Busy Beekeeping Day
We had a busy day yesterday full of all sorts of things. Triathlon Training in the morning, followed by beekeeping in the afternoon.
The triathlon training finished a little late so we then had to rush off to Llanafan for a beekeeping meeting. There was no way we’d make it by 2pm so we let them know we’d be late and told them to carry on without us saying that we would meet them for the teas and cakes afterwards – that is of course the best bit! This meant there was no need to rush and that we could stop off for some snacks and drinks at Spar. We turned up at Llanafan at 2:30pm and the beekeepers were still there so we were actually able to join them on the ‘Apiary Safari’ afterall.
Apiary Safari’s are just visits to other members apiaries for a look through their hives. It is always interesting to see how other people manage their bees, and it is always nice to see the location of other apiaries. Although it has to be said we are usually reminded of just how inhospitable our garden is for bees when we see the lovely sheltered, forage-rich locations of other apiaries. We really are ‘beekeeping on the edge’.
We were allocated to go to the woodland apiary which turned out to be in a bit of woodland we knew quite well. I had even seen the hives before so there wasn’t much new there, but it was a pleasant little stroll up to the hives in the summer sunshine and interesting to open up the hives and see the different way that other beekeepers operate. The hives had quite a few supers on them, but none of them were full, and the most full ones were at the top.
Hives
It was then back to Llanafan for a nice spread of tea and cakes. We’d taken along a gluten-free Honey and Polenta cake (that was actually gluten-free this time), so I had to try a piece of that to make sure it was OK for everyone before we got started! There were salmon sandwiches and then banana cake, strawberry flan, chocolate fruit cake, loads of fresh blueberries, raspberries and strawberries from Ann’s garden and cream to go with them. Needless to say I ate far too much as per usual.
As always it was nice to catch up with the other beekeepers and have a chat about the various things going on inside our hives. We’re still having problems with our queenless colony. The new queen (if she was ever there) never started laying. We couldn’t be 100% sure if she was just slow at getting started or if she simply wasn’t there so we had taken a frame of eggs from our other colony and placed them in the queenless one to see if they would draw out queen-cells. This is where we left you last time we blogged about the bees.
Since then, we took a look inside the queenless hive 2 days later and they had already built some emergency queen cells and somehow even had a sealed queen cell in there. Clearly there wasn’t a queen in residence and they were desperate to raise one. We were going to destroy these queen cells and introduce a new mated queen, but the weather took a turn for the worse and we were unable to get a queen, or get into the hive to do anything. It was nice yesterday though and Jim (who we got the nuc from in the first place) had offered to swap the nuc over for us. We therefore formulated a plan.
Jim turned up at around 9pm just as it was getting dark. His idea was to just take out 5 frames from our queenless colony, including the frame with the queencells. He would put these into a nuc box and take them away and would then install a new nuc complete with laying queen into our colony. We however wanted to unite the two colonies in a slightly less aggressive way which is what we did.
We moved the queenless colony to one side and placed a new floor and brood box on the sight of the queenless colony. We then installed the new queenright nuc into this empty brood box, filled it up with empty frames either side of the nuc and then covered it with a sheet of newspaper. The original queenless brood box then went on top of this. We took the frame with the queen cells out of this along with 4 other frames, all of which went into the nuc for Jim to take away with him. We then put the queen excluder on top of this, and placed the supers, crown board and roof on the top.
We therefore now have a hive with a double brood box. The new nucleus colony with a laying queen is in the bottom brood box and the old bees are in the top brood box separated by a layer of newspaper. Hopefully by the time they chew through the newspaper (we put a few tiny holes in it just to get them started), their various scents and pheromones will have mixed a little and they’ll all get on well together – only time will tell.
