quick peek inside-loads of sealed brood,eggs and larvae.Bees VERY gentle and returning to the hives LADEN with pollen.Signs of fresh nectar as well.Still only found one dead mite under one colony after a week.Weather to get colder as the weekend approaches so will probably curtail foraging for a while.Time to keep an eye on stores as with all the brood activity they'll quickly consume everything.

[GRIZZLY]

Activity slowed a bit today with the drop in temperature.Bumbles getting active again.

[EmsE]

Saw a few different bumbles in the garden today- 1 fussing around the compost heap.

[Neils]

Bumbles spotted here too. Unconfirmed rumours of bees living in the gaps in the brickwork in one of our garden walls, but nothing see around the solitary bee shelter I put up a couple of weeks ago.

Been through two of my hives yesterday, I'd forgotten just how much I love doing this. Sadly too cold to take a leisurely look through them, but just having the hives open and seeing my ladies makes me happy.

[Jimbo]

Colonies at sea level last week were doing well and pollen going in but the colonies on the hill were not so active and no pollen seen. All OK today with pollen now going into all hives in abundance. Will need to get my breeding plan sorted and not leave it to the last minute as usual.

[lindsay s]

Hello all
It’s been about 8°c here for the last few days and the forecast for the next 10 days isn’t very bee friendly lots more wind and rain on the way. I had a quick look at my apiary yesterday and all 8 hives had bees flying at different strengths, I didn’t get too close, as I had left my veil at home. As soon as we get a calm day I’ll clean the hive floors and check the weight of stores. I’m hoping to do less spring feeding this year.
I’ve spoken to a few local beekeepers and nobody seems to have suffered any winter losses but its early days yet and no doubt some of us will find drone layers or queenless colonies once we can get into our hives.
The dandelions are starting to make an appearance, they’re an important source of spring forage up here and hopefully they will be in abundance this year.
Lindsay in Orkney (it’s a little bit north of Bristol)

[Neils]

Lindsay in Orkney (it’s a little bit north of Bristol)

:D :D

Is this going to be another winter that flies in the face of the "bees are dying!!!!!" I wonder?

I've checked two of my three so far and they both look fine. Looking at the forecast I think the other one will have to wait a little while but it looks good at the entrance. Funnily enough the one thing I haven't seen yet are dandelions, even on the paths in the allotment. I do work in concrete land though.

[GRIZZLY]

Still lots of activity despite the high winds (forecast 60mph for here) Light fawn pollen at the moment - haven't a clue as to the source.Whins still flowering strongly and my cherry trees bursting buds-fingers crossed theres no late frost.Daffodils are giving their best showing ever and very forward.

[Hoomin_erra]

Finally a good day to open up the hives. Both building with eggs and Larva present, stores building, and pollen coming in.
Being my first winter, there are a few combs where i have dead bees in the cells arse out, and mould on the comb. Will the bees clear it? or do i need to replace the comb?

[GRIZZLY]

NOT a beekeeping day today - cold,wet dank low cloud, bees shivvering. Not nice.

[gavin]

It looks like it might be improving for the weekend though? I've just seen a circle with '19' in it for my part of Scotland on Saturday so maybe I'll get a proper look at them then. Here in the Netherlands summer seemed to arrive yesterday afternoon. The swallows are here, maybe Galloway has them too?

G.

[GRIZZLY]

It looks like it might be improving for the weekend though? I've just seen a circle with '19' in it for my part of Scotland on Saturday so maybe I'll get a proper look at them then. Here in the Netherlands summer seemed to arrive yesterday afternoon. The swallows are here, maybe Galloway has them too?

G.
Still waiting for the first swallow Gavin--won't be long now.We've had a couple of Blackcaps - male and female on the fat balls yesterday and today tho'.Our different bird species count has just reached 59. The bees are going crazy,pollen pouring in and I presume nectar too.Going to have the first real inspection if the temperature remains high.There are so many bees in the hives that I'm going to have to super as well, as much for room as anything.

[chris]

No swallows yet, but the first cuckoo. I did my first inspection proper this morning. All fine and building beautifully. One hive bursting and drones flying, so I did a split and moved one half to the cherry orchard. The trees are in flower- a month ahead of usual. Hopefully all will go well as it is my most productive hive. I was planning to split it this year, though not nearly so soon. I have this horrible feeling that all this gain will have to be paid later. Or maybe it's just the pessimist beekeeper blues.

[Neils]

Well, I seem to be down a queen already and I still haven't managed to inspect all my colonies yet. One of the colonies is distinctly lacking in eggs and young larvae and there are 3-4 supersedure cells on one of the frames so I'll leave them alone now for a couple of weeks and see how they get on. I've given them a super in the meantime and have started a bailey change on the other colony. The hive on the nature reserve I've still yet to inspect this year, but I hope to get to it before next weekend.

[Jimbo]

Hi Nellie,

A bit early for queen cells. Is there any drones? I did see a few drones today when we opened the club hives to mark the queens but they would not likely be sexually mature yet.

[Neils]

That's what I though, but they are there and it doesn't appear to be swarming, t They're a reasonably strong colony and there are a few drones around in the hives at the moment, but not a huge number. They definitely had a queen two weeks ago, but apparently not today and not for some time by the looks of it.

[Calum]

finally got the last of the supers on my colonies, so now all but two on three magazines. 18°C here so the dandylion is giving nectar, pear trees all in full flower too. Selling of three colonies tomorrow - big demand here, estimated over 200000 colony losses in Germany.
Warnings from one of the beekeeping institutes to be on the lookout for swarms before the end of april and heavy varroa infestation. Seens about right with what is happening here in my area..

[gavin]

Pear is not quite out yet here but some plums are. And dandelions, and blackthorn. The bees were bringing in a variety of pollen types today.

My bees have mostly survived but some of them are really weak. Three I'm happy with and three have just made it. Two didn't.

[GRIZZLY]

Inspection day today.All colonies have come thro' the winter very strongly.All on 7 or 8 full frames of sealed brood with loads of stores and pollen.Going to be good candidates for the OSR and Sycamore.Plum blossom out,Cherry,Apple and Pear showing advanced flower buds.Queens are laying well with eggs and larvae of all stages.Still only the one colony showing very slight varroa-not an urgent candidate for treatment.I am getting my Modern Beekeeping Nationals this coming week so will shook swarm all the colonies onto new frames and clean wax in new hives . I intend taking splits from the remaining brood.

[EmsE]

Absolutely beautiful here for the past 2 days. I enjoyed my first inspection of the year today and the bees were so calm despite me changing their brood box for a nice fresh 1. There's 5 frames of brood in 1 colony & 4 in the other. There seemed to be an awful lot of stores in both- will need to provide more space I think for the queen next time I go down to see them. I checked the floor debris from 1 hive (collecting since 23/03) & no varroa found. My red current bushes have been in flower since last weekend & the bumbles (and a wasp) have been enjoying them, still waiting on the pears, but I have seen some lovely fruit trees in blossom- not sure what type yet.

[gavin]

The earliest of the pears were out today in the old orchard which seems to be something that happened overnight, but most of the pears (grand old trees up to 100 years old) are not yet out. Probably this morning rather than overnight for these first few to open, come to think of it. Plums are in full flower as are the local blackthorn. Apples are yet to come.

The most further on of mine will need an extra box soon and I may plump for a brood box to assist with nuc raising later. Also couldn't find any Varroa on the floors. Mine also seem to have been frugal with their stores overwinter, mostly taking around half of the half block of fondant on top and still with a couple of frames of stores each.

I still need to do a spring clean, replacing floors and painting some of the more scruffy looking supers.

[Neils]

Still got one hive I haven't looked at yet, but spent the day playing with hawks and just had enough time when I got home to make up another brood box. 2 down one to go though I don't think either of the allotment colonies are in any immediate danger of swarming!

[lindsay s]

I was just intending to clean the hive floors today but the weather was warm and sunny so I managed my first inspection of the year as well. Seven out of eight of my colonies were OK. One hive had a drone-laying queen and this was the hive that was vandalised last year. I think the queen was superseded late in the year and wasn’t properly mated. I’ve now united this hive and it was curtains for the queen.
None of my colonies have more than 2 or 3 frames of brood but this is quite normal for this time of year in Orkney. All the hives are OK for stores so I’ll let them build in there own time. I’m jealous of all you southern beekeepers who have to super their hives as it will be well into may before I can even think about that.

I am getting my Modern Beekeeping Nationals this coming week so will shook swarm all the colonies onto new frames and clean wax in new hives . I intend taking splits from the remaining brood.
:confused::confused::confused: If you are removing your bees from their old brood combs whats happening to the brood.
P. S. I have just been speaking to a beekeeping friend in Wiltshire he had a swarm arrive in an empty nuc box at his house today.

[GRIZZLY]

.

: If you are removing your bees from their old brood combs whats happening to the brood.


Allowed to hatch out on top of new supers. B.box stood on Snelgrove board so that I can filter emerging brood down to main hive..If mature drones were available I would make splits with the old brood and allow them to make queens.

[GRIZZLY]

Swallows arrived this morning Gavin.Bees flying well,gathering water,pollen and I presume nectar.They were very quiet and well behaved when I inspected them.I don't know why but we always make the first report on Swallows in the district.

[Jon]

My Conference pear tree was in flower at the end of last week and the Victoria plum was in flower before the end of March. I have several apple trees in flower a full 3 weeks earlier than last year.

[onj]

Saw two swallows in Dunbar yesterday. Loads of blackthorne, cherry and plum out here. It was 18 degrees on saturday, so I gave mt bees a visit. Both colonies doing well, foragers coming back covered in yellow pollen, I suspect from the plentiful gorse. Also some creamy white pollen which is not on my chart.

[Hoomin_erra]

Grampians are awash with Cherry, Gorse, and Blackthorn. Willow is still going, although they are coming to an end. Some of the fields are starting to turn yellow. Though i am not sure if that is Rape or something else. Possibly a green manure?

[EmsE]

Also some creamy white pollen which is not on my chart.

My bees were also bringing in creamy white pollen a few weeks ago and I don't know what it is.

[chris]

I took the grandchildren for a picnic to the cherry orchard today. On arriving I noticed that in the blackthorn hedge, and just behind the nuc from a split that I'd put there, there was a nice sized swarm. I was *sure* that the queen from the hive I’d split was in the other hive back at the main apiary and that as I’d put all stages of brood, the bees would have stayed put in the nuc. However you never can be sure with bees, and with a witch just down the road. Anyway, rapidly sorting my priorities, I ate the good food, drank the fine wine, and leaving the grandchildren with my wife, went off and collected my gear.
Looking in my nuc, I saw all was fine, so this was a swarm from elsewhere, though I’ve no idea from where as I know of no other bees nearby. The law says that if you have a Corsican mother in law you can claim any swarm, so this one would be for replacing the one the witch ate the other week. As it was attached to intertwining branches from different bushes I decided to try the following: I put just one frame of old comb at each side of the hive and then manoeuvred the hive into the 18 or so inches under the swarm. I quickly cut all the branches, closed up the hive, waited to check that any stragglers were trying to get inside, and took it back to my main apiary. There, I opened up, and on top of the tangle of thorny twigs and bees I put 8 super frames of drawn comb. I’ll check in a couple of days, and should be able to throw out the blackthorn.
I’ve now got to quickly prepare some bait hives as I’ve a feeling some bees are showing too much interest in one of the chimneys.

[Trog]

My bees were also bringing in creamy white pollen a few weeks ago and I don't know what it is.

It could be wood anemone. We had a few bees down in our wood working the anemones and their pollen was creamy white. Not many bees, though, even though it was only a couple of yards away. They're spoilt for choice for forage now so I suppose there were more attractive/better yielding sources around.

[Trog]

Interesting, Chris. My lot also seem to prefer blackthorn for swarming into!

[chris]

594

The swarm watching us picnic

[chris]

I checked the hived swarm yesterday. All was fine. The queen had started laying
The twigs and bits of branch were more or less abandoned, and I could throw them out.
597
In one place where I couldn't fit any frames because of the twigs coming too high, the bees had constructed some comb attached to the cover board ,to fill the gap.
596
You can see the wax makers working below the frame.
595

[Neils]

Today's escapades: http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/entry.php?123-Down-to-Earth-with-a-bump.

[Calum]

a great couple of hours today with the bees.
12kg weight gain in the last 7 days on the hive on scales.
Made 3 new colonies up, and 12 queens are being raised in a 6 frame nuc I set up last weekend (yesterday I removed all swarm cells so they jumped at the material I gave them today). Will remove them on Wed and add another 12..
Seven of my colonies are doing really well, three are a little behind. I'm giving my last over wintered spare colony away, so thats those out of the way too.
I'll sleep well tonight.

