Neils
Sorting out the second attempt to swarm.
by
, 27-05-2010 at 06:02 PM (5930 Views)
They're playing with me I tell you, I can hear them sniggering when I pack up to leave.
The brood half (national) of my artificial swarm has a nice, new laying queen. Very new, there was maybe half a frame of eggs when I took a look this afternoon to pilfer a couple of frames of stores for the new Nuc as I'd managed to scrounge a spare Nuc box. Opening up the difference in temperament was immediately noticeable, so while I was in there I thought I'd confirm that what I thought was true. Sure enough close by the eggs the new queen was spotted. I didn't mark her this time (at the moment with two colonies I don't clip though I might revisit this policy) as I've heard it said that marking a brand new laying queen is not always a great idea, I'm willing to be corrected on that point, but better safe than sorry.
I also took the opportunity to play with some drones, I'm still a little nervous picking up queens, especially someone else's so the drones in the National have not had a happy time this afternoon, they've been picked up every which way I can think of and with varying degrees of "roughness" and it's actually surprising just how resilient the little buggers are. I don't recommend grabbing them by the feet or wings especially but no drones were harmed in the making of this programme . There's a more practical side to this as well, I might have the opportunity to work with a commercial beekeeper for a while and I suspect they don't have time to fanny around with a crown of thorns cage trying to trap them so they can be marked/clipped.
I also put into practice a lot of the techniques that I learned earlier this week and the difference is actually amazing. I'm not exactly zooming through inspections, but I'm not wasting half as much time as I was either. There's still a few things I need to improve but I feel already that I'm a much more competent beekeeper this week than I was last. Well until I put the hive back together and then spotted the queen excluder on the floor anyway That aside, my note taking while perhaps a little less meticulous is now done at the end of the inspection rather than painfully going through each frame then to the notebook and back again. I'm not wasting time staring at frames of honey, nectar and foundation and while these are my own bees and I can remember what was were last time, I feel that I've got a much clearer idea what I'm going to encounter next than I did before. Looking for problems rather than things that are ok also speeds up the time you spend on brood frames though I might have spent a little longer than was strictly necessary admiring a frame or two of corner to corner capped brood.
So having pilfered a frame of stores I turned my attention to the 14x12. Moving two full supers, on your own, at a time, especially when putting them into the roof on the floor isn't to be recommended if you value your back. There's a reason they make them smaller, why try to save 30 seconds of time at the possible expense of putting your back out?
Queen cells, queen cells everywhere? Not a chance, not one to be seen anywhere, there were a couple of play cups but otherwise nothing doing. I'm going on the assumption that they haven't raised more because
a) They know that by time I get to inspect next time they'll be right on the edge of capping them if they start now
b) The existing sealed brood has started to emerge giving the queen a lot more room in the brood area
c) I added another super (granted of foundation) giving them more room again to place stores.
So I've left the queen where she is. I did nab the National frame in there (for the same reason you put a super frame in a normal brood box) to slip into the existing Nuc. I'm not convinced they'll do anything with it, the Full National has a day or so head start as a result of me drawing the queen out, but I was curious, they've not had any brood in the Nuc for a little while and the frame had a nice mix of eggs, larvae and sealed brood.
I'm still going to move the 14x12 next week, it'll reduce overcrowding on the allotment site if I do end up needing to move the queen and I get to start off my new apiary site. I'm a lot happier today, I can now officially claim to be a two colony beekeeper and I might just keep the Nuc for myself after all.