I bought a National polyhive from Abelo at their open day recently. I had noticed one of my 14 x 12 plywood hives was expanding rapidly but had a lot of dark wax and I had planned to move the colony into the polyhive by a Bailey change but when I opened up on Saturday to start the procedure I discovered several charged queen cells with grubs in advanced stages. Two of the cells were in the process of being capped but the queen was still present.
I changed plans and switched to a shook swarm. I inserted a queen excluder under the new brood box prior to shaking the bees into the new hive with clean foundation as a belt and braces precaution to ensure no swarm would leave the box if they had made their minds up before I looked in.
I gave them a feeder full of thin syrup to fuel comb building and left them to get on with drawing fresh comb. I'll take the queen excluder out in a week or so when the bees have drawn some new comb and hopefully the queen has been busy laying in it. In the meantime there is a lot of traffic at the entrance. Bees are foraging and landing heavily plus some yellow pollen and orange pollen is being brought in.
I changed plans and switched to a shook swarm. I inserted a queen excluder under the new brood box prior to shaking the bees into the new hive with clean foundation as a belt and braces precaution to ensure no swarm would leave the box if they had made their minds up before I looked in.
I gave them a feeder full of thin syrup to fuel comb building and left them to get on with drawing fresh comb. I'll take the queen excluder out in a week or so when the bees have drawn some new comb and hopefully the queen has been busy laying in it. In the meantime there is a lot of traffic at the entrance. Bees are foraging and landing heavily plus some yellow pollen and orange pollen is being brought in.