[GRIZZLY]

Finaly got the residue my poly nationals today.I had collected 3 at the BBKA meet at Stoneleigh on Saturday from the Modern Beekeeping stand leaving them owing me 7. I will be spending the next few days assembling and painting them before transferring my bees to their new homes.Just in time for the local O.S.R.which is just coming into flower - this is quite a bit later than the Rape "down south".Met phil McAnespie and John Mellis down there - representing us Scottish lot.Lots of foreign equipment manufacturers as well as the usual British suppliers - some realy mouth watering (and expensive) equipment on show.
Examination of my colonies going to plan - no sign of Q cells or cups yet and the Queens continueing to lay well.The bees are very gentle and a pleasure to handle.Plenty of stores coming in now with surplus being stored in the supers and lots of pollen in the brood boxes.Bees all over my fruit trees and soft fruit bushes - could be a bumper year especially if the present warm weather holds.Temperatures 21 deg.C today and the same promised for tomorrow.

[Calum]

Grizzly do you remove your cups?

[GRIZZLY]

Grizzly do you remove your cups?
No just leave them but they are on new(last year) frames and just haven't built any cups yet.

[Neils]

Picked up a second swarm this morning, they seem to come to us now, both have settled within 10 feet of each other maybe 20 feet from the apiary. Two nice prime swarms and definitely not ours (wrong colour to be from my friends hives and I've got no laying queens at the moment).

[Calum]

made two nucs today, both six framers. The stock scale is up 15kg on sunday no wonder they are in the mood to swarm.
Wood honey coming in now, pity I was looking forward to a good spring honey crop, now we will only get a mix.. :(
Oh well the second super will be going on most of the colonies tomorrow, and thats me out of frames. With only 4 casts done!

[Neils]

Today I wasn't supposed to be doing bee things, we went up to sort out the allotment.

My friend arrived in short time, we'd looked at one of his hives that appeared to be queenless 4 days ago. There were apparently two queen cells in the colony and we weren't sure whether it was swarming or supersedure. There were still eggs in the colony but despite going through it twice we couldn't see the queen.

So we decided to put the two frames with queen cells into a nuc, come back today and see if we could see eggs anywhere and take it from there. We knew there shouldn't be eggs in the nuc as we were pretty sure the queen wasn't in there, we were hoping to see eggs in the main brood box.

Today, there were no eggs in the Nuc, no eggs in the main colony, but a bunch more queen cells that we'd almost certainly missed looking last time. We think now that they've swarmed and are possbily one of the swarms we collected. we didn't before, but once again, queen cells are easy to miss when they're covered in bees, the new ones were on the frames of drone brood.

We decided to knock down all but one of the queen cells in the main brood box and leave the nuc as is, it's bled all its flying bees and we'll move it again next week just before the queens start to emerge, this way seems like hedging our bets. There's enough bees and brood in the nuc to keep going, plus stores. If the queen cell in the main brood box doesn't do anything, hopefully we'll end up with a queen in the nuc. If we get both, maybe we'll sell the nuc on.

[gavin]

All this swarm talk is making me twitchy. I last saw my bees 5 days ago when I thought: 'Hmmnn, must give *that* one a second brood box at the weekend, and *those* ones more space within a week'. Maybe I can slip away at lunchtime tomorrow to do the deed. I'm sitting here with that mixed aroma of western red cedar, beeswax and PVA glue, the smell of spring equipment assembly. Nice.

[gavin]

Wood honey coming in now, pity I was looking forward to a good spring honey crop, now we will only get a mix..

Is that the stuff from aphids on spruce trees? That seems awful early.

[Jon]

The sycamore flowers are about to open and the horse chestnut is already in flower in Balmy Belfast

[gavin]

Sycamore well out here. The dandelions seem to be at their peak too which seems wrong somehow. I think that they usually manage to bloom before the OSR but this year the OSR was very early. Maybe they (the dandelions) are sticking to the calendar but some other things not? Where is a botanist when you need him ....

[Jon]

The blackthorn and the hawthorn are in flower at the same time here. I can't remember that happening before.
Blackthorn flowers late March and Hawthorn mid to late May in a normal year.
Apple blossom 3 weeks early as well. Pear and plum normal flowering time. Dandelion flowered early but there is still a lot about.

Oil seed rape about normal as well.

[gavin]

That's odd - I don't think that our hawthorn is out yet. We seem to have two types of blackthorn. Planted ones around road landscaping and the like which is always earlier (and now over) and blackthorn in copses and the like which is later and still in flower. Probably real native stuff in the copses and some exotic genotype in the plantings.

Maybe they need exotic bees too to go with all this exotic planting.

We did have some early dandelion but there is now a major showing of it in some places.

[Neils]

All this swarm talk is making me twitchy. I last saw my bees 5 days ago when I thought: 'Hmmnn, must give *that* one a second brood box at the weekend, and *those* ones more space within a week'. Maybe I can slip away at lunchtime tomorrow to do the deed. I'm sitting here with that mixed aroma of western red cedar, beeswax and PVA glue, the smell of spring equipment assembly. Nice.

We're definitely a month + ahead of last year looking through my notes. Our Association has a "deal with swarming" day next month which, ordinarily would be fine. Not this year. One of mine swarmed, I reckon around 10th April, I hadn't even opened it up yet and we've picked up another two since then.

[Jimbo]

Checked my strongest colony yesterday and saw drones which means they will be mature in a few weeks. The bees were also making queen cups so it will now be weekly inspections for this one.

[Mellifera Crofter]

I checked the hived swarm yesterday. All was fine. The queen had started laying
The twigs and bits of branch were more or less abandoned, and I could throw them out.
597 ...

Chris or Gavin,

The attachments lead to an 'invalid attachment' message - am I the only one who can't see them?

Kitta

[chris]

Hello Kitta. I had trouble uploading, so perhaps it won't work. Works for me but that's probably normal. I know nothing about computers, so Gavin will have to help out.

Updating, I checked the hive again yesterday. Ahem, it's never too late to do something stupid. My idea was that the bees would build beneath the super frames in the brood box, and then I'd nadir them out with a second brood box.. Firstly, I didn't think of putting a starter strip underneath the bottom bar. My, my, they have cross combed like crazy down there. And, I find that I used an old hive that has the floor screwed to it by screws going up from the bottom.So, no nadir, and no possibility of taking out the *half* frames with dangling comb without causing a lot of damage. Any ideas anyone?

[gavin]

I have to admit that the site can be a bit erratic about accepting uploads. Chris, if you'd like to email the attachment to me I can try to make them visible.

Regarding your wee cross-combing and dead-end nadiring problem - I'd just put a normal box on top and let them work upwards as usual. Your odd box of comb might be vacated later in the summer, or you could wait until next spring when surely it will be empty as the bees go up above?

[gavin]

I checked mine yesterday. Significant build-up in the last 6 days, nice new white wax where they had been stuffing in the honey. Two are now double-brooded and another will be getting a super soon. If only I could arrange to have strong spring colonies as some do then I might have had an early super by now. They are working the rape but - at least judging from the pollen at the entrance - not exclusively. No sign of bees hunching up and closing one eye, so maybe my bees have escaped the neonic holocaust once again. Must get some bait boxes sorted (whilst watching the Royal Wedding with one eye of course) on Friday. Sycamore in full flow, despite some rain the other day the OSR probably isn't yielding as it could.

[EmsE]

I don't think that our hawthorn is out yet.
.

The hawthorn flower buds are there, so shouldn't be too long now. There'll hopefully be a better crop of berries from them this year- they make lovely wine.

My colonies are definitely a couple of weeks ahead at least of last year & that's without stimulating them with weak syrup & pollen patties like I did last year.

[gavin]

My wine-making kit is going to be occupied making mead this year, he says optimistically!

[EmsE]

It could be wood anemone. We had a few bees down in our wood working the anemones and their pollen was creamy white. Not many bees, though, even though it was only a couple of yards away. They're spoilt for choice for forage now so I suppose there were more attractive/better yielding sources around.

It probably is as the surrounding land is ideal for the wood anemone. Thanks Trog- it's time I started getting to know my local plants.

[EmsE]

I've been promising the hubbie home grown mead for the past couple of yrs and he's still not got any:o As they say, good things come to those who wait- it'll taste so much better when it's finally brewed (come on bees pleeeeeeeease!)

[b.lambert]

putting a second super onto double brood this morning, looked at them on Tuesday and it is boiling over with bees! placed first super on 14th with drawn comb and some foundation has drawn it all out and honey being made. Could not find her Maj but plenty evidence of her presence 13 frames of brood, eggs and larvae. Yesterday neighbor had gardeners in with noisy machines, just before this I had been sitting out almost falling asleep with the hum of the girls when the silence was broken. Within the next five min's I had about half a dozen bees intent on stinging me! One got caught up in my hair the furious buzzing noise indicating her intent, managed to free it then let it go outside I then went back out only to be attacked by the same bee again! Alas, her valiant actions led to her demise but not without a result! Now the question pondering is was it the machines? or were they still unsettled from the inspection on Tues? Hope they are in better fettle this morning

[Mellifera Crofter]

I have to admit that the site can be a bit erratic about accepting uploads. Chris, if you'd like to email the attachment to me I can try to make them visible.

Regarding your wee cross-combing and dead-end nadiring problem - I'd just put a normal box on top and let them work upwards as usual. Your odd box of comb might be vacated later in the summer, or you could wait until next spring when surely it will be empty as the bees go up above?

Chris, I'm still curious to see your photos, please.
Kitta

[chris]

616

617

618

Kitta, I've just given my computer a hernia. Does this work?

[gavin]

It does - thanks Chris and apologies for not getting round to it myself.

[gavin]

Hope they are in better fettle this morning

Hope that they were. Mine have been really calm this year but yesterday were a bit more defensive. I think that generally follows a build up - when they are stronger they can afford to be more aggressive with intruders.

Lovely day for a spot of beekeeping! I wonder if Thornes is open today?

G

[Calum]

My mirst 7 queens from 2011 hachted today! Another seven will be out on sunday, and seven more a week later.
Excellent. Cool week so only 7kg weight gain this week so far on the scales... What is the going price for mated queens in scotland?

[gavin]

Thornes charge £48 but their prices for nucs are about double the price if you buy locally and maybe that applies to queens too. To be honest I don't know how much trade there is in mated queens. Some folk will give them away to friends and association colleagues. Folk ought to be prepared to pay for quality locally raised queens, especially from known, bred stocks. Maybe we'll be able to do that one day and at least recover the not inconsiderable costs of doing it properly. We had some plans to do this in the east of Scotland but there are other pressures on folk's time and resources at the moment so I'm not sure that much is going to happen this year. Jon raises queens in NI. Are you planning to sell some of them Jon?

'Only' a 7kg weight gain?!

[Jon]

Dunno. I suppose it depends how many I get mated. I have 18 Apideas.
I have volunteered to get a breeding programme up and running through my bka and we are meeting on Monday evenings starting 9th May.
A lot of my free time will be going into that but hopefully a few others will help spread the donkey work if you pardon the expression.
There should be more than 50 apideas available.

I might concentrate on more queens but less nucs this year as it is hard getting the bees to make up the nucs. I have one queen right cell raiser set up already and I have some cells due to hatch on the 8th May. A few colonies are making drones now.

I can graft from a pure bred Galtee queen mated in the Galtee valley with Galtee drones or I can graft from some of my own queens, some of which have Galtee genetics in them.

There is one guy in my bka who has 40+ colonies so if he wants to get nucs ready for new members, I could provide the queens.

[gavin]

Turns out that Thornes wasn't open. Hrmfff. And half of Newburgh was out having a Union Jack be-decked party! What an odd place.

Spotted plenty of Correx in the fields beside the roads though! Many of them a nice shade of blue.

So I retreated to the apiary and did some box painting and scraping and dusty corner roasting (there's a knack to keeping those blowtorch thingies alight, basically keep them upright). One colony even let me paint linseed oil on the new brood box atop the old one without getting dressed up for the occasion.

I had a few visitors whilst standing with a brush or roller in hand. A few red mason bees, showing that they don't just congretate at my front porch. A queen wasp (she never hesitated and quickly moved on). An even two high-pitched honey bees. You know the noise they make when they are telling the world that they are in a desperate hurry to do something? Ready to go and win a half-mile race?! They sniffed around the piles of woodware giving it all the once-over. They *must* be house-hunting surely, and if so they are none of mine and they were a nice dark colour. Quickly readied a couple of nuc boxes and spotted a few drops of lemon grass oil on the top bars and on the entrance, just in case.

