Beekeeping in May

May is the month where things really take off in Beekeeping. Colonies should be building up, the queen should be busy laying eggs, brood should be developing and emerging, the honey flow starts as more and more flowers are out and regular inspections become necessary in order to keep on top of swarming. With fertile drones about it is also the time for re-queening.

Not the best of Nucs

Those of you who have been paying attention may have noticed that I collected a small 3-frame nuc from a friend who was selling it on Sunday evening. I picked it up and took it to our out apiary where I carefully transferred it to a nice new hive. I had a little look through it as I did so, but things didn’t look great. A nuc (Nucleus of bees) like this should be a colony in miniature. It should have a decent number of bees, a laying queen and therefore eggs, larvae and sealed brood and a small amount of stores in the form of honey and pollen too.

What it definitely shouldn’t have is queen cells.

Guess what, this one had about 7 queen cells dotted around the centre frame, and there was no sign of the queen. I told the guy I’d bought it from and he gave us our money back and we also decided to pop back up to take a second look the following day as he couldn’t quite believe that the queen would have left and that they could build queen cells so quickly.

We’ve since been up to check on them and the queen is definitely not at home and there are no new eggs either. It looks to me as though she has swarmed from this nuc and they are trying to re-queen. The bees that were there looked healthy enough though so there was little we could do but leave them to it to see if they can successfully raise a new queen. Only time will tell.

Swarming Nucs

Personally this quite often happens to us. The theory says that performing an artificial swarm on a colony and therefore splitting it into two halves, one with the original wueen and no queen cells and another half with at least one queen cell should prevent swarming and ‘make increase’. The half with the oringal queen should no longer feel the need to swarm and will rebuild in strength. The half with the queen cells will raise a new queen and build up to a full colony as well so the result is two happy healthy colonies.

However, when we split a colony that has queen cells, we often find that half with the original queen simply continues to swarm. They don’t seem to notice that the colony has halved in size and no longer has any queen cells. They simply build some more queen cells and the queen swarms anyway. This seems to be what has happened with this nuc.

Let’s hope they manage to re0queen and build up over the course of the summer. They should be able to do so, and doing so in May is pretty much perfect timing – assuming the weather plays ball.

A Colony in Build Mode

I also inspected the bees at the bottom of our garden this week. I’m happy to report that all was well. I used my GoPro camera to shoot some video of it, so here’s the inspection. You’ll see that I spotted the queen straight away and she looks healthy. The colony has stores in the form of honey, and are even beginning to store some honey in the super. They also have loads of pollen stored in the brood box and there were eggs, larvae at all stages of development and sealed brood too. The video even gives you a bonus little walk through our garden which is looking nice at the moment.

 

The bees at the bottom of our garden are building up nicely and seem to be doing what they should be at this time of year. The weather has been kind lately and I now need to keep an eye on them for signs of swarming as they are likely to be gearing up to do so. Once they are we’ll have to perform an artificial swarm to try to make two colonies from them, but so far we haven’t had a huge amount of success with this.

So far beekeeping in May has been a mixed bag. The bees at our house are doing well, but those in the out apiary not so well. Unfortunately the weather is taking a turn for the worse for the second half of this week with wind and rain forecast. Lets hope for the sake of the bees that it doesn’t last too long and that we have a nice long, productive summer. It’s about time we had a good beekeeping year.

1 Response

  1. Avatar forComment Author Emily says:

    I enjoyed the video. I can’t go to see the bees at the moment as I’ve got baby Tom so it was nice to have a reminder.

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Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.

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