Whilst
the human world is in lockdown, the bee world has been very busy taking
advantage of a warm and dry spring. This post is to bring you up to
date with the activities of our apiary.
March – winter survival checks
Back
in March we did some very short inspections to confirm how the bees had
fared over the winter. We were very pleased to find that all five
colonies had survived the winter OK.
You
might think this unsurprising, given the mild winter we had. But in
fact colonies can often die as a result of mild and damp winters. They
have more tendency to go out flying during
mild winters, which of course is a waste of energy as there is unlikely
to be any food available.
But despite the winter all our colonies survived OK and given the warm spring they got started with early foraging in mid March.
April – starting inspections
Because
of the warm spring we needed to get started with inspections at the
start of April – just as the world plunged into the weirdness that we
have now become used to. I was initially
concerned about how we would maintain social distancing, but
fortunately my son Matt is a trained beekeeper so we were able to
undertake the inspections together. I was even provided with a key
worker letter in case our travel was questioned by police. Travel
to tend livestock is permissible.
Drone Laying Queen
All
was not entirely well within the hives however. The first issue we
encountered was a drone laying queen in hive 2. This is not uncommon
after winter. The queen starts to lay again
in spring, but she has run out of stored semen from when she mated as a
young queen. Without the ability to fertilise her eggs, all offspring
end up male and the colony is doomed.
The
solution is to replace the queen as quickly as possible. One of our
colonies was a strong but small colony in a nucleus box (the small one
on the left). So the old queen was removed
and the colony united (combined) with the nucleus colony. This worked
well and they are now a strong colony with a good queen.
Hunt the queen
Our
next challenge was hive 3. For two or three inspections we were unable
to find the queen. There was no sign of brood in the brood boxes either.
Very bad news. To confirm that the
colony has no queen, you “lend” the colony a frame of eggs from another
colony. If the colony has no queen they will quickly build queen cells
from the eggs to allow them to make a replacement queen. This they did
NOT do. Weird.
We
only discovered two weeks ago that the queen was there alright. But she
had somehow found her way into the “supers” above. These are supposed
to be for honey storage, but because
the queen was in there she laid eggs in there and they ended up full of
brood! What a mess.
The solution was to shake all the bees off every super frame into the lower brood box, and hope that included the queen.
Luckily
that worked fine, and the following week we found that she was now in
the brood boxes and laying eggs fine. Now we just have to wait for all
the brood in the supers to emerge
and we can tidy up things and get them back to normal.
Swarm prevention
It
is inevitable that in this lovely warm spring the bees will be making
preparations to swarm. So far we have spotted the signs of swarm
preparations in hives 1 and 4. So both of these
hives have been “split” – a process where you take the queen and some
frames of brood and stores into a new box. This makes her think that she
has swarmed and crucially makes the original colony think she has gone
so they stop their swarm preparations. The
other side-effect is that you end up with more colonies. This is a
double-edged sword, because it means more time doing inspections and
requires more equipment.
Through June
So
that is where we are at the end of May. June is still a prime month for
swarming, so we’ll be watching carefully for that. And also hoping that
there has been
a good enough nectar flow to bring in at least some honey.