[Mellifera Crofter]

...

Kitta, I've just given my computer a hernia. Does this work?

Yes, thanks Chris. My sympathies. I hope you can sort it out soon.

Kitta

[b.lambert]

does the lemon grass attract them? I use lots of essential oils and I have often wondered if their therapeutic properties could be used when dealing with the bees for example the apiguard has lots of thymol within is composition thymol coming from thymus vulgaris. I have often used lavender oil on myself before going to the hive and I swear it calms them! have never found any research on essential oils and bees interested if any one knows of any articles

[b.lambert]

sorry I meant apistan

[gavin]

Sounds like Newburgh wasn't so odd after all with 50% of the UK population glued to their TVs yesterday.

Interesting that oils may calm them. My lemon grass oil is always in the pocket of my bee suit - maybe that helps. Yes, it is good at attracting the attention of bees and helps fill any bait boxes with swarms. Two drops on the top bar, renew after a month or so. I also put a spot on the nuc entrances yesterday.

[Neils]

Still no laying queens in any of my hives :( I'm giving the one that was a drone layer another 24 hours to be sure. Either there is a new queen or there are some laying workers, but I'm not certain which and there were only a few cells that had eggs in them. Once had an egg on the side of the cell, another few had 2-3 eggs in the cell a few more did appear to have single eggs, but I wasn't 100% sure. There shouldn't be laying workers as the colony's had donor brood added of which there is still some sealed. I'm going back tomorrow when there'll hopefully be clearer signs as to what is going on. Needless to say I couldn't find a queen, but I'm going to have another look tomorrow and decide then what I'm going to do (bin them basically if they're laying workers and move one of the swarms into its place)

[GRIZZLY]

Realy too windy to do anything for the past few days.I've got a colony with a single Q cell and I can't find the queen although there are eggs and young brood.A candidate for supercedure perhaps?I expect the queen decamped onto the b.box walls during examination.I've to pick up a colony from one of our members who has given up due to pressure of work.I need to have a good look at them as they have been left to their own devices for the past year.They have however come thro' the winter/spring strongly and seem to have resisted Varroa quite well-so one to watch in the next few months.I'm still without my car at the moment so am frustrated at not to be able to put my bees on the OSR for a few more days yet despite having 70 acres for my exclusive use.

[chris]

My lemon grass oil is always in the pocket of my bee suit - ...... Yes, it is good at attracting the attention of bees and helps fill any bait boxes with swarms. Two drops on the top bar, renew after a month or so. I also put a spot on the nuc entrances yesterday.

Talking to an old boy today who has been baiting hives for 50 odd years. Being a peasant, he wouldn't go spending money on any *fancy*oils.:rolleyes:

His recipé:
Crush up some old black wax containing some pollen. Add a small amount of water, and boil it up for a few minutes. Leave it to cool and then filter it. Add a little honey to the blackish liquid and spray it on the inside of the hive. You can also scrape some propolis from the inside of a hive. Warm it enough to make a ball that becomes hard and brittle when it cools, and when rubbed on the inside of the bait hive is very effective for attracting bees.

[chris]

Today, the maple (acer campestre) outside my bedroom window has started buzzing. And the one in the chicken yard.I've never seen the bees working them so frantically before.

[Calum]

Maybe we'll be able to do that one day and at least recover the not inconsiderable costs of doing it properly. We had some plans to do this in the east of Scotland but there are other pressures on folk's time and resources at the moment so I'm not sure that much is going to happen this year. Jon raises queens in NI. Are you planning to sell some of them Jon?

'Only' a 7kg weight gain?!

the costs are not that high! honestly! Jenter or Nicot systems are about 50 pounds. 10kg powderd sugar mixed with 6kg honey for apidea feeding. Bees are free. Apideas do cost, but pay themselves of with the second queen sold. Chinease larve spoon 3 pounds. and if you want to go rolls royce an excellent egg brooder with humidity control is >200 pounds. I will raise 30 queens for my own use this summer. time
make breeder colony 30 - 40 min
(1 week later)
clear breeder of queen cells 15 min
remove young larve (20) to plastic cups for breeder 50min
(5 days later)
cage closed queen cells 15 min
7-8 days later
prepare apadieas 10 min / apidea
shake & spary bees from breeder for apidea 15min (quicker if they are in a bad mood)
add bees to apidea and insert queen max 5 min / apidea
I know this because my wife always has the watch on me and enjoys asking me when I'll be finished especially when I am doing something fiddilly with a hand full of bees!

And yes only 7 kg it was 13 the week before!

[Jimbo]

My plan this year is to produce some queens using the cupkit and mininuc method using Amm colonies that showed 95% Amm using wing morphometry. As well as producing some queens from the hybrid stocks I have by splitting and making up 5 frame nucs for some new beekeepers. Just waiting on sufficient drones to appear before starting which should be within the next few weeks.

Jim

[Adam]

Today I need to inspect a hive that swarmed yesterday and the bees came back. They did it again today. It's the ONLY one I didn't inspect last weekend but I suspect queencells in there. The queen is clipped so maybe she hasn't gone or walked back or got lost on the grass.

[Neils]

Spent most of the day with Roger Patterson who came to visit us at Bristol to talk bee improvement. Took a mosey up to the allotment afterwards to test a theory about swarms settling and after he'd left took a look at my colonies... Well almost.

A nuc that wasn't entrance blocked looked a lot busier than it should have been. I knew it had a few old frames of stores in it and initially wondered if it was just being robbed out, but it was far too busy. Sure enough opening it up, it was packed to rafters with bees and also had a nice bit of drawn comb where the 5th frame should have been. They weren't there on friday so are definitely new additions to the apiary and definitely didn't come from our hives.

As there's no brood there at the moment we decided to shook swarm them into a full hive now before they get too settled. As this is an unmarked queen my suspicion turns again to the "natural" beekeepers at the bottom of the allotment and a stroll down to eyeball their hive does suggest that the bees may be from there (plus one week ago that we got the prime swarm could well indicate a caste) so we'll be keeping a close eye on them. If it is a virgin queen I wonder whether OA is a good idea and whether a good dose of Icing sugar might do the trick instead.

Mine continue to labour on. I do at least have one queenright colony which is the first swarm that arrived. I gave the Drone Layer that I ran a virgin n a few weeks back a comb of eggs last week and there's a nice fat emergency queen cell on it so it looks like she didn't make it. The other colony is also still queen less so now have a frame of BAS (brood all stages) to play with to hopefully give me some indication as to what they're up to.

Despite only having drawn half the box, I've stuck a super on the swarm as they're pcking the frames with stores and brood so hopefully the last box of drawn super comb I have will give them a little more room to pack away some honey while they draw out the brood box.

[gavin]

How is the old codger?!

I have a few swarm boxes out but there doesn't seem to be much interest in them yet.

[Jon]

Roger 'Ley Line' Patterson to his friends.
Could be the West Sussex answer to Rudolf Steiner.
Did you mention those bizarre articles in the bbka magazine?
Seems like a perfect opportunity.

I believe he is coming over to NI shortly to speak to the Judean people's front (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb_qHP7VaZE) Institute of Northern Ireland beekeepers (INIB) which is affiliated to the bbka. The deadly foe of the Ulster Beekeepers Association (UBKA) of which I am a member.
Might tag along to do some heckling.

Nellie, what about those natural beekeepers?
Putting their escapees in a national brood box is like feeding meat to a vegetarian.
Do they even know when they lose swarms? If you don't look in the long box you are probably blissfully happy to see the bees continue to fly in and out in a treatment free manner.
Could be quite a varroa load.

[Neils]

He sends his regards, at least I think it can be construed as regards :D

I did mention the articles, as did he. Might I put on some rose tinted specs and opine that their editor is still finding his/her feet?

I didn't put their escapees in the Nuc, they settled there of their own accord. Did you get their article that appeared in our allotment newsletter by the way?

As they bought the bees from the enemy last summer I'm hoping they're still relatively Varroa free, but I did dose the first swarm with Oxalic Acid. Given the timing it's not unreasonable to assume that what turned up yesterday (presumably) is a caste swarm so I'm a little wary of dosing a virgin queen with oxalic acid.

Obviously we didn't open up the hive, but it otherwise seems to be in reasonable fettle at the moment, but it's early days yet, they picked it up in late July last year so it's not had much time to pick up a large Varroa load. As it had an observation window we might have looked at it through there and it's maybe 7-8 frames at the moment but only just has enough bees covering those frames hence suspecting that we've had two swarms off it so far. The third we think has come from elsewhere.

Ironically, they have two bait hives out, another TBH and a Warre both of which they could have bees in now. We did consider leaving a note on the hive saying "thanks for the bees" but thought that might be rubbing it in a bit.

[Jon]

I didn't put their escapees in the Nuc, they settled there of their own accord.

I got the article, thanks.

That must be the Imidacloprid disorientating them. No other explanation for a swarm setting up home in a box which is squarish rather than long.
Why would a bee leave a top bar hive for a national unless it had taken leave of its senses, or perhaps failed to read the collected works of Phil Chandler.

[Calum]

Hectic weekend!
Harvested about 70% of the frames in my supers, leaving alot of full but uncapped frames behind.
118kg from 56 frames out of 10 colonies. Not bad at all.
made up another 2 artificial swarms (so nine now in total), have 4 laying queens in apedias that need a home. started another 2 queenless 5 frame colonies on queen cups with three novice beekeepers in attendance (thats worth 100€/student from the Bavarian government).
On the downside I got in lots of trouble for not taking my wife out for mothersday dinner (relocating colonies to a new beehouse) which was yesterday here in Germany... OOOPs that will cost me dear. :)

[GRIZZLY]

B....y wind,making inspections difficult and low temperatures not helping.Finaly managed to get my two remaining stocks re-hived into their new homes.Both bursting with bees and loads of stores in the B.box.Had to forgo the rape this year due to new plastic hives being such a late delivery.Colonies still got 2 supers on each ,filling up nicely with early spring flower honey-I'll have to add a third soon at this rate.I don't know the nectar sources-maybe bluebell which is very abundent this year.Sycamore is just coming into flower as well as well as horse chestnut plus all the fruit blossom.Could be an excellant apple crop this year too.Managed to lose one swarm I think.Full of Q cells - no eggs and couldn't find her majesty.Knocked down all the cells except one with a nice fat larva,closed them up and let them get on with it.Cold wet weather meant I couldn't get into them when I needed to. No Q cells in the other colonies tho'-all full of bees with side to side brood.High winds and cold wet weather not going to help with Q mating.

[EmsE]

It looks like our apiary visit could be cancelled on Sunday because of the weather:(

[gavin]

I looked through the colony at the association apiary at lunchtime and did an artificial swarm on them as there were open queen cells with grubs. Once they've developed further I'll probably split that box into 3-4 nuc boxes with mature queen cells for mating. Although it was breezy the sun was out and it was warm enough.

Then at 6 tonight I tried going through my own. Not a good idea. They were more than a little feisty although I still came away with no stings.

[Neils]

I might get a pot or two of honey yet.

The swarm looks like it's going to be the colony to beat. Fabulous bees. I know they're only over 5 frames but in the context of Roger (Patterson)'s Queen workshop last weekend they're a no brainer. If I was an idiot I'd inspect without a suit let alone a smoker, if they live through winter they're everything I'd like to see from bees from a personal point of view. I 'd like to see some sign of VSH too, but maybe you can't have everything.

The other two colonies are getting on. One now has a new queen that we marked today. The other doesn't. We ran a virgin queen in a few weeks back and she's obviously not worked out. there are two fat queen cells on a donor frame from the swarm colony. If I'm honest I should combine this with one of the others, but another queen from that swarm is too good an opportunity to pass up.

The other colony also has a queen. This was the one that swarmed before I did the first inspection. We couldn't find her, but they're still mean and I'm glad they're not on the allotment. If things were slightly different I'd requeen this hive tomorrow.

I took my mentee around again today and thankfully this time we got to do some "standard" beekeeping compared to last time. Fair play to her, I've not managed to put her off yet and after 3 swarms collected so far we've promised her the next one.

All things considered it's capped off a good week. I'm not going to get to get much honey this year but I've learned a huge amount.

