Saturday, May 7, 2016

Swarms and Students

I had a really great day on Friday! I gave three very enthusiastic students from the Jamia Ahmadiyya in Haslemere a tour around the apiary. They were extremely keen to learn about beekeeping and I only hope I was able to answer all their questions fully!

I met up with them mid afternoon and gave them a quick briefing - about the bees, the equipment, the protection and most importantly to stay calm, don't worry and have fun!

Fortunately the bees for once were similarly briefed and cooperated beautifully!


We had quite a lot to cover as I now have 3 hives that are all at quite different stages of development. However, the first thing for us to notice was what was going on outside the hives.  There was a lot of activity!  It was a very warm spring day and from what I could tell there was a good nectar flow on; lots of bees flying in and out, not so much pollen being carried. So what did we find?

Hive 1:  This is the long established hive.  It needed no mite treatment a week or so ago but I went through the hive with the students, showed them brood, pollen, capped honey, eggs and larvae - it has everything you could want for a teaching hive!  We left it after adding a super of drawn comb - there's a flow on!


Hive 2:  This is the combined hive which had just had a course of MAQS mite treatment. I wasn't sure how this hive would have coped as my experience in the USA (where admittedly it was much hotter) was not good. But my fears were unfounded.

When I opened the hive I found the queen had been busy laying in the super!  Not too much brood, but enough!   But by way of compensation there was also a lot of honey and nectar in the super as well!  Anyway, I was sort of prepared for this as I had a super of undrawn foundation with me.  I checked that the queen wasn't in the in-situ super and then put the new super under it; the theory being that the queen won't cross the undrawn super, the brood will hatch and the bees will then fill the brood cells with honey - well, that's the theory!


Again we looked through the rest of this hive saw there were no queen cells but saw there was a lot of nectar in the cells.  So I felt quite good about putting a second super on.


I'll also do another mite count in a couple of weeks.

Hive 3:  The new Swarm Hive.  Last Wednesday evening Dave got a call from someone local who said she had swarm in her front garden.  And what a swarm!  It filled the skep.  Sadly there are no photos, but Dave reckons it's as big a swarm as he has ever caught.  He put the swarm into a new deep, added a queen excluder and a super.  Unfortunately he didn't have any new foundation available so the bees went into a box of old comb.

The good news however was that I have plenty of frames and so I planned, with the students, to relocate the swarm onto these new frames.  It was all ridiculously easy! 


Most of the frames were in a bad state so we just checked if the queen was there before we gently shook the bees into the hive.  We left just 3 original frames of decent half drawn comb; the rest was new foundation.  We also fed the bees some 1:1 syrup in order to stimulate some frame drawing.  But given the size of the hive and the activity in and out of it this may not really have been needed!

So the 3 students and I left the apiary happy and excited for pretty much the same reasons!  They had been through three hives, handled bees, seen the stages of growth and even tasted a bit of honey/nectar direct from the comb!  Very cool! I had seen the hives looking strong and calm!

I went back into the apiary today (Sunday) just to see the swarm hive again, but ended up looking at all 3, and I'm glad I did!  There wasn't much change to Hive 1, but the second super in Hive 2 was being drawn out, fast.  I didn't want the queen rushing back up too soon so I dashed home to get another super of undrawn foundation and popped that under the other 2.  

Three supers on - nectar flow - feeling happy!

I went this morning mainly to feed up the swarm and found they had taken about 1/3 of the feed from Friday.  So I topped it up.  I also found the queen and saw she had been laying - all very encouraging!  It would be nice to put some new super foundation on the hive soon.

All in all its been a brilliant weekend!  You just have to love spring!




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