Bees on the Mend

by Alan Cole · Published Sunday, July 10th, 2011 · Updated Thursday, September 17th, 2020

Saturday proved to be a perfect day for beekeeping. Light winds, sunshine and temperatures around 18ºC. We were due to make hive inspections of all of the hives in our apiary and had a bit of re-homing to do on one colony.

Pendam – Nuc Box

This Nuc box contains an artificial swarm from the colony in Clettwr. It was created on June 16th with a couple of queen cells and two frames of brood and stores as a swarm prevention measure. All is looking good now. All 5 frames have been drawn out and there were eggs in some of them. We also saw the new queen who has been named ‘Poppy’ and as we were sure that she was laying we marked her too.

Syfyddrin

This box contained a caught swarm from Clettwr (our swarm prevention didn’t work!) complete with Ffion, the original queen from this colony. It was housed in a small, 3 frame compartment within a borrowed triple nuc box, so one of the tasks was to re-house them in a new full sized British Standard National Hive. We didn’t want to task my Dad with making yet another hive for us quite so soon after the others he made so we bought a flat-packed one. Hives aren’t cheap, but we managed to find the cheapest in the country from Fragile Planet which only cost £55 for a hive complete with:

Open Mesh Floor
Brood Box
Queen Excluder
Two Supers
Crown Board
Gabled Roof

It went together easily enough although as expected at this price, the quality isn’t great. It’s made of ply so I treated all cut edges with PVA glue and then painted the exterior with a preservative paint. The boxes all fitted together OK. There were a few little gaps here and there but the bees will soon fill those. The crown board is just a sheet of corratex, but it was nice to have a gabled roof with it. Once put together and painted it looked quite at home in our apiary.

The bees in Syfyddrin had done well. Ffion was still there and looked happy. There were eggs, plenty of capped brood and some stores too. We took the Triple nuc box off its stand, put the new hive in its place and moved the 3 frames complete with all the bess into the new hive. Another 9 empty frames were added to fill up the hive, the remaining bees in the triple nuc box were shaken into the new hive and everything closed up. The entrance block was a little different on the new hive and a few centimetres higher than the one on the triple nuc box so it took the bees a few minutes to figure it out but they were soon coming and going quite happily.

Clettwr

This is one of our original hives that was looking a little depleted due to having had an artificial swarm removed and then it swarmed again. All was looking good on this inspection though. We didn’t see a new queen although we have named her Delilah, but eggs were seen and there seems to be more bees than there was before.

Leri

Another of our original hives and one that we lost the original queen from due to a swarm that got away. Again, this one seems to have built up a little since last time we looked and had lots of eggs and larvae in. We also saw the queen, who we have named Daisy, but as Morgan had been stung and Anna had gone off to see if he was OK I couldn’t mark her because the marking pen was in Anna’s pocket. This was Morgan’s first sting and the bee got him on his ankle. He seemed OK with it all though.

As the bees in this hive were doing so well and have drawn out almost all of the frames we added a super to it as we are ever optimisitic!

Overall, a good inspection. We now have 4 colonies, all with laying queens. Hopefully the June gap is over and the nectar flow will start again allowing them to build up some stores ready for the winter.