[Jimbo]

With all the recent bee thefts its good to know my bees are in good hands and being protected 24hr a day. I thought I would go up early this morning (8.00am) to stick a sugar bag on a 5 frame nuc I made up this week as I was worried that the nuc would starve with all this recent bad weather. The job only took a few minutes but just as I closed up the nuc I was met by a very large dog and two MOD police handlers. Having an apairy located on MOD property does have it's advantages

[Trog]

What? More bee thefts? Apart from Dundee, where else?

[gavin]

Wales and Hampshire most recently I believe. Two summers back, 11 hives in West Lothian belonging to a local commercial beekeeper.

[Calum]

Just reached the highpoint of my aparist adventures so far. 3 of my colonies have been selected to be part of the 8 that will supply the regions (West Allgäu) mating site with drones.
The regular breeders had very high losses so they cast about for good alternatives.
The guy from the agricultural ministry gave me a rating of 3.5 (agressive) 3 (steadfast) and 3.5 (broodfill) at an open stand bad weather. Scale was 4 good-1 bad. I had nothing to do good bees though... selling colonies at a premium price will be much easier though.

downside two of my 2011 colonies swarmed yesterday afternoon (three swarms). I only caught 2 of them.
such is life.

[EmsE]

I'm moving my hives to a new apiary site and thought that it would be a good idea to do one of them last night at 6.30 as it was raining.....as it had been all day:(. I was really surprised when, after sealing the entrance up, some bees began to return to the hive to find they couldn't get in. It wasn't due to any escaping as I filled the entrance with foam as I managed that before they realize. Needless to say they weren't happy to find their home being carried away. Points to note: A small number of bees still venture out in the rain:confused: & they can sting through denim.

[gavin]

Ahh ... one of the down-sides of having Amm, that they forage in typical Scottish weather (not that they sting through denim!).

[gavin]

The guy from the agricultural ministry gave me a rating of 3.5 (agressive) 3 (steadfast) ......

I wonder how the guys from our ministry would rate me?! :p

Seriously though, well done. This illustrates very well the differing attitudes to beekeeping in different EU member states. It would be wonderful if our officials got involved with breeding and selection. As it is, that is down to a small number of enthusiasts, most of whom are too busy on other things to spend the time required to get it right.

[gavin]

I'm moving my hives to a new apiary site ....

Trouble? Looking ahead? Most of us must start with the bees in the garden then graduate to keeping them where they will not annoy the family or the neighbours. My neighbours are never out of their garden in the summer months, save for a couple of hours on Sunday morning, so stress-free beekeeping was getting hard.

And my news of the day? Stopped off at the association apiary on the way home to spend an hour and a half painting some more polystyrene boxes, nucs and full Nationals. Having bought some Denrosa/Swienty poly Nationals at the weekend I tried assembling a brood box. Heaven! You just push the sides together and knock them into place with the heel of your hand. The painting may take a while but the assembly is trivial.

[EmsE]

... Having bought some Denrosa/Swienty poly Nationals at the weekend I tried assembling a brood box. Heaven! You just push the sides together and knock them into place with the heel of your hand. The painting may take a while but the assembly is trivial.

Wow, that sounds like my kind of self-assembly hive. Are they compatible to mix with the wooden boxes?

Reason for the move? Neighbours & space really. I need to be able to visit the bees whenever it suits me, trying to juggle work, kids, weather & husbands fishing is quite difficult, so now they're going to the middle of nowhere it should hopefully be less of a worry. Also, where I was before didn't have the scope for me to build the number of colonies. Sad to go though.

[GRIZZLY]

What colour are you painting them Gavin ??.Mine are a nice shade of green which blends nicely in with the garden.The assembly of mine take a little longer as you have to add top and bottom reinforceing strips but, like yous they simply push together-add glue if you must but not really neccessary.Going to house some neucs into a couple more tomorrow.

[gavin]

Fishing, did you say fishing?!! Ahh (wistful look as I haven't been out enough this year ...).

As far as I can tell the outside dimensions are the same as a cedar National but I'll check when I'm next there. I've been told that you can park wooden wire excluders (you know what I mean), supers and the like on top. The walls are thick so you can only get 10 frames in a box.

I should really post some pictures, so look out for that ESBA Apiarist fellow's blog.

The real reason for going poly was the stark difference in survival in the 2009-2010 winter of colonies in wood and colonies in polystyrene. However, the low cost, the lighter weight (for lugging to the heather) and the ease of assembly are all plusses too.

Getting the bees away from people who may get stung changes your beekeeping. I'm more relaxed now. And the woodpeckers (greater spotted and green), treecreepers, buzzards, roe deer and more just add to the pleasure.

[gavin]

Murray suggested painting the rims with polyurethane varnish (hardens them for protection from hive tools and stops bees chewing them) so that is one more thing to do. I'm using B&Q acrylic exterior masonary paint in two shades, a sandy one and a pale grey one. I'll post pictures another day.

Also have Paynes 6-frame nuc boxes and they are also getting the same paint. Nuc boxes and full poly Nationals are having their feeders painted internally with sand-laced paint to protect the polystyrene from mould and to make the surface rough for the bees to climb out.

[Calum]

I wonder how the guys from our ministry would rate me?! :p

Seriously though, well done. This illustrates very well the differing attitudes to beekeeping in different EU member states. It would be wonderful if our officials got involved with breeding and selection. As it is, that is down to a small number of enthusiasts, most of whom are too busy on other things to spend the time required to get it right.

Well the guy is one of 4 or 5 full time state employees that is only concerned with bees for our region.
they run training courses in the two beekeeper schools in Bavaria and come to clubs to give courses (next one I'll attend is queen breeding -for the third time but it is THAT good). He says breeding clement bees is doable in 4 generations if you start with 5 colonies. The rate of improvement (regardless of charecteristic) is always diminishing as the generations progress as delta from the potentioal optimum is getting smaller.
So if your bees are clement healthy and bringing in plenty of honey dont worry about it too much.

Germany does not support beekeepers as much for the sake of the aparists or bees but for the job bees do for agriculture and nature. They appreciate that the honey bee can no longer survive in the wild in the numbers required to satisfy agriculture and natures needs, thus the need for plenty of good quality beekeepers.
I think it is called joined up thinking in the uk...

[EmsE]

Yesterday I went to prepare the last hive that needs to be moved. It needed reducing down to a single brood which I managed only just- and that was because I'd taken 4 frames out to produce a nuc about 10 days earlier. Of course as I'm trying to do this, it keeps trying to rain but the job had to be done before the schools finished.

The hive was all ready to go when we went down to collect it late last night, however despite the very cold wind there was no threat of rain. After successfully blocking the entrance my husband lifted the hive off the stand it was on to place on the hive carrier but he caught the floor board which swiveled enough to let a lot of highly irritated bees come flooding out. We managed to get everything back into place, but not before they discovered how to find their way down my wellies!! We decided that it would be best not to continue in our efforts that night and will try again on Saturday when thy've hopefully forgiven us.
How long do bees hold a grudge for?

Just found out I've passed my Module 1 :D

[gavin]

Ah the joys of moving bees!

After several difficult flits to the heather I discovered ratchet straps (and within about 4 years of that worked out how to use them properly!).

They forgive you by lunchtime the next day, but don't do it on a regular basis or they'll get the message.

Well done on passing module 1. You're now well ahead of me in formal beekeeping qualifications.

[Neils]

Grats on the module 1 Emse!

[gavin]

What to do today? Visit Thornes for the last of the big order for the association apiary before it shuts at 12? Go straight to my apiary without passing Go or Collecting £200 to get on with my first attempt at filling Apideas? I was going to use some of my bees to fill 4 for spare Q cells of a good strain at the association apiary. Planning to demonstrate queen-raising at the next association summer meeting in mid June, so I'd best try it out.

There is a huge rain cloud over N Ireland and the west of Scotland with our name on it though, and tomorrow looks very chilly and showery. Best get on with all of it then ...

[Trog]

It's a bit more than a huge rain cloud, Gavin! Chucking it down, windy and cold. Rather glad I'm not camping at Scone this evening!

[Jimbo]

Enough of the rain! Does Thorne's sell waterproof beesuits?

[Trog]

Phew! Get hot enough doing inspections in a standard bee jacket and boiler suit without adding waterproof to the mix! Bees were out on cotoneaster yesterday, near enough to dash home during the frequent downpours, but have they brought in enough to ward off starvation? They were OK when we last looked, a few days ago, but they built up so fast in April, ready for the apple blossom (which was mostly wasted in the rain), that I'm a little anxious about them.

[EmsE]

Well that big grey cloud has been raining heavily on us since 11am today. We went out to move the last hive to it's new site. This time it went without a hitch but got soaked to the bone in the process- the bees were still insisting on flying but thankfully not down my wellies. At the next inspection (if the big grey cloud decides to move) I'll be taking some frames full of stores down with me just in case.

The wind has really picked up here in the past hour- certainly stronger than that forecast, which I'm hoping won't be a problem.

[gavin]

Ya big softie Jimbo! Like Ems and Trog I was out beekeeping in the rain. The beekeeping I did today was rather more than I usually do, with just a soggy jacket and veil. It was interesting seeing the reaction of different colonies to having the lid popped - one I knew was tetchy was positively vicious, though starting with heavy bombardment on the hands then bees in the face before offering the odd sting. They followed me for ages afterwards, and despite their Amm look they will be getting requeened when I can. A small overwinter survivor (Italian-looking) is building up now (5-frames) and went straight for me when I lifted the lid, no pussy-footing about with the thumping on the hands of the dark bees that warn me off. Another candidate for requeening. On the other hand the dark bees at the association apiary were fairly tolerant of being search for ripe queen cells.

I filled 4 Apideas today for the apiary (first-time experiment) and gave them queen cells from that nice colony. Both of my double-brood colonies had queen cells. One is now split into a bottom box with the queen and no queen cells, super, and a top box with vertical dividers and a special floor to make three compartments, each with queen cells. There may be a blog later. The other was split in the standard artificial swarm manner with the old queen on the old site with the flying bees in a spare box. Tomorrow I will deal with the queenless double brood with queen cells. I like the colony so may split it into a few nucs.

So much more fun than sitting in a room all day going through SBA Executive business.

G.

Forgot to say that in the space of a week all three of my bigger colonies have gone over to queen cell raising, just about on cue for a third week in May swarm (but I've thwarted that now :)). I knew before I arrived at the apiary. I stopped for a chat with the nearest neighbour and he told me that they had two honeybees die on their kitchen window-sill during the last few days, a sure sign of bees house-hunting.

[Trog]

Sorry to disappoint you but I wasn't beekeeping today. I try and avoid opening them up in the rain, though quite a few were flying, despite the rain. I think the reaction of your two colonies was perfectly reasonable; there was thunder forecast for here and no doubt a feel of it around even in Perth. How do they behave on a lovely sunny day?

Tomorrow's task for me will be to batten down the hives - a double-brick storm is forecast for Monday :(

[Jon]

a double-brick storm is forecast for Monday :(

...and Monday is the night out queen rearing group meets. That will be 3 Mondays in a row we have been confined indoors.
I think I will have to bring along the laptop and the scanner and run through some of the steps in Morphometry as there will be no chance of getting outdoors.

I have 11 Apideas set out, each one with a virgin queen so I will have to put a brick on top of each one.




Forgot to say that in the space of a week all three of my bigger colonies have gone over to queen cell raising,
Perfect opportunity for grafting 60 cells.
I remove the queen with a couple of frames to a nuc, wait 6 days, remove all cells and then introduce a frame of grafts from the best queen available.
I did this last Tuesday and got 21 cells started which will be going into Apideas of association members next Saturday.

[Jimbo]

The rain was so heavy I thought it might have been the end of the world like that American preacher was predicting. Anyway still here and the weather is improving today so the plan is to get the hives opened up

[Trog]

I think it was earthquakes rather than rain predicted. I thought earlier this morning that it might be a good day for checking colonies (though the only reason would be to check level of stores this time) ... until the downpour 15 minutes ago! Hope the cotoneaster bees made it back/took shelter in time. Sort of smash-and-grab foraging they're doing at the moment, but all credit to them, they're flying in almost anything!

[gavin]

Smash and grab foraging - like it! Bees seem to watch the clouds. You can see them scurrying home when there is a big cloud coming. Often I see the rush of bees at the entrance before I notice the cloud coming.

That's two great phrases in 24 hours. A two-brick storm!

[Trog]

The latter owes not a little to Sherlock Holmes, both the old version, where I gather there was such a thing as a two-pipe problem, and the new BBC one, 'a two-patch problem'.

[Neils]

Weather not great here today, no rain, but lots of wind so I only had a look at two colonies that I wanted a better I idea of what they're up to.

