What did you do in the Apiary today?

[Curly green finger's]

Thanks Cgf, somehow back to three colonies in the space of a couple of weeks so will be many more to do aha!

Hopefully you will have a bit of honey maybe always a bonus to taste your own after so long.


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[StephenT]

Relatively quick (for me) inspection of our 3 garden hives.
The AS we introduced a new queen to a few weeks ago is going well. Plenty of brood but a few frames of foundation still to draw. Gave them some feed to help them along.
Found the queen at last in the swarm we hived a few weeks ago. Just marked her white as easy to see and that's the only decent pen we had.
The original hive that re-queened itself is increasing in numbers again now. Still a few super frames with no nectar and not enough bees in the super to stick another one on. The Lime is starting flowering nearby so hopefully they'll get cracking on.

Spotted a Bumblebee with quite a few mites on it.

 

[Erichalfbee]

Spotted a Bumblebee with quite a few mites on it.

Stephen do you fancy posting that picture in the native bee section?

 

[enrico]

didnt like the wire

Put a new frame in the other day. They chewed round the wire and then it melted!!!! Needless to say I have replaced it!
E

 

[StephenT]

Stephen do you fancy posting that picture in the native bee section?

Done!

 

[madasafish]

Made up two Apideas with emerged virgins.
Graft session 9 of the year from my most proflific (with honey) and best tempered hive. 11 grafts done.. All I want is 3-4 successes as mating nucs will be a problem

Finished beekeeping for the day at 4pm, was sweeping yard when I saw return of mating flight from first Apidea put outside last Thursday. This is the first decent day since then - sunshine and 14C...(who says queens need 20C to mate?)

 

[Angry_Mob]

Checked my warming cabinet, no queens emerged yet and were due yesterday. They do have the dark rings though; is that a good sign or does it happen regardless of them being a dud?

Fed nucs last night, noticed this afternoon I had left one of the lids ajar; hence lots of robbing going on, particularly against a nuc that has not yet accepted the queen which I finally resorted to putting under a push in cage.

Removed newly mated queen from the apidea and made up a split for her; push in cage as well this time.

 

[Beekeeper Brownie]

Today I checked on all colonies, none were wanting to make Q cells, which is the first time in a good few weeks.

And also had my second spring harvest which is the later oilseed **** honey. I took the first lot off on May 9th so some supers had been on for a while which did mean there were a cells cells which had crystallised honey in . I also harvest the biggest hive I've ever had. Including the harvest today this hive has yielded 170lbs! I'm glad they are not all like this otherwise I wouldn't know what to do with it all. The hive to the left I had just taken two supers off. For openness I do have two full size hives which became very small over winter and I have not taken a drop off them this season yet.

 

[Bear]

Today I re-queened an aggressive hive with a queen I bred myself. Hopefully the new hive will accept her and not kill her.

 

[madasafish]

Checked on yesterday's grafts.
7 out of 13 started..

So 9 attempts with a total of 71 grafts. (Includes two attempts with zero success).
21 Queen cells started.

I'll stop now for the season.. and start counting mini nucs...... (I have an oddball collection)

 

[monarda]

Marked two new open mated queens who are up and running well and resprayed a couple of last years models. Pondered as to why one hive needed to produce quite so many queen cells and vowed to produce some miniature books on Bee Behaviour , one for each hive which I will instruct all bees to read so that are all singing from the same hymn sheet as it were.

 

[BB King]

Checked two of the out apiaries. All good the two A/S colonies building well the parent hives waiting for sign of eggs, established hives no sign of swarming. Honey production has slowed as the drought has been followed by wet and cold from Thursday until today.
At the second site I found the easiest swarm could have collected clustered on a thin branch of a beech in the middle of the site clustered tight at shoulder height. Concentrating on my hives I nearly missed seeing them I just notice the noise. One snip of the branch an they were in the box. They were all together by the time I had finished the inspections. Not my bees, this apiary had nothing close to producing a prime swarm and all was in order today.
I wouldn’t have expected much swarm activity with the recent weather so just a bit of luck to be there at the right time.

 

[masterBK]

Checked them all today. No sign of swarm cells anywhere in any of my colonies. However found single supersedure cell in a colony. This colony has been a waste of time all year so I destroyed the cell, killed the queen and paper united a demaree top containing brood in all stages headed up by a 2020 (now blue) queen from one of my better lines. Most of the 30 current years queens are now laying . I marked the six I just happened to find on on the single comb I took out to check for brood. Time was short so didn't go looking for the others.

 

[drdrday]

Two beekeeping firsts for me today!

Two firsts for me today. My first go at an AS can now be declared a success with BIAS and plenty of capped worker brood to see today. So there'sdefinitely a mated queen in there after all of these weeks of having to wait patiently and just leave them to get on with it. I can finally say I have two colonies now!

The other first - my first beekeeping sting - was a less happy event

 

[Newbeeneil]

Interesting day....... took off 8 supers this morning and took them to my honey room. Filled my extractor and switched on......... nothing...... looks like the box of electrics has given up the ghost.
Phoned Thornes and eventually spoke to someone who could help...... new box on its way tomorrow!!
Spent the afternoon trying to extract a colony from a large beech tree that was being felled. The contractors lowered the trunk to the ground where we split it open like a coffin and tried to remove the bees. Turns out they were queenless with only a couple of frames of bees. I enticed them into a box with a comb of open brood and took them to an isolation apiary.

 

[Curly green finger's]

Today I checked on all colonies, none were wanting to make Q cells, which is the first time in a good few weeks.

And also had my second spring harvest which is the later oilseed **** honey. I took the first lot off on May 9th so some supers had been on for a while which did mean there were a cells cells which had crystallised honey in . I also harvest the biggest hive I've ever had. Including the harvest today this hive has yielded 170lbs! I'm glad they are not all like this otherwise I wouldn't know what to do with it all. The hive to the left I had just taken two supers off. For openness I do have two full size hives which became very small over winter and I have not taken a drop off them this season yet.

I hope you had some one footing a ladder with that stack.

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[manek]

No they wouldn't go in

Went to collect a swarm yesterday.

They were at the bottom of a fence, intermingled with vegetation - grasses etc. It was impossible to get the swarm box under them as they were almost on the ground, and scooping risked damage to bees. So I thought I'd get clever, and put a nuc full of drawn comb next to them, and a ramp of cardboard from the middle of the swarm to the nuc entrance.

Lots of interest quite quickly, not quite the big march upwards but close to it, with plenty of trophyllaxis at the entrance. Hoping for the best, I left them to it. An hour later, they'd swarmed off.

So much for that idea...

 

[Repwoc]

I've had two like that this week - one under a privet bush where the cluster was touching the ground the other on the bottom of a steel fence in Newport docks, just about clear fo the ground. With both I managed to get a shallow cardboard box under them - after quite a bit of pruning in the case of the privet - then brushed them in and transferred them into the larger swarm collection box. Eventually the rest found their way to their temporary home.

 

[manek]

Well done.

Sadly, that wasn't an option in my case, not only as they were effectively on the ground, but also because they were straddling a wire fence, making it impossible to treat them as a single bunch of bees.

 

[Beekeeper Brownie]

I hope you had some one footing a ladder with that stack.

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I could just reach the top 'safely'. I wouldn't have wanted it one super higher though.