So much for being prepared

I was all set last week... Then reality hit!

We extracted about 7.5 kgs of honey from one of the supers we took off, last week; so far so good.  The other super was however stuffed full of heather honey so we couldn't extract any of it! Agghhhh!

We had planned to put the empty supers back on the hives for the bees to clean up. Now we're going to put the honey back as winter feed!

To compound the issues, the bee escapes didn't do their job.  So where we were originally planning to remove a cleared deep and super we now were fighting off a load of bees happily residing in the hive!

So after the surprise yesterday (and a hasty retreat given the gloomy weather) I went back this morning.  I put the heather honey immediately above the brood chamber, and the cleared frame above this. Then went on a bee escape (fingers crossed this time) and the supers I added from the combined hive last week (yes, that seemed to have worked ok) and finally the deep and super I had from the other hive that didn't clear. 

Outer cover

Inner cover

Deep

Super

Super

Super

Bee escape

Super - for cleaning

Super - full of heather honey

Queen excluder

Deep

Base board

This is now quite a tall hive that one way or another next week will be significantly smaller. If the supers clear we will extract them or leave on as feed!

It all seems a bit pointless planning ahead! We will see where we are next week.

United we stand!

A couple of weeks ago I did my first inspection of the year (a very brief one). It was apparent that the second of the two swarms I caught last year is now not queen right.  There wasn't much brood in it when compared to my other hives, and what there was was spotty and mostly drone. I kept an eye on it just in case it was just a bit slow, but it hasn't improved.

There are a couple of reasons for spotty brood, but in this case it wasn't laying workers as I found the queen.  I can only assume I have a poorly mated queen that doesn't have sufficient (or any?) sperm and is therefore laying unfertilised eggs.

I wonder what happened last July?  Was the weather mixed? If so, perhaps this interfered with her mating flights and she just didn't mate enough.  Either way I couldn't allow the hive to deteriorate.

It is too early in the year to requeen, so that wasn't an option, I also didn't want to take brood and eggs from another hive in case this weakened that hive as well.  So, after consulting with my old mentor Eugene, I decided the best course of action was to combine the hives.

It's been quite mixed weather of late (especially at those times I had free to look at the bees) so I leapt at the chance to do some work when I woke up yesterday to find a brilliant Good Friday morning.

I got to the hive around 8am which is much earlier than I would normally open a hive, but circumstances dictated I could only get there at that time and the rest of the Easter weekend looks wet.  The bees weren't agitated when I opened the hive and I found the queen pretty quickly - and swiftly dispatched her!

The strong hive was also mild mannered and I quickly removed the second deep that had just started to get drawn out.

I use the newspaper method of unification and so placed a sheet with a couple of slits in it over the receiving deep.  I then moved the deep from the weak hive on top before shaking out the bees from the partly drawn out deep.  This empty deep I will put to one side for now.

The shaken out bees quickly clustered around the hive entrance and started to fan Nazarov pheromone. I just love that smell!

So, I now hopefully have a strong single hive that should grow quickly and with luck, in a month or so, I can split and form a second hive.

It was interesting to find quite a lot of honey in the old hive.  I imagine as there was little brood to raise there was little brood to feed, hence the stores being laid down.