The swarm is progressing nicely, now covering 5 frames of brood. I had to swap the brood box out as the Thornes second I bought over winter turned out to be too narrow at one end. The frames fit, just, but then they're wedged tight.

They'd be doing better but I nicked two frames of brood to go into the other hives.

As I suspected might happen, it looks like the queen in the supersedure hive is going to be superseded again, there was a queen cell in place. but she's still there and laying so I've removed it for now to buy some time while the swarm expands a bit more, then I'll look to try and requeen her. As this colony is only across three frames I've also transferred them into one of my lovely new Nucs to hopefully make life a little bit easier for them rather than them rattling around in a big 14x12 brood box. That and I also just wanted to try out one of the Nuc Boxes.

[gavin]

Were they the 6-frame polystyrene ones from Paynes? I was hoping to fill 4 today with 2-3 frames of bees with Q cells at the association apiary (propagating a strain I rather like), but by the time I got to them the wind was howling and my thighs peppered with stings from a re-visit to the ones I split yesterday. Despite previous assurances that bees will forgive you by lunchtime the next next day, these ones clearly have revenge on their minds for rather longer than that.

[Neils]

Nope these were wood ones made by Tom Bick (http://www.thebeehiveworkshop.co.uk/) (not sure he's wound his way to this neck of the woods).

They're a thing of beauty, almost a shame to put bees in them to be honest:
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5101/5701364350_d0c016f16f_b.jpg

Forgot to put the entrance blocks in for the photo but hey ho.

No stings at least, I didn't go near the "grumpy" hive for that very reason. It's also got two supers and bags of room for brood now there's a laying queen in it so opening them up wouldn't really tell me anything I don't already know.

[GRIZZLY]

43 mph winds here today with gusts up to 70mph.Bees realy struggling to return to the hives having been lured out by the bright sunshine.Lots of damage to trees with whole shoots and leaves being stripped off.To be even worse later on in the week with even higher windspeeds.I wonder how many bees will be left in the hives when this little lot calms down.I need to get into the hives but dared'nt in these winds.Fortunately they've got plenty of food with the early honey flow - don't think there will be much left for me tho' ( heavy sigh).

[Trog]

Storm 10 here. Lost a birdbox with three great tits about a week away from fledging :( Just crashed out of the tree. Parents still OK so may have time to find a new home and start again. Beehives still in one piece when I checked this afternoon but WBC bait hive in several bits! National Geographic Explorer cruise liner taking shelter - can't blame them! Sometimes I wonder if we really do want a boat .... would not have liked to be at anchor in this!

[EmsE]

I'm just back from work and haven't seen so many trees & part trees blown over before. I put an extra brick on top of each hive yesterday but am wondering if I'd need to go down with some more. I think I'll need to go down anyway to put my mind at rest. Am i being too much of a worrier?

[gavin]

A wee bit of worrying doesn't do anyone any harm. I went to see mine on the way home, after picking my way through fallen branches and trees. The house nearest to my apiary had the top of an oak tree (a large and heavy piece) fall and hit its side (no structural damage I think) and demolish a wooded fence. Had to stop and heave a big larch branch out of the way to get there.

Jon knows of a cedar hive with two supers on its side this afternoon, and I saw a hive at an apiary near mine at a funny angle on the way home ... so a visit is well worth it I think. Colonies will recover from being tipped over but the sooner the better.

[EmsE]

Thankfully my hives are still vertical and I've added another brick to each. I'm really glad I didn't move my hives to where they were originally going to go as a great big tree has fallen over. Thankfully no trees to climb over, but the bottom field I need to walk through to get to my bees is flooded and discovered that there's a hole in my wellie somewhere- what an excuse to get some more:D. My bees are a good 8 feet or so above this so they'll be ok

[Jon]

Our queen rearing group met earlier this evening and we found two colonies blown over at a neighbouring apiary.
My correx nuc with half a breeze block on top was fine.
8 stalwarts turned up for the Morphometry demonstration.
there were fallen branches everywhere.

[Beejud]

I haven't seen winds as strong as this for a long time. Half a tree in the chicken run, no chicken casualties thankfully but branches and debris everywhere. I went down to my bees about 9.15 when the wind dropped enough to be able to stand upright and was met with carnage in the apiary. I followed trogs warnings and added extra boulders on the roof of each hive this morning. Hive 5 was artificially swarmed a few days ago and so was top heavy ie new brood box plus two supers plus old brood box ( now a nuc) plus super for feeder. I guess I should have realised it would be vulnerable in these winds but it has crashed over and taken hive 6 which was a double brood hive with it. My son helped me piece them all back together. There were bees everywhere and not showing much appreciation for our efforts. I was covered with bees at the end of it and feeling pretty depressed about it all. My queen cells in the nuc will be gonners now and who knows if the original queens have survived or are even in the correct box. You nurse them through the winter for something like this to happen. Will just have to leave them to settle and see what can be rescued from it all tomorrow.

[gavin]

Sorry to learn about your problems. Hopefully you will find things not so bad when you can have a good look in the morning.

[Trog]

Sorry to hear about this Beejud. What a wild day it was. Glad your chooks are OK.

[Neils]

Ouch! We missed it here, been a bit blowy and wet but nothing too serious.

[Trog]

Just been round the hives and hefted the supers. Empty, having been half full only a week ago, and I know the brood boxes were mostly full of brood, not stores. On my way down to the 'Co' to get some incredibly expensive sugar. One huge colony has chucked out some 50 drone brood; probably uncapping and evicting more even now. I've never seen the like at this time of year :(

[Beejud]

Well how lucky am I? Had a look at the patched up hives in between the showers and gusts today. Found both the marked queens in the correct brood chambers and the queen cells I was sure would have been squashed look intact so despite severe headaches all round they may be ok! What resilient insects bees are, despite the best efforts of the weather and their 'keeper'. Only time will tell but what a relief. About half of my hives are pretty light in stores now after this bad spell so I think I will need to plan ahead for the June gap. Do you think with the way the weather has been going it will arrive earlier too? Any weight I was feeling in supers has gone so no spring honey for me. I cant say I noticed any drones being chucked out but then my mind was on other things.

[EmsE]

That'll be such a relief for you Beejud, fingers crossed for your Queen cells.

I'm going armed with combs of stores tomorrow and will make some syrup too to help them along.

[Jimbo]

Checked all my colonies today to check for storm damage and found everything OK. Some of the colonies were a bit light in stores so stuck some sugar syrup on.

[GRIZZLY]

Things going from bad to worse.Went to inspect the bees yesterday-the first day following the extreme weather.The blighters decided to swarm and ended up inside my greenhouse firmly attached to a shelf and its contents.They were followed immediately by a quite large cast which ended up on the end of the roof of the same greenhouse.Has anyone tried to extricate bees from such places.I couldn't shake the bees down and there wasn't room to place a box over the bees.I ended up brushing the bees little by little into a box,then moving them outside where I threw them into another box propped up to make a bottom entrance.Further brushings were taken outside and thrown onto the ground in front of the second box where the bees were fanning furiously.After about 1/2 an hour I managed to transfer the majority of the swarm outside.There were quite a few loose bees inside still and I had to wait for them to cluster to capture them and make the transfer outside.
The second lot that had perched on the roof were even more difficult to capture as they had spread themselves over a fairly large surface area.I again resorted to brushing them up into a second box again placed on to the floor with a propped entrance.This took several attempts as the bees objected strongly and did a lot of flying around.I managed to box most of them and left everything to settle down before hiving them.To say the bees were upset is a bit of an understatement - they became very agressive and I got a few pricks for my troubles.Anyway no harm done and the stings have worked wonders for the rheumatism I get in a wrist I broke a few years back.Hey-ho now got to find a site for the little blighters.
Just goes to show what impossible beekeeping weather can lead to.

[Calum]

hi grizzly,
I find spraying them with copious amounts of water from a plant sprayer makes the job much easier.
They really clump well together and hardly as many fly up at all.

had a queen raising course yesterday, after chatting with the main beekeeping specialist for the Bavarian forestry and agriculture department he said he could be enticed to scotland to give a course or to if the participants can put up with his poor english....

[GRIZZLY]

Hi Calum ,I couldn't spray the cluster as it had engulfed a full carton of sulphate of ammonia I had ready for the cabbages.I had to resort to dry brushing instead.Good fun and all in a days beekeeping.Anyway they are now safely housed and takind down Ambrosia by the litre.Weather still cold,wet and very windy with the wind backing round to the north west.I've got to get everything into some sort of order as the beginners are coming for a demonstration the weekend after next.

[Calum]

Hi grizzly,
the other option would have been to delve in with your hands and fish out the queen.
Where she leads....

[Neils]

Calum,

Heard of that before but always qualified by "...marked queen...".

If the queen isn't marked or plainly visible is there a particular location within a swarm where shes likely to be? Ie if it were me I'd probably want to keep her safe in the middle but bees regularly ignore what I think would be a sensible thing to do.

[Calum]

Nellie, good point...
They can be enticed straight into a brood box with a frame of food and young (hungry) brood if they are inclined..

I passed up a swarm today- running out of places to put them and things to put them in (using fruit crates with cardoard inserts now). And I need to remove frames from my first 2011 colonies again tomorrow not to mention my main colonies.
I really do not want more than 30 colonies but things are going that way. -still only may!

[Beejud]

In to examine my bees today, the first nice day for a while. They had appeared to have put the swarm urge on hold with the bad weather but it's all change again. Eggs appearing in queen cups and one of my artificial swarms appears not to have worked as I found a huge sealed cell in with the queen. Surprised she was still there actually Has the June gap arrived yet do you think? Some of them are short of stores and I am feeding but there was a fine array of all colours of pollen coming into all the hives today so I'm not sure what to think. The temperatures seem to be on the rise now too thankfully

[Trog]

I put a second, much needed, feed on two days ago and although they were flying today I didn't feel the weather was good enough for an inspection, though it's 14 days since I was last into the hives. It was only just ten degrees and there was a cold wind. I've put out a box in the hope of catching any swarm and am checking the apiary area several times a day. I suspect that since they chucked out drones last week a swarm isn't top of their agenda right now.

[GRIZZLY]

Had a second swarm yesterday.I've given up trying to stop them and am relying on finding and capturing the swarms instead.The weather has been so cold and WINDY that I think I would have done more damage trying to A.S. them rather than letting them be.The second swarm erupted just as I was standing by the hive dringing a cup o' tea,flew into the top of a nearby shrub and were caught and boxed before my tea got cold.They were hived that evening on to clean wax foundation and immediately set about emptying a rapid feeder of Ambrosia feed.My plan to take splits from the colonies has been achieved "natures way"-so this year a mixture of "managed" and "leave alone" beekeeping - not exactly to plan but satisfactory never the less.

[Beejud]

This is where I find the general chat so useful. I see what other people have been doing and think more about my own actions with the bees. The AS was done on the last good day but perhaps it wasn't warm enough for that procedure. Now I think about it the reason the queen was still there with the sealed queen cell is because until yesterday the weather had been awful. It is also the hive that crashed over in the winds last week so I probably didn't examine the box thoroughly enough last week. I was just relieved to see her in there alive so not looking for queen cells. They have not drawn out the foundation at all well, possibly because they are intent on getting rid of her. She is older now and maybe the hit on the head was the final straw. I did the text book AS and put the supers on top but maybe syrup would be better. So many "maybe ifs"!

[Trog]

I quite agree, grizzly. Sometimes it does more harm to follow the textbook and open hives regardless than to give the bees a break. The bees would be out of their tiny minds to swarm in this weather so I'm hoping common sense is prevailing in the colonies!

[gavin]

Well, last Friday I found one colony with advanced queen cells and split it in a standard artificial swarm. Today I looked at one I'd already split (it was a powerful double brood colony) and raised three nucs from a couple of weeks ago, plus shook some bees into Apideas. It has filled its brood box once again, building up from one frame with the old queen and the flying bees. Not only that but today again it had sealed queen cells. I took the old queen out into a nuc box to buy me time with that one. A third colony which was also split from a double brood into five nucs was also raising queen cells again in the the queen-right part. That one had its queen cells removed.

Three colonies sitting there with their old queens and sealed queen cells, ready to swarm off into the distance if I hadn't intervened. I'm surprised they didn't go yesterday, but maybe they are waiting for the even warmer weather tomorrow.

I suppose that our weather in the E has been a little kinder, but the conditions have still been pretty poor and inspections have not been kind to bees or beekeeper. I'm glad that I've kept at it though.

