Beehive Configuration
Despite my sore finger and the strong winds, I did manage to do some beekeeping at the weekend.
We’d bought a new poly hive so I constructed that. It wasn’t much of a project really and only took about 5 minutes so instead I set to cleaning out a whole load of old brood frames and adding new foundation to them.
Reconfiguring the Bedroom Hive
I then decided that the wind had eased just enough to inspect the bees by the bedroom and re-configured their hive. They were on brood and a half and had plenty of room, but for some reason, colonies here seem to do better when on at least brood and a half but preferably double brood boxes. It’s not the extra room that they need and they actually rarely use the bottom box. It may sound odd but I have a feeling it’s to do with the wind. It’s always so windy here that the extra brood box helps provide some shelter from the howling winds and means that the top brood box is more hospitable. In many ways, it’s a waste of a brood box and the frames but if it means the bees above it fare better then it’s not too much to give them.
So, I made sure the queen was in the brood box and then moved the super that was below the brood box above the queen excluder. I replaced it with a new (poly) brood box full of new frames and left them to it. The brood in the super should be OK and once it has hatched they’ll be able to fill the cells with honey. It does mean that this hive is currently quite tall with two brood boxes and four supers but I’ll reduce the number of supers later in the year when/if we are able to harvest from it. Hopefully with so much room they won’t even think about swarming and the early pre-emptive split that I did will have worked.
If only these supers were all full of harvestable honey. Unfortunately, the bottom wooden one has brood in it, the two middle poly ones are full of honey but it might be sugar-syrup honey and the top one is half full of honey that we can harvest. We do like the poly hives though and I think we’ll gradually migrate to having all polystyrene hardware.
I know it’s a bit odd having a hive right next to the bedroom window as well, but they seem to like it here and it’s nice to be able to see them up close and personal from the bedroom. There are no bees flying in the photo above despite the glorious sunshine and warm temperatures because it’s also blowing a hoolie out there! I can assure you there are plenty of bees in there, they just can’t get out because of the wind!
Re-queening
I haven’t checked on the other half of the split yet. I’m hoping the queen has hatched and she’s been out on a mating flight and is starting to lay. It’s been 4 weeks since splitting them so she should just be starting to lay by now. I’m just a little worried that the strong winds will have prevented her from going out on any mating flights. I don’t want to disturb her until she’s settled but might take a look next week just to see what’s going on. That said, I probably won’t do anything if she hasn’t started laying so it might be best to leave it another couple of weeks until we are back from holiday. There’s not much point disturbing them if I’m not going to do anything whatever I discover. Better to just leave them to it for now.
