We had gale force winds last night so I had to check the colonies for damage today. I was out for a couple of hours - an 11 mile round trip on the bike taking in the association apiary on the NT site, the donkey apiary nearby and my allotment which is 5 miles further on via the Lagan towpath. No lids off was the good news. I only have one nuc at the association apiary and it seems to be doing well. I hefted it and it was fairly heavy. There were very few bees ...
Broke all the rules today and lifted a frame from a couple of hives. It was 15C at lunchtime and there were clouds of bees in the air, rather more than I'd been expecting. Tipped off from across the Irish Sea that stores were being converted to bees still, that seems to be the case here too. One had a patch of eggs about three inches across, and a few young larvae nearby. A few colonies are getting noticeably lighter than they were. Another, one that I'd thought might be queenless, had a sealed ...
Spent the afternoon scraping propolis from apideas and putting frames in a box for fumigating with acetic acid. The bees in the garden were working hard bringing in pollen in a light mizzle with the temperature about 12c I still have 9 occupied apideas, 7 with laying queens and two with virgins which I presume will not mate now although I had a queen in a nuc start laying around 1st October. Some of the apideas are a bit weak and will hardly make it through winter but ...
A bit of an understatement, that. Devastated? Well, not that bad. Bad news certainly. I'm now certain that all the queens that were raised and have survived this year are infertile. That leaves me where I was back in the spring, on a knife edge. I badly need disease-free Amm nucs next spring, but as yet I'm at a loss to know where to get them. The lesson I've learnt from this year is that I cannot afford to take anything for granted, whether it be the supply of nucs/queens (that never materialized), ...
It's been a while! That queen displaced in early July to a nuc box found her way back to the cell raising colony after the first round of queens had been raised. How?! She was mated three quarters of an hour's drive away so shouldn't have known the site of the cell raising colony. The nuc box she'd been put in was about three feet to the side and behind the main colony. After the failure of that second round of queens I re-arranged the boxes to create the queen-right arrangement of Wilkinson and Brown, ...
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