[Jimbo]

Things are starting to look up in the wet and windy West. The colonies are starting to get stronger although will still need to check the stores as some are a bit light. Started my queen breeding using the Cupkit system. The Queen has laid up the eggs in the cups so need to wait 3 days to get the 1 day old larvae then moved over a queenless cell builder colony. I will just raise 10 queen cells although the system allows you to produce up to 100 cells at a time. If only I had enough colonies and apidea's

[kevboab]

Today !!! Well started by removing a frame of eggs for a friend who is queenless. Removed feeders after bad weather and popped supers back on. First two a doddle, last one the bees poured out every one on a suicide mission to take me down the minute cover was removed. Super thrown on, closed up and had followers for next 20 mins. Will need to fish out the suit of armour for weekend and see exactly whats going on. To be honest can see her ladyship getting the chop. Definately not a colony for the garden.

[Beejud]

I have one like that! Do Thornes stock Kevlar suits?

[Trog]

Well, today was glorious and the junior beekeeper and I opened the first hive with a small 'courtesy' puff of smoke at the entrance. Halfway through I glanced sideways into the grassy bit beside the apiary and noticed a swarm on the move. 'Follow that swarm,' said I to junior beekeeper, and returned to inspecting the colony, putting it back together and writing up my notes before I forgot what I'd seen. The swarm had obligingly settled in a low hawthorn bush so with a wee bit of pruning of lower branches and a sharp tug they were quickly boxed (don't have a skep but a cardboard box does the job just fine), the box inverted on a board with a brick at one end to provide an entrance, and the bees fanning furiously to call the others in. Meanwhile we went back to the inspections wondering which lot had swarmed. Each time we confidently said 'maybe this one', right to the end - the big lot on double brood plus a super. But no, all had eggs apart from the supersedure colony whose queen was almost certainly out on her mating flight, and no sign of queen cells, sealed, hatched or anything and it was too soon for any to have been taken down. All will doubtless become clear next week but it was a delightful inspection with the smoker only needed to clear bees down to stop them being squashed while putting things back together. Bucket loads of pollen going in and all the bees in cheerful mood - not even the offer of a sting; in fact they largely ignored us and carried on with their lives as if we weren't taking their home apart. Lovely! (And I even managed a couple of hours fishing afterwards!) :D

[kevboab]

I have one like that! Do Thornes stock Kevlar suits?

If only !! Not looking forward to the weekend as much now.

[GRIZZLY]

Will have a thorough overhaul of my bees on Sunday when we're having a beginners meeting in my apiary.Should be plenty to interest them - 2 swarms and two neucs to check for progress,2 swarmed hives to check for newly mated young queens(hopefully) and the other 6 hives for their routine weekly checkover.Thank goodness the gales of the past few weeks seem to be over and my beekeeping can get back on to a more normal footing.
All my colonies have been exceptionally strong this year and crowded with bees.The early flow has kept them well fed but there will be no surplus for me.I just hope we get a good summer flow and perhaps a bit of honey later.

[EmsE]

Finally got an opportunity to have a proper look in the hives instead of a 'quick peek' to add a frame of stores. The 5 frame nuc looks to have successfully hatched a queen- I'll leave this one alone for the next couple of weeks but good to see the bees bringing nectar in. In the queen cell part of an artificial swarm, all the brood has hatched and there are lots of Queen cells being ripped down but I couldn't find one that looked as though it had hatched. I'm hoping that is down to the bees tidying up but both were very good natured.

My 2 established colonies are puzzling me. One I did the AS leaving just a couple of frames of brood, a couple of stores & the rest wired frames at the beginning of May. There are a few QC's in there both sealed and unsealed. I think I'm going to risk it being supercedure. If it's not I could find myself chasing my first swarm.

The other, which I removed 3 frames of brood with QC's for a 5 frame nuc is producing QC's again. None have been sealed yet but are distributed over 2 frames. Would an artificial swarm be the best bet? I'm just conscious of the June gap being just round the corner.

[Beejud]

Emse, in the hive where you did the AS, did you see your marked queen still there? If not then she may already have gone in which case your decision to leave the cells would seem the sensible one. The other hive sounds like it is doing what mine have been doing ie. cancelling any swarm thoughts during this bad spell of weather but now things have improved it's game on! I suspect if it was me I would be AS'ing but I would see what some of the more experienced forum members say about it as you have already reduced the colony size. I think the June gap is upon us more or less. There was less pollen coming in today compared with the previous few days and you are not far from me. I have a queen just hatched in a nuc so not sure how it will fare in the next couple of weeks. I understood the success or otherwise of mating is more to do with the weather than the lack of forage, assuming the colony has adequate stores.

[EmsE]

Hi Beejud, the hive I did the AS last time still has it's marked Queen (well it did last night anyway- today could be another matter). The other, I'll go with you on that & do an AS and make sure I feed well. I just hope they wait for me to get down there later today.

[GRIZZLY]

Todays visit by our ass'n beekeepers a success despite the weather which was on and off very light rain and cold wind.Both new neucs have nearly drawn their new foundation right across.Both Queens spotted.Both swarms drawn nice fresh comb.Queens seen and eggs spotted in cells.Decided to delay inspection of parent colonies to give new Queens a good chance of successful matings.Other colonies o.k. except for one which had superceedure cells-quick look then closed up to allow Q to emerge,mate then take over colony.
Bees were well behaved quiet and not at all aggressive - no bees were flying at the start of the mornings inspections and general flying has only just begun (5.0 pm) .A pleasant surprise was the amount of honey on each hive - two full supers with lots of stores in the brood boxes.They all need an extra super for room as much as anything.I have never seen them so strong.The bad weather of the past weeks doesn't seem to have affected them one bit.Lets hope we have a good main flow.
I treated all hives with "Varroa Gard" in their entrances today so will be interested to see if the mite population can be kept to an insignificant level before the autumn.

[Trog]

There were scouting bees all over the house today from early morning onwards. As ours didn't seem to be making swarming preparations when checked a couple of days ago, they must be from a neighbouring apiary or ferals. I now have three bait hives out, so here's hoping!

[kevboab]

The plan is to raise queens using Hopkins method. So i bought a frame trap, popped her majesty (aka Houdini ) onto a freshly drawn frame to lay in and left for three days.

Went in today whilst sun was shining to remove her and lo and behold not an egg in site on frame within trap and Houdini had succeeded not to follow the instructions as per the manual. Found her 4 frames away grinning like a cheshire cat at me.

Only im not laughing, closed up, took frame trap away for some quick modifications and returned on a mission. Ha ha, get out now ya wee bugger.

Back in 3 days for the results !

[EmsE]

There was a brief spell with no rain today, the first that theres been since Friday where I haven't been working / looking after the kids. I took things to do an AS on one of my colonies and a box just in case. On one of the bushes hiding my apiary there was, hanging on a branch, a swarm of bees- my first one. Whilst I was disappointed in myself for letting it happen, it was great fun trying to get them re-homed, it was just a shame that I had to use the 'quick' method of getting them into the new hive due to the approaching rain. I was kicking myself for forgetting my phone so I couldn't get a picture.

[Beejud]

Spot of good luck that you were in the right place at the right time and with a box too! I am surprised they chose today. The weather has been just rubbish and some very heavy showers. Just goes to show, the swarm urge is very strong and it's sometimes tricky trying to anticipate when they'll go.

[Adam]

Another 4 queens are now laying. It always makes me smile to see eggs and small larvae in a new queens comb.
The queen from a gentle colony from a friends swarm hasn't mated and that's the one I really wanted!
So it goes with bees!

[Jon]

Hi Adam
I found eggs in another two apideas today as well.
That's ten so far and I have another 6 of my own still with virgins and six belonging to members of the queen rearing group.

I printed off some of your apidea record sheets and have them under the lids.
Just the ticket, thanks.

[EmsE]

Spot of good luck that you were in the right place at the right time and with a box too! I am surprised they chose today. The weather has been just rubbish and some very heavy showers. Just goes to show, the swarm urge is very strong and it's sometimes tricky trying to anticipate when they'll go.

It's been a very mixed week so far. I came home from work on the Tuesday and wondered why the drive was white- we'd had lots of hail!

The elder flower is coming out now- looking beautiful. I'm planning on having a wonder round at the weekend to find out what plants are nearby. I've seen a few already that I don't recognize so will definitely need a camera so that I can identify them.

[GRIZZLY]

I am going to hive the last two neucs today.They've been sitting on top of their new homes for the last couple of days for orientation flights.This will bring my strength back up to ten colonies.I've finaly tracked down the source of the cream coloured pollen to the "wild" fuscia prevalent in the district.Pollen continues to be brought in to all colonies in great quantity.I just hope they have good nectar sources as well.The weather continues mixed with warm/cold spells and quite windy.Perhaps summer will come next week!!.

[Jon]

Did 3 hours work with the bees before the rain came on at lunchtime.
-two colony inspections
-rearranged the frames from top to bottom box in one of my queen rearing colonies
-grafted a frame of larvae for this colony
-moved a 7 frame nuc to a full brood box. (cranky, marked for requeening)
-put roller cages on 30 queen cells due to hatch on Wednesday
-gave a couple of pints of 1:1 syrup to the two queen rearing colonies
-checked the feeders of a few apideas.

None of my colonies are making queen cells yet, touch wood and I have 9 at full strength.
A lot of mouths to feed in this sort of weather. We have had about 4 decent days in the past 5 weeks.

[GRIZZLY]

Swarm No3 yesterday afternoon-the very black bees.Left the hive ,settled nicely on a low bush and were one of the easiest I've ever had to catch.All in the box and tucked away nicely by 3 o'clock - then fed and allowed to settle down.Now used up all my national equipment so will have to revert to the 16x10's abandoned the year before.I'm going to have to make a load more crown/clearer boards and hive floors (varroa type).Good opportunity to treat for Varroa with O.A before theres any brood to hide the mites.I don't mind swarms this year as the colonies have been so strong and have built up so fast they have recovered their numbers quickly-still full of slabs of brood to supply nice young bees for the main flow - if the weather ever lets us have a summer.

[GRIZZLY]

Association outing to John Mellis today to watch how the pros deal with swarming on a commercial scale.Hope the weather improves as my bees have been either shivvering at home or shower dodgeing.Still plenty of pollen being brought in and the bees are in particularly friendly mode.I proved this the other day by forgetting to put on my veil and doing a full inspection,only realising the fact when I was going thro' the last colony.Senior moment perhaps?.Anyway nice bees.

[Trog]

Ha ha! Definitely lovely friendly bees. I remember an elderly Polish chap who spent every day with his bees with no veil or anything. His smoker was a bunch of rags in a baked bean tin and his hives were a very raggedy collection of stuff. Given that the bees of the area could be stroppy, his bees must have been gentle because of the way he handled them.

[Neils]

Hived a whopping great big swarm today that had conveniently settled up a couple of yards away from the hive it emerged from. Hived it into a topbar hive and ended up trying to balance keeping the space small enough while they get some comb drawn and needing to give them near enough 7 frames of space just to be able to physcially accomodate them in the hive.

My own are still chugging along. i think the nature reserve bees are getting ready to try and swarm again but I was already suspecting that they might have a good dose of Carnolian going through them.

[GRIZZLY]

This must be the"year of the swarm"-my bees are producing queen cells just as fast as they can and with the alternating hot,cold and wet days making inspections difficult,the odd swarm emerges as soon as the sun comes out- usually just as I'm about to do an inspection.The main culprit tho' is the succession of strong and cold winds making chilled brood a distinct possibility if the bees are shook off the combs in the hunt for Q cells.Longer intervals between inspections due to inclement weather don't bode well for swarm control.

[chris]

It's not just beekeeper's bees.And not just Scotland with its special weather conditions. Where I live is pretty wild countryside, with no other beeks around. Any swarms i get are either feral, or descended from ancient 'kept' colonies. I've never seen so many as this year. Even the die hard ecologists are wondering what's going right.............

[OXFORDBEE]

Funny year this one. Bees are doing well but not interested in moving house. Broodnests are smaller than exected as the weather changes have meant queens being taken off lay when the weather is bad and then empty cells are filled with stores when the weather improves. Extracting deep frames and putting them back on has not helped. The queens ignore them and they get re-filled when the weather improves...

[Trog]

This must be the"year of the swarm"-my bees are producing queen cells just as fast as they can and with the alternating hot,cold and wet days making inspections difficult,the odd swarm emerges as soon as the sun comes out- usually just as I'm about to do an inspection.The main culprit tho' is the succession of strong and cold winds making chilled brood a distinct possibility if the bees are shook off the combs in the hunt for Q cells.Longer intervals between inspections due to inclement weather don't bode well for swarm control.

