What did you do in the Apiary today?

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Introduced a nice 2017 buckfast Q to my small cast swarm whoes virgin Q went missing in action 2 weeks ago. I'll release her from her cage tomorrow
 
Made another six frame Nuc up for a new Queen , checked a six frame Nuc i made a fortnight ago with a mated Queen that i thought would be ready for a full brood box today disappointing to say the least and still in the Nuc on 3.5 frames of brood and eggs, checked the Queen from Beefriendly and she is on fire, 10 frames of brood and eggs on double brood and she has only been in there 4wks a pure egg laying machine and i took two frames of brood and food a fortnight ago for the new mated Queen, i also robbed the brood box from the angry Q- colony to spare up some equipment and left them with two supers to happily die off in, and too finish my inspections i cut the waist height grass with some garden shears so i could see the hive entrances from the fence line.
I also rung three bullfinch chicks and three goldfinch chicks in my Apiary oop's i mean Aviary :spy:
 
Some time ago, I promised to update you all on a project I was involved in. The project was to provide queen cells to Rothamsted Research so they could track queens on their mating flight to the DCA (https://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/harmonic-vertical-radars). That project is now drawing to a close.
I tried to discourage my contact from using cells because experience has taught me that some will not emerge, or may be damaged (particularly if moved unnecessarily or subjected to variations in temperature). I suggested that freshly emerged virgins would suit their purpose much better. However, they wanted cells.
The first batch were a complete failure. None emerged. I put this down to the way they were transported between my incubator and the Rothamsted site (in a polystyrene box). After this, my contact brought Apideas already filled with workers to my house so the cells could be transferred to the Apidea straight from the incubator. This worked and most cells emerged after this change.
In subsequent batches, they did manage to follow some queens on orientation flights but not on mating flights so the project didn't really accomplish its objective. They learned a lot about how to conduct the experiment though and will try again next year.
 
It encouraging that they are not giving up and their experiment at least had some conclusions, i.e. how better to run it. I look forward to their results I hope they keep going.
 
My farm apiary has a lot of wasps around so I placed a waspbane - this is a pic taken after 4 days. 😱
 

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Checked in on my hive where I re queened yesterday. All looking good plenty of pollen coming in and they have mastered manouvering around the sheet of glass I placed against the front to confuse scouting wasps, reduced entrance not causing any issues
 
Drinking my morning cuppa saw a wasp walk out of the hive carrying one of my bees. A little later another wasp arrived. I managed to knock it to the ground and beat it to death with my flipflop! :ohthedrama: As I did so another wasp flew into the hive entrance. As it was still quite cool I decided to quickly turn the entrance block to the smallest entrance and got chased all the way to the back door for my pains!

At sunset I checked the air temp, 14oC, and pinned a plastic tunnel (made from a 4 pint milk bottle) over the entrance. As I did so something shot out of the entrance hit the plastic, rattled around for a few seconds and disappeared over my shoulder. Another wasp? What gets me is I have never seen a wasp in the garden since I moved in 4 years ago.

The entrance is now about 4cm by 1cm and behind a plastic tunnel screen 12.5cm wide. Should I close it down any more? Should I put in the wooden floor under the omf?

Nobody told me it was gonna bee like this! :rolleyes:
 
Codford said:
Impressive - what did you use for bait (other than the stuff provided)?
Click to expand...

Actually this is broken waspbane from two years ago that fell out of a tree and got a hole smashed in it. As the wasps were so evident at the apiary I tipped all the dead wasp liquid out through the hole in the box and refilled with Guinness honey and sugar syrup feed I had knocking around. Then taped over he hole with gaffer tape. I was worried it wouldn't work properly without the purchased liquid so had just ordered two new ones - which arrived today. I will be putting all three at the apiary this week.
 
Yesterday checked hive of with relatively newly introduced purchased carny queen. She's not laying like a trooper as hoped (like my purchased bucky or my two self raised queens)... thinking she just needs to get organised... and then... I found a huge single capped queen cell - on the bottom of the frame, queen still present.

I'm guessing supercedure... don't think I'll buy queens from this dealer again!

However, to test the bee's intentions (maybe the old genes simply don't like the new queen?) I nuc'd the single queen cell with hopefully enough stores and bees for it to emerge and get mated.

I'll watch the original hive to see if they try and supersede again!
 
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