Saturday, May 26, 2018

Spring Manipulations

The weather has been pretty mixed through the winter and early spring. I didn't really manage to do much of an inspection at the apiary until the beginning of May.  When i did manage to get in what i found was reasonable, not great, but not bad either.

Hive 1: My old aggressive hive that I am still nervous about. This is doign well but it 'stuck' together.  I need to go through it and separate frames and deeps/supers; locate the queen, stick in a new queen excluder and reorganise the hive.  There are now 2 supers on it and one is more or less full.  When i reorganise I hope to be able to get a third super available for filling.

Hive 2: This was in a good position.  Lots of brood, the queen is no on the correct side of a queen excluder and 2 supers are located, again one is pretty much full.

Hive 3: Not so good.  It appears this is Queenless.  I found a single queen cell with a larvae in it but few bees and brood.  I suspect the hive swarmed before I got to the inspection. So the plan is to relocate the observation hive to this or to combine it with the new swarm.  We shall see what the single queen cell produces!

Hive 4: This was in reasonable shape and probably somewhere between the extremes of the other hives. We put a super on this hive, but it needs a queen excluder and maybe another super.

ll in all things don't look too bad.

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