That's always the problem here on Mull! The last but one split I did resulted in some chilled brood because it took 3 of us 3 separate sessions to try and find the queen. We never did in the end so bodged the split and hoped for the best. A quick check last week revealed one virgin queen in one half of the split and a colony acting queenright in the other, so all may have gone well.

Because of the cold winds, I tend not to shake bees off combs unless it's vital. I move them around the comb while looking for queen cells by blowing on them. They seem to prefer that to being shaken!

Mating flights are another source of fun. A supercedure queen didn't get out on orientation flights due to wind and rain so went for it on her first flight out and ended up in a hedge with a few bees. She's now heading her own wee nuc and doing very well but her home colony have had to raise another. I'll unite if the new queen's no good.

[kevboab]

Well, my first attempt at queen rearing over past couple of weeks using Hopkins method didn't exactly go to plan. Gained two nucs but whether they come to anything, well we shall wait and see.
Plan B: spent a couple ae bob in buzzybee shop buying cups etc and grafting tool and made a frame to raise 20 queens in one sitting. So having never grafted in my life I transferred 20 larvae and upon a quick peek today it looks like at least 10 have been taken.

I must say i've impressed myself and cant believe just how simple and effortless it has been compared to finding queen, trapping for x amount of days and all the other faff that went with Hopkins method and with a much higher success rate.

Just gonna need some good weather and a spot of good luck that I can get them mated.

[lindsay s]

Because of the cold winds, I tend not to shake bees off combs unless it's vital. I move them around the comb while looking for queen cells by blowing on them. They seem to prefer that to being shaken!

I do exactly the same Trog.
Apart from last Monday cold northerly winds have been the main feature here this week. The temperature has never been above 14°c and the conditions have been bad for the bees and their keepers. I have 13 supers on my hives and I’ll be lucky if they contain more than 30lbs of honey between the lot of them. There’s plenty of white clover out at the moment and if the weather improves I might get a small honey crop before the end of summer (wishful thinking).
Last Monday was sunny, cool and still (a rare occurrence up here) so my friend Graham and I managed to inspect my entire apiary. We made up 3 five-frame nucs each containing a few nearly sealed queen cells and moved them to another apiary. This should take some pressure of the parent colonies and hopefully I’ll have new mated queens in a few weeks time if the weather is good. (The weather did I mention the weather I must stop going on about the weather):(:(:(

[Jon]

So having never grafted in my life I transferred 20 larvae and upon a quick peek today it looks like at least 10 have been taken.

I must say i've impressed myself and cant believe just how simple and effortless it has been compared to finding queen, trapping for x amount of days and all the other faff that went with Hopkins method and with a much higher success rate.

That's what I keep telling people. I don't know why more beekeepers do not bite the bullet and start a few cells. It puts you in control as you graft from your best colony whenever it suits you and you don't have to make up nucs with what ever queen cells happen to appear in one of your colonies.

The grafting is straightforward but getting queens mated properly and getting them mated with the right type of drone is the real issue. That's where the apideas come into their own as you can bring your virgin queens to a mating apiary where they should encounter decent drones.

[Neils]

My swarm colony is definitely trying to supersede the queen so I've whipped her out into a Nuc. There's a flow on at the moment and they've filled a super in a week so I've slapped another on, I will get some honey this year! It's not even July but the brambles are already coming to an end

I ran out of time so couldn't get to the colony on the nature reserve which I'm convinced is going to be trying to swarm again when I open it up next and typically, I've just found that I don't have enough spare frames. I bought a load in the thornes sale and it would be fair to say that the quality of a lot of them was so bad that I had to chuck them, so I thought I had plenty of spares, but I don't.

Best laid plans and all that :rolleyes:

[Trog]

I do exactly the same Trog.
Apart from last Monday cold northerly winds have been the main feature here this week. The temperature has never been above 14°c and the conditions have been bad for the bees and their keepers. I have 13 supers on my hives and I’ll be lucky if they contain more than 30lbs of honey between the lot of them. There’s plenty of white clover out at the moment and if the weather improves I might get a small honey crop before the end of summer (wishful thinking).
Last Monday was sunny, cool and still (a rare occurrence up here) so my friend Graham and I managed to inspect my entire apiary. We made up 3 five-frame nucs each containing a few nearly sealed queen cells and moved them to another apiary. This should take some pressure of the parent colonies and hopefully I’ll have new mated queens in a few weeks time if the weather is good. (The weather did I mention the weather I must stop going on about the weather):(:(:(

Ah, yes, I have encountered the Orkney weather! Do you have to cement the hives to something solid? ;) Still, you're doing better than I am if you have 13 supers on! Weather-wise it's been low-lying cloud most of today and serious rain forecast for tomorrow, Tuesday, Wednesday .... :eek:

[kevboab]

That's where the apideas come into their own as you can bring your virgin queens to a mating apiary where they should encounter decent drones.

Just trying to keep it as simple as possible until I get a good grasp of things. One of our local beeks tried using apideas last year and certainly made it sound like it was a lot of faffing about with hit and miss results which has put me off the idea meantime. Sticking to making up decent sized nucs to see what kind of success i get. Original queen is my insurance if all fails, so nothing lost.

[Trog]

Today it is wet. So wet there was a frog foraging on the terrace this morning. 15mm of rain since yesterday evening and it's still falling. Streams running down the garden and puddles where the water can't run. Yet the bees are out and about, even the 'less dark' ones. Perhaps the escallonia is workable on the lee side or where it's flowering under leaf cover. Certainly the clover's no good in these conditions. I wonder when summer will turn up?

[Neils]

26 degrees here today. Having sorted out the allotment bees yesterday I took a peek at the ones on the nature reserve. there is definitely a flow on. I thought these might be trying to swarm, but so far all looks ok. They are absolute buggers for propolis though, Maybe I can put up with them being rather mean (got stung again, cuff rode up and a guard bee got me a good un, I nearly dropped the frame it was that painful) if I can get honey and propolis off them.

[Adam]

I checked a couple of hives at my out apiary yesterday. One has a new queen; 6 frames of solid brood including one freshly laid with eggs and ... queencells. :( Queen was still in there despite there being two sealed queencells. I took her out and dropped her in a polynuc with some bees and cut out the queencells leaving just one sealed one. I prised open the sealed queencells and both were dead. Now that's why they say to leave one open queencell with visible larva floating in royal jelly.


At 10 o'clock last night two of my 5 frame nucs (both with 5 frames of brood) were bearding out of the hives. It was still warm and humid and bees are gathering honey again by the bucket-full (Bramble I guess). A loud humming came from all the hives and bees were on the landing boards or outside most hives fanning air about to keep cool and evaporate the honey.
This morning I put the two nucs in bigger boxes. Both had pretty much 5 frames of sealed brood so there is now room for the queen to lay and bee numbers will increase dramatically soon. Cue smiley face :)

[gavin]

We also saw this business of a new queen with good slabs of brood going quickly to new queen cells at the association apiary at the weekend. This was in a batch of queens with rather poor mating success generally.

I really should be feeding bees as the weather has been so poor here. That heatwave passed us by completely, but at least we have the sun out today for a change.

[Jimbo]

I have been checking my nucs with this years new mated queens. All are producing nice brood patterns and so far all have 2-3 frames of brood. All have produced new queen cells at some point which I just keep cutting out. All have been fed throughout.
I have never experienced new queens producing new queen cells before and on a regular basis. Usually you just leave them to get on with it building up for the winter.
After talking to some very experienced beekeepers in the west they are all experiencing the same problem.
What is going on? Is it this poor weather pattern that has them confused? Is this an exeptional swarmy year?

[GRIZZLY]

I'm getting the problem of new queens laying a couple of frames of brood then suddenly lots of queen cells.Bees swarming at every chance.Definately a new pattern I haven't experienced before.I can only think it's the extremely changeable weather that we've been getting this year causing confusion in the bees and to the beekeeper.

[gavin]

This is something I haven't seen before either. Are we now seeing the pattern that Roger Patterson has been talking about? Why now? Some possibilities to add to the changeable weather possibility (but if it is that, why is Jimbo seeing it with colonies being fed?).

1. New pathogen causing it. Nosema ceranae, or a virus, or something. Spreading north.

2. Pesticides. Could it be an effect of neonicotinoids? (I'm being serious folks, honest.) We have OSR here and maybe John's bees have access too, but what about Rosneath bees? Just natural forage for them?

3. The hard winter. The bees 'know' that there are likely to be empty nest sites out there and so they go over to a swarmy mode to take advantage? Or they have kept a log of survey results over the last few years and reckon that heavy winter losses and so it is worth risking some extra swarms?

4. Something to do with the solar sunspot cycle (again, seriously!). Full of the joys of spring and glad to see some sunspots coming back?

5. This has always happened from time to time and we are simply collectively becoming more observant beekeepers.

Take your pick.

G.

[Neils]

Not seeing that particular issue here. Two early queen failures aside, it's been pretty stable for the other colonies. The colony that swarmed in early April is currently covering 8 frames ofbrood and filling supers nicely.

The swarm has decided to supersede the queen but they had the decency to let her lay up 9 frames of brood first.

[Jimbo]

Gavin. I don't think it is option 1. I treated for Nosema in all my colonies in autumn last year. If it is a disease spreading north then it moves fast. Ian Craig has about 60 colonies showing a lot of swarming and Mike Thornley has also seen the same in Helensburgh with his nucs.
Don't think it is option 2 as there is no farming in our area to speak of unless the MOD are using some secret chemical material we don't know about.
Therefore left with option 3,4 and 5
My money is on the changable weather which is somehow confusing the bees. Nellie has not had any issue but the weather down south has been more settled compared to the west coast where we have had more than our average rainfall and extreme hot and cold temperatures this summer

[Adam]

Are we becoming more observant? Maybe it's better communication with these new fangled forum thingies?

I was going to say that the supercedure issue was the English Disease spreading North but I recall Jon has had problems too. Maybe it came across the channel - Roger Patterson is in S England, maybe he saw it first - before us?

Is the problem down to poor mating? Maybe not. The queen I referred to above has no sign of drone brood except where you'd expect it where there was previous drone brood in the comb. I had a couple of 2010 queens that were superceded early this year after getting through the winter and there was no sign of drone brood there either. I have an eclectic mix of bees in my apiary so I should get a good mix of drones and a good mix of temperaments :eek. (Yellow italian, Swarmy Carnis, a orangy thing and darker (local) propolis producers.

[Jimbo]

I don't think its supercedure as it is happening in all my nucs where more than one queen cell is being produced on more than one occasion.
I have queen cells being produced after splitting the original colonies and where the old queen has had plenty of space. I have noticed the occasional queen cell being produced after a split in the past but never in the nucs with new mated queens and after they have produced a couple of frames of brood.
The only colonies not giving me any problems is a couple of Amm colonies of 95% and 98% Amm. They are still building up and so far have not produced any queen cells

[Trog]

One of our colonies superceded its queen early this year and a friend's colony is busy replacing last year's queen. Others behaving fairly normally. The two supercedure colonies had gone from strong to weak over the winter and were the only two on open mesh floors. I wonder if this could be a factor?

[GRIZZLY]

Not pesticides Gavin,my bees are nowhere near OSR-the farming round here is mostly beef cows with sucklers and silage.I've also had another odd happening-a swarm issued which I collected and hived.The weather turned cold so no chance inspecting that hive.3 days later a second swarm from the same hive - quite a large one.Having hived this one,I finaly got to go thro' it today only to find that this second swarm actually contained the original q from last year and marked blue.I don't recall ever having a "cast" issue several days before the prime swarm !!!.Anyone got any thoughts on this occurance ??

[gavin]

Goodness, casts before swarms is beyond my experience.

So - Jimbo's comments interest me. Might it be the spread of the 'wrong' genetics? Swarmy Carniolan genes spreading far and wide, not necessarily in obviously Carniolan lines but even hybrid derivatives of them? Could that be it, swarmy genes giving inappropriate queen cell production? I have to say that the mother of the colony used to generate the nucs *looked* Amm but I haven't yet done morphometry or taken up Jon's kind offer and they *did* come from a source that has Carniolan look-alikes amongst the stocks there. Although Jimbo's stocks can't be that contaminated by Carnie genes, can they?

G.

