BBKA Forum

Alfred wrote: ↑

14 Jul 2019, 18:13

Nigel could you expand on these, for the benefit of my numptiness..

I'll try. New laying queen..... eggs seen. Within a few days these will either have the flat characteristic caps of worker brood (mated fine) or they will all be raised dome shapes like drone cells...a drone layer. BUT, as with all things bees not everything is 100%.... some queens start off laying drones and then go on to lay normal worker brood...

If you are not sure of the queen right status of a hive by adding a frame of brood with eggs/v.young larva then (usually) one of two things happens. If no queen is present they will draw queen cells....but if a queen or an accepted virgin is they won't. So you know what is going on...whilst not 100% fool proof adding a frame of brood to assess what is going on in a colony is as close to 100% certain as beekeeping gets.

Got it thanks

Sometimes you can't believe your luck.....I lost one of my two heather sites this season as the tenant farmers moved on and the land is still available for rental so we couldn't put our bees back there. My other site is very small and can really only cope with about 4 hives.
Cut a long story short approached a company who organise a lot of grouse shooting on the nearby moors. They took me and showed me a site on top one of their moors if I wanted it.
Right up amongst the heather at 1200 ft up with a wall for shelter.
No sharing, no-one else allowed to put bees on that moor....
Looks like normal heather honey service will be resumed.

Japey Edge wrote: ↑

14 Jul 2019, 12:38

AdamD wrote: ↑

14 Jul 2019, 08:09

Japey Edge wrote: ↑

13 Jul 2019, 18:57

... Just found out from next door that one of my hives swarmed. I think it was the small one that I heard the queen piping in. I thought I could leave the QCs there and she would kill them, obviously not

Hmm...

A small colony (say a nuc made up with two queencells on a frame) might allow just one queen to take over but if there's a queen and a sealed/nearly queencell as well, the queen will fly.

Thanks Adam. So is the answer to destroy QCs upon discovery of newly emerged queen?

That's what I would do - the queencells might have queens that are ready to emerge so it's up to you whether you want to use them, squash them or let them free to fight it out!

NigelP wrote: ↑

16 Jul 2019, 10:16

Sometimes you can't believe your luck.....I lost one of my two heather sites this season as the tenant farmers moved on and the land is still available for rental so we couldn't put our bees back there. My other site is very small and can really only cope with about 4 hives.
Cut a long story short approached a company who organise a lot of grouse shooting on the nearby moors. They took me and showed me a site on top one of their moors if I wanted it.
Right up amongst the heather at 1200 ft up with a wall for shelter.
No sharing, no-one else allowed to put bees on that moor....
Looks like normal heather honey service will be resumed.

That's good news. No heather for me in my part of the world.

On the previous visit to poundstretcher the checkout girl looked at the two 10kg packs of sugar and then knowingly asked "jam or bees?"
Today we got to the till with disposable gloves,duct tape and four big jars of peanut butter.
She looked up and looked away.

2 days ago I united a nuc to a colony and put the empty nuc in the back garden. Today I looked out back to see a swarm arrive and move in... LMAO.. No idea where they come from, but they are mine now.. LOL
I will have a look Saturday to see what we have, its a 6 frame nuc so not sure there will be enough space. Its been another wierd year.

Cheers, Mick.

They are all weird Mick.
For me this has been the season of disappearing queens.
No sooner do I get a new queen mated and laying and she disappears and they are raising queen cells again. One I could put down to an accidental death or whatever but this has now happened to about 50% of my new queens .
Very frustrating.

Made up three ekes,cut parts for a spare super,found I have enough rails offcut to do a pair of poor man's nucs

Some honies and bumbles on the fuchsias in my back garden. A few wasps (Yellowjackets) hanging around. Watched one hawk and grab a honeybee on a flower. It was a big fight and lasted a few minutes, but finally the wasp won and flew off with its burden over the garden wall.

Added a proper hive stand under my hive as I was worried the bricks were not stable enough. That hive is packed and busy and now five boxes tall.

The top box is almost all honey, but a few frames have small patches of legacy drone cells that I’m waiting to emerge. That top box is the original box and has the original 6 DN4’s from my nuc in it. The rest of the frames are medium / 190’s. I’ve been working that box up so it will become all honey and I can extract those frames and get rid of them and the eke. But as I’ve moved the box up, the queen keeps laying a small band of drone along the bottom of the DN4’s.

I’ve but box 5 in the #4 position, so maybe the gap and heavy flow were having will deter her from laying in those frames when the space frees up.

I’m feeling a little better about my beekeeping now. When I was putting the stand in place, I needed to disassemble most of the hive and I’d never been in such a huge cloud of bees before. A month ago that would have shaken me. But yesterday I just carried on and felt not so bad about it. There was a prayer or two in the back of my mind to Apis the Goddess of Bees to keep me safe, it it was good. In the end, some lovely people in the apiary came and gave me a hand to help put it all back together again.