I moved the nucleus colony with my new breeder queen into a full-sized hive today, it was too hot to wear a bee suit or jacket, so I wore just a hat and face veil. I'm pleased to say that even though my smoker was lit, and on standby, I did not have to use … Continue reading New Queen, New Palace
Another Busy Few Days
I've had a couple of busy days again, nipping round all my apiaries to put clearer boards on hives so that I could remove some honey supers. I took supers off from two sites today, and put the clearer boards on at a third. I will be taking the supers off from the third site … Continue reading Another Busy Few Days
Queen Laying
Here is a nice little video of one of my queens laying - you can see her putting her head in the cell, to check that it is clean and polished ready for her to lay in, and also to measure the cell so that she knows whether to lay a fertilised or unfertilised egg. … Continue reading Queen Laying
New hive
I noticed over the last few days that the last over-wintered poly nuc left has had bees bearding outside, this means they are having problems with the hive temperature getting too high, probably due to overcrowding. Overcrowding is one of the main reasons why bees swarm, so I knew that I had to move them … Continue reading New hive
Castles on a rainy day
It's a rainy day here in Dorset today, so I set about taking care of a few jobs I'd been putting off. The first task was to change out the metal runners in my honey supers for 10 frame castellated spacers. This means I need one frame less per super, and the extra space between … Continue reading Castles on a rainy day
Making increase
I went to my out apiary at Lytchett Matravers today to carry out the first stage of a vertical split, so that I could make two colonies from one hive. I opened the existing hive, found and isolated the queen, then selected 3 combs of brood, shook all the bees off and placed them in … Continue reading Making increase
Frame Making
Making hive frames is a mind numbing exercise - I gave up with the Lidl nail gun, got fed up with clearing jams and removing bent nails, so it's the Mk1 pin hammer and 19mm brads - only eleven per frame times 140 frames....