[Neils]

My money is on the changable weather which is somehow confusing the bees. Nellie has not had any issue but the weather down south has been more settled compared to the west coast where we have had more than our average rainfall and extreme hot and cold temperatures this summer
It's not been too bad down here. We've had a lot of rain but it's played ball and tended to rain in the evenings and over night or overnight into morning and then give a decent half day or warmish weather and no rain.

[Jon]

My uneducated guess is that early or unexpected supersedure could be related to nosema, especially nosema ceranae. I remember Pete L talking about that a while back and I think there has been some research published linking early supersedure to nosema in queens.

[Beejud]

I think I have just experienced something similar and was about to ask for some advice about what was happening. I have a nucleus which had a virgin queen that I reckoned had finally managed to get mated. I saw the first sign of eggs a week ago but only a few so I left her to get on with it. On Saturday I peeked in to check things and found about six charged queen cells and no sign of any other brood or eggs. I had been feeding the nuc as the weather here has been dire! So what on earth happened?Did she not mate properly and does that mean the cells the bees have drawn will likely be duds? Perhaps I should put a frame of eggs and brood in from another hive now. It's frustrating as I was wanting to use the nuc to requeen a rather bad tempered colony next to it. I have also had rather less success with artificial swarming than usual this year. Some of them are still determined to swarm and are not settling at all. The weather must be part of the problem.

[Adam]

I did a microscopy course in early June, so if I had a microscope I could grind up some bees and look for it (Nosema). Is it Nosema in the queen or Nosema in the colony in general? If it's Nosema in the queen and the queen is one from a batch of grafts, then it would be reasonable to assume that all of those queens are likely to have nosema. Maybe Fumidil B should be given to the queen-rearing colony before and during queen rearing to improve the chances of sucess?

[Jon]

Hi Adam. I don't know if a nosemic queen would produce offspring which emerge with nosema as the spores are usually picked up from wax, honey, pollen or other bees.

I found this paper. The discussion is very interesting. It appears that nosema was linked to early supersedure as far back as a paper published in 1947.


Our chemical analysis demonstrated that Nosema can significantly modify pheromone production in
queens; similar results were found in workers in which Nosema parasitism altered the production of
the pheromone ethyl oleate (Dussaubat et al., 2010). Based on the observation that Nosema-infected
queens are more likely to be superseded (Farrar, 1947; Furgala, 1962), Butler (1958) suggested that
infected queens produced lower amount of pheromones. In fact, we found that infected queens
produced higher quantities of QMP compared to healthy queens. Richard et al. (2007) found that the
QMP profile changes according to insemination quantity, with virgin or single-drone inseminated
queens producing higher amounts of 9-ODA and 9-HDA compared to mated or multi-drone
inseminated queens, respectively. In our study, the QMP compounds, 9-ODA and 9-HAD, were higher
in infected queens, suggesting that elevated levels of QMP are a hallmark of poorly fertile or sick
queens.

http://www.prodinra.inra.fr/prodinra/pinra/data/2011/03/PROD20116cf9b1b_20110315103742504.pdf

[Adam]

An interesting article, Thanks Jon.

I had a trawl around - A high propensity to supercede is also mentioned by Dave Cushman.

http://www.dave-cushman.net/bee/nosema.html

If - for a moment - we assume that Nosema is the cause and it's not agrochemicals (!), then should we use Fumidil B to treat or should we leave the colonies untreated and ensure that we get genetically more nosema resistant bees in our apiaries?

[Jon]

If - for a moment - we assume that Nosema is the cause and it's not agrochemicals (!), then should we use Fumidil B to treat or should we leave the colonies untreated and ensure that we get genetically more nosema resistant bees in our apiaries?

I suppose it depends upon the percentage losses. Not treating is a poor option if it causes the loss of all or most of your colonies. If you remember I lost a lot of nucs last winter. I must get the samples in the freezer tested for nosema as that is my number one suspect.

Agrochemicals provoke hysteria rather than early supersedure.

[EmsE]

If suspecting Nosema is the cause, would we also find that our colonies were not able to build up due to the shortened life span of the workers? Hard to tell in colonies that keep swarming, but my gut feeling is the weather.
Heard reports of nectar going into the hives yesterday. Could this be the June gap coming to a close?

[gavin]

My strongest colony had been pinging out of the entrance this lunchtime. Isn't it strange how bees in fine fettle and with nectar on their minds can be so expressive of their enthusiasm?! I suspect that is was clover they were after, but the limes are coming into flower too. Rosebay willowherb is starting to come out too and the thistles are turning purple. Bramble has been out for a while.

Jon, I could do you a swap. I'll send you wings and you could send me bodies.

[Adam]

Agrochemicals provoke hysteria rather than early supersedure.

Quite right

:D

[Jon]

Jon, I could do you a swap. I'll send you wings and you could send me bodies.

Sounds like a deal although I have a lab 1 mile from home which does free nosema testing. I think the samples are large enough to split in most cases so I can send you a few. 30 wings gives a fair idea about the mix of a colony. You only need 50 if you are after Jimbo's Mars bar.

[EmsE]

It's 7 days to the hour since my last inspection of all the hives and found that the nuc I transferred to a full size hive on Sunday has settled well and the Queen survived the trauma which was a relief. I have another lying queen in the artificial swarm I carried out back at the start of May and just need to wait for it to be capped to make sure she mated successfully. The parent hive of this had even more queen cells in. This time there were 3 sealed and several unsealed. I transferred the best unsealed queen cell to the swarm (that I now think was a cast) that I tried to hive a few weeks ago but nothing is really going on in there. As there were plenty of eggs I decided to remove all the queen cells in the hive although i didn't see the Queen. It didn't occur to me at this time to check the supers for bees (as these are normally really full of them) before knocking down the QC's- I usually check them as I'm reassembling the hive. I was in the process of closing up when about 3m away, if that, under the dead bush, in the long grass & brambles was a mass of bees (Again mobile phone left at home:mad:)
Made an attempt to get them into the nuc box (that I was going to bring home to clean out) and when I left due tothe light was fading, the bees were fanning at the entrance but not many wondering up the cloth to go in. So, another trip to see them tomorrow to sort thing out(shame :rolleyes:). So they haven't been trying to supercede the Queen for the past month, they'be been trying to swarm despite being through an AS in May.

Is this the bees equivalent to a baby boom year?:p Puzzled as I thought I would have been fine checking the bees today as it's only day 7:confused:. I think I need to build up the courage to clip my queens next year.

[chris]

but the limes are coming into flower too. Rosebay willowherb is starting to come out too and the thistles are turning purple. Bramble has been out for a while.
.

Lime here is at the end, but the wild lavendar is in full flower (2 weeks early). And melilot all over the place, the yellow and the white. Do you have melilot in Scotland?

[Hoomin_erra]

And the Bell heather is starting.

Placed my 2 hives next to spring sown OSR yesterday morning. Checked on the way home from work, and both are flying well.

Now if this bloody weather holds i might actually get some honey this year.

[gavin]

No mellilot Chris. White clover in pasture, and red clover which honeybees generally can't work - that's the limit of our forage legumes most of the time. Melilot turns up in game cover but is seldom grown on farms as far as I know.

Do I leave my two strong colonies for a possible lime flow or run to the hills for the bell heather? Maybe I'll give them a week with the lime to see what happens. I'm told by a fellow who lives near my bees that the lime trees on the estate were buzzing yesterday. They are using it to replenish depleted reserves mostly.

[Jon]

I marked and clipped a couple of queens I introduced to colonies I split last weekend.
688 686 687

I use the plunger cage as the queen sticks a wing out when she reverses and if she is held in place with the foam, the wing is easily clipped.

These two were grafted as larvae into a queenless colony on 3rd May, hatched 15th May, mated 4th June and introduced to the queenless part of two splits, 26th June.

They will grow a bit more as just started egg laying out of an apidea but I think they look ok.

Neither of them is with their own bees. The one unmarked in the photo has been used to re-queen a colony of fairly yellow bees. I will do morphometry in the autumn but I have already noted that the bees which have hatched in their apideas do not show any yellow banding which is a good sign.

[Neils]

My colony that's been queenless since April now has a [Virgin} queen, verified with a mark I eyeball. I'll leave them alone for a while to hopefully get on with it and see how they're doing in a fortnight. Please let this one survive the "cheeky sparrows" we've adopted as a new edition to the apiary. They sit in the surrounding trees and swoop across the hive entrances pluck the odd bee or two as they pass.

I have another new Nuc and my friend's swarm, erm, swarmed so we now have getting on 12 colonies on the allotment, though 3 of mine barely qualify for that statement at the moment.

My swarm I'll leave discussion to the other thread :)

The one I think should be swarming I naturally didn't get time to inspect today so I will be trying to skip out of work early enough to get up there. Nasty tempered things so I want as many of them out as possible.

[Jon]

I took a pic of the queen I have been grafting from this year, a daughter of a Galtee mated with Galtee drones.

692

As you can see she is a small queen, grafted and subsequently mated in an apidea.
In spite of her diminutive stature, she keeps the brood box filled with 10 frames of brood in a perfect pattern - no queen cells made this year, so non swarmy genetics noted.

Most of her daughters are much bigger.

693 694

I have seen about 60 of them so far this year.

[lindsay s]

I managed to inspect all my colonies at my main apiary on Saturday the weather was good and there’s been a honey flow in the past week. There were not so many queen cups/cells in the hives and I was hoping swarming fever had died down. I was at my apiary at 7.30 on Sunday morning strimming round the hives and feeling quite pleased with how everything was going.
On Sunday afternoon I went to Doris’s demonstration apiary at the other side of town to cut the grass there. I was just about to start my strimmer when I noticed a swarm on the ground near the hives. I phoned Doris and said I think one of your hives has swarmed and she replied that they were coming from my nucs which I had left there 13 days ago. She also informed me that she had hived another swarm yesterday.
Rarely in all my years of beekeeping have my nucs swarmed. Once my nucs are made up I leave them alone for a few weeks and usually the bees sort themselves out. I’ve been reading elsewhere on this forum about nucs swarming and I know about cast swarms but I didn’t think queenless nucs would swarm with virgin queens.
Doris arrived to lend a hand and I was introduced to Alex (he’s a N Z beekeeper who manages 600 hives). The three of us soon sorted out the nucs. The first nuc had 8 large queen cells and a few had already hatched. The second nuc had even more queen cells and two even hatched out in front of us and the third nuc had a new queen with no other queen cells. The nucs each started with 2 to 3 good unsealed queen cells but the bees must have decided to make more. These were the strongest 5 frame nucs I have ever made up and it turned out the bees were short of room. So the moral of this story is to check your nucs before the queens hatch and make sure they have plenty of room.

[Calum]

Wasps are sniffing about the hives - time to harvest the final crop here according to the old boys.

Raising queens, they started 30 cells in three queenless colonies but only finished 6. I think they'll be dragging out the drones soon.

(here in south germany, your area might be different!)

[chris]

Do I leave my two strong colonies for a possible lime flow or run to the hills for the bell heather? Maybe I'll give them a week with the lime to see what happens. .
So, what did you decide Gavin? I hope you got some lime honey for yourself. If the bees have made a lot of reserves from it make sure they don't have too much for the winter as it can cause them dysentery.

[gavin]

Definitely a lime flow on at the moment, along with clover, but the rain clouds are coming tomorrow so it will not last. I may get a few frames for cut comb honey, then I'll take the better ones to the hills. There they'll get heather honey which I'm sure is worse wintering fodder than lime, but these bees are Scottish bees with cast-iron constitutions and they could live off molasses if they had to! A couple of the hives have deep yellow staining and the start of the ragwort flowering season may not be unrelated. Yesterday it was 27.5C as we left the association apiary at 17:00.

Today not one swarm call but two - the first of the season for me. Is that because its my birthday?! One was a reasonable size and the grateful householder pressed a bottle on wine on me for clearing from the neighbourhood the cause of some nervousness in the household - thanks Chris! The other was a bit wee but a suitable size for an Apidea so Lara become a beekeeper an hour ago. The first is now settling in at my apiary having started laying wax down on the roof of the empty cardboard kettle box in which they were housed for a couple of hours.

[Neils]

Happy birthday, 'grats on the swarms as well.

[Jon]

Born on the 4th of July. Sing us a verse of Yankee Doodle Dandy.

[kevboab]

Having tried two different methods of queen rearing this season my first home reared queen is now laying and pattern is looking good. I'm usually not one for being patient but I resisted all temptation to annoy them and it has been well worth the wait. Gonna be interesting to see how many more turn out successfully but just need to be patient ay. Meantime I shall have a vodka or two tae celebrate. Cheers guys for the informative posts which have helped me along the way. :-D