Creative Honeycomb Building
I’ve had a busy day already and it’s only lunchtime while I’m typing this. A quick swim in the sea first thing, followed by some work and then a nice surf ski paddle into the estuary at high tide.
I then had some time for a quick inspection of the bees. Everyone else is reporting having to feed their bees having already taken honey from them in some circumstances. I thought it might make sense to give ours some feed just to keep them going through the ‘June Gap’ as well.
All was looking well though. The smallest colony is still quite small and doesn’t have huge quantities of brood either. It isn’t building up quite as quickly as I would have hoped. They did have quite a bit of honey stored in the brood box though and with not much brood to feed should be OK for stores.
The bigger colony is doing well and now has quite a few bees in it and brood covering about 6 frames. They have a small amount of stores in the super as well, but I thought I’d give them a little feed anyway. There were however quite a few drone cells as well, so I need to keep a close eye on them as I suspect they will be thinking about swarming soon. There were no signs of queen cells today though.
The swarm that I caught a couple of weeks ago is still in the hive and looking good. There are quite a few bees in it and they have been busy drawing out fresh comb both in the brood box and in the super. They seem to have been doing so in quite a creative way in the brood box though.
There was some sealed brood as well. So, although I’ve yet to see the queen she must me there and is happily laying eggs. Fingers crossed things will stay that way, but with the comb built in the way that it is, imspecting them and finding the queen herself isn’t easy.
It’s quite busy ion the apiary now with three colonies in it so if they start swarming I’m not really sure where I will house the splits. I’m sure I’ll work something out.
