All Blog Entries

..or have too many Apideas.

The queen rearing group got another 17 Apideas and Kieler mating nucs tonight which is timely as there are about 35 more cells due to hatch in the next week in 3 different batches. 6 of the Kielers are empty and Tim has left me instructions to fill them with the contents of his swarm box which has 6 queen cells in it. His beekeeping has got complicated as he commutes from Belfast to Amsterdam for work on a Monday and returns on Friday evenings. The other ...

Say what you like about the 12th July – and many people do around these parts – but it has the saving grace of being a public holiday in NI and the sun always shines, presumably some tryst made between Big Ian Paisley and the Devil.

It is always one of my favourite beekeeping days, due to the aforementioned balmy weather and the suspension of any pretensions with regard to completing work and meeting deadlines.

Call me an old fuddy duddy if you like, but I own neither ...

Its not so difficult, this grafting lark. On Sunday an enthusiastic bunch of East of Scotland Beekeepers, mostly beginners, gathered at the association apiary to see what's happening. Having managed to find the long-sought queen in our big double brood colony (thanks Susan) we went over to grafting mode. The old queen was banished to a small box at the side. We went and prepared bits and pieces while the bees adjusted to their loss.

Here is a frame from the breeder colony with ...

I had a look thru my hives, this glorious warm and sunny afternoon in south Ayrshire, of which I have 4; Starting off the year with 2 hives and watching them progress thru the warm April to near swarming stage I decided to artificially swarm them. This went quite surprisingly smoothly with a few silly errors tooooo silly to post.
However I believe that 1 of the hives had it in its mind to swarm so it did and left me with more or less a neuk of beez, on the original site, with no Queen but ...

I had my first swarm of 2011 today apart from one which I may have lost from a nuc a week ago.
This one was from the colony I have at the bottom of the garden which has a brood box and 3 supers packed with bees. I put an extra super on it only yesterday but was too lazy to check the brood box and it was 11 days from the last inspection when I did notice a single queen cell which was removed.
The thing is, I clipped all my queens this year and it makes you complacent about the checks ...