Things are taking off

After a cold early morning it had warmed up sufficiently by 11.00am to take a look inside the hives.

When I arrived at the apiary it was cold and there was little activity. I procrastinated but decided not to open them.  Instead, I sat in the car for an hour listening to the Archers, but that's another story altogether...

By the time that had finished there was a lot of flying activity outside; it had warmed up and the cold wind had abated, bees were bringing in pollen.  So I suited up for a look.

The "United" hive was in great shape.  Lots of brood, eggs and larvae in both deeps. So I think Spring has finally arrived! I kept the super in place as this has some capped honey/sugar syrup in place.

The other older established hive was still only in one deep but there was nevertheless significant brood in it.  This hive is in old equipment and was "listing" badly.  I moved it onto a new stand and baseboard, swapped the old second deep (that contained old drawn comb) with a new deep of undrawn foundation and swapped the old cover for a new one.  The bees seemed pleased!!

Now I need to think about splitting both hives, at least in a month or so; in the meantime I'll need to locate a couple of queens!

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.