There are 4 hives at the Association apiary’s new site at Barns. All now have laying queens, and have been gathering a good crop of honey – all have almost one full super of honey, one more super each will be needed shortly. In past years we’ve left each colony a super of honey for overwintering, and the surplus is sold to fund the next year’s work, apart from some honey set aside for our rent. The lime has flowered early this year, and is already coming to an end, but the colonies have made good use of it, producing beautiful white comb. In colony 2 the queen has been particularly busy, full frames of sealed brood quietly waiting to hatch. Will need to keep an eye on this one in case it gets crowded and thinks about a late swarm. Most colonies had 6-7 frames of brood and larvae.

None of the colonies had queen cells – each 2 or 3 “play cups”, but none was charged.

The “grumpy” colony has now settled and is just as calm as the other three hives – whatever upset it is now all sorted. The queen is laying well, and they have a pleasing store of honey building up well. 10 days previously they’d had a sealed queen cell, so they were left – the brood box will be checked in 10 days’ time.

Apart from checking that each colony has a laying queen, that she has plenty of room to lay, there are no queen cells and the colony has plenty of food – we check the varroa board under each hive, to count the number of dead varroa there. Dividing the number of varroa by the number of days since the last count gives the DMD (daily mite drop) for the colony, which is a very rough guide to the number of varroa present. 5-10 varroa is unfortunately the norm, the colony can cope with this – but more than 10 and treatment is needed. We were surprised to find that for the 3rd consecutive count, the DMD was 0.5 or less. David has carried out sublimation on these colonies, spring and autumn, and we’re delighted to see this result. It’s still a very low infestation rate, perhaps also helped by longer intervals of queenlessness occurring before a new queen starts to lay. As a back-up, we could also open some of the drone brood, to see the level of infestation in them.

The other task for the day was sorting out 2 apidea: one was queenright and bursting at the seams, the other had no queen. We had hoped to try to unite the 2, but the design of the apideas makes this impossible. The queenright colony has been headed by a very vigorous queen, the bees so pushed for space that the inner roof was now firmly cemented to the combs. Plan B resulted in creating a nuc within a brood box – confining the apidea within walls of foam insulation to minimise heat loss, and opening the floor of the apidea so they could expand downwards onto brood frames.

We had hoped to find a queen cell for the other apidea, but none was found – we will see if another source of a queen cell can be found.

Date and time provisional. Details will be posted here and by email when confirmed.

A rota of experienced beekeepers will check the association colonies roughly every 10 days. Mandy will be leading this visit.

Beginners will be welcome to come along to these sessions.

Visits should not take more than an hour. The midweek visits are suggested for the Tuesday-Thursday.

This way the visits can be shared, and place less of a burden on the usual small core of volunteers.

Shirley, Bill, Mark, Lynda and Jon helped Peter with the apiary inspection on Tuesday.

There were four full hives and two nucs to be looked at so we split into pairs to do the work. Sun was shining and the bees seemed happy so things looked good. Sure enough the first 3 hives all had laying queens and needed 2nd supers. Shirley and Lynda found a new queen who was duly marked (red).

The two nucs had come from Dankas apiary beyond Drumelzier where the remote location is causing mating difficulties. The good news was that one of the nucs now has a laying queen – the red pen was in action again. The bad news was that the 2nd nuc was drone laying. Still a good result overall and the queen right nuc can go back home.

Shirley took some photos of the drone layer comb. You can just about see the eggs but can you tell if its drone laying queen or laying workers? Are the eggs central in the cell or stuck to the sides, are there multiple eggs?

The final hive caused the most work. No sign of the yellow marked queen that should have been in there. Soon we spotted a queen cell that was almost hatching as we watched, and a few more besides. We put the nearly hatched one in a nuc box with an extra frame of brood and one of stores. Mark took the nuc away to be looked after. Next we put another cell in an apidea – Peter took the apidea plus an extra couple of cells for apidea at home. Finally Jons persistent queen hunting paid off when he spotted a queen out and about. He nabbed her to take away for safe keeping. Still a couple of cells left in the original hive to keep it going.

That seemed like a good afternoons work so we called it a day. The bees seem happy in their new site and hopefully have got the swarming urge out their system by now and can get down to making some honey to pay the rent.

Here’s an interesting video – again many thanks to Shirley – showing 2 workers attending to partially capped brood cells. What are they up to?

Peter will be leading this visit.

We will meet at the new apiary location at 2pm on Tuesday 10th July. Please contact Peter if you need more information.

A rota of experienced beekeepers will check the association colonies roughly every 10 days.

Beginners will be welcome to come along to these sessions.

This way the visits can be shared, and place less of a burden on the usual small core of volunteers.

A rota of experienced beekeepers will check the association colonies roughly every 10 days. Mandy will be leading this visit.

Beginners will be welcome to come along to these sessions.

Visits should not take more than an hour. The midweek visits are suggested for the Tuesday-Thursday.

This way the visits can be shared, and place less of a burden on the usual small core of volunteers.

Report from David on the latest from the association apiary:-

After watching the weather forecast, I went along to the bees at 1.30pm today and was helped by Mandy and assisted by Shirley Sharpe and Elaine and Alan Murrison.

Hive 1 (the furthest away) was very grumpy! They had very little stores, so Mandy gave them some syrup trickled over a couple of frames. We closed them up and after a short while they were noticeably calmer. Our short opening and closing of the hive will have released a few drones from above the excluder, but we didn’t go through the brood box. It can be checked on the next visit – but be well suited up!

Hive 2 had quite a few queen cells, so we made up two Apideas which I have here to hopefully hatch, mate an start laying. We removed all but one remaining sealed queen cell.

Hive 3 looked as though the queen cell had been pulled down by the bees. It didn’t have a lot of bees and no brood, so we placed in two of the queen cells we had removed from Hive 2, in the hope that at least one of them is viable and hatches out alright.

As we headed back to the cars, Shirley was carefully carrying the Apideas and remarked “one of them was quacking, like a duck”!  She was quite right, it was a queen piping . . . what an extraordinary sound. I recorded it on my phone and have attached a copy. Maybe it could go on the web site?

Queen piping in apidea 19 06 18