Hello Everyone,
It’s me again (Greg), Kat was busy with being a teacher/reputable member of society so she let me write another blog post in her stead. Muhahahahaaaa! Prepare for lots of waffling again as I’m going to be writing this throughout the week and today is only Tuesday!
I’m going to be quick with the first bit of bad news and rip it off like a plaster.
The grafts that Kat and I did (mentioned in our last post) came out with no winner, only losers, as the bees decided to clean out the plastic queen cups rather than feed the larvae up to be queens. I’m hoping it was because we did a terrible job of grafting, instead of the bees not liking the cups to rear queens in, as we’d like to give it another go in the future.
So, what do we do with the “Queen Rearing Nuc” now that it has no viable larvae to create queens?
· We can either combine all the bees back to Hive Laura or another hive that may need a good boost in numbers
· Try grafting again
· Or, add a frame of eggs from Laura, let the nuc rear queens from them and then cut out the individual queen cells when capped to use in the same way as grafted cells.
We’re going to try the latter choice as it means we are less likely to screw up in getting viable larvae into the Nuc; it’s as easy as popping in a frame - so no fiddly grafting tools and squinting at combs in a hot, dingy car. The hard part with this method is going to be removing the capped queen cells out of the frame unharmed and then getting it to be accepted in another queenless nuc. The bees can choose different aged cells to become queens, meaning we don’t know 100% when the queens will emerge so an early bloomer could emerge first and either swarm (if she’s feeling particularly merciful) or kill all of the other unemerged queens.
To prevent this, we will have to keep a weathered eye on the cells as they develop, probably annoying the bees by opening them up every other day to check progress. A queen cell is capped on the ninth day of the larva’s life and remains capped for six days at which point it emerges. It’s during these six days we need to remove any sealed cells and place them into a queenless nuc. I’m writing this on the Tuesday and I’m hoping to put the frame of larvae in this evening, if the weather ever breaks, so we’ll know how many queen cells are started by this weekend (which will hopefully be an “update” at the end of this post) and the queens will be ready to be moved into their own nucs (please see our update later in the week ~ Kat, ed)
The second bit of (possible) bad news has come about after I had a quick peep in the Nuc at the second apiary (we’ve named it Re-FeeBee). In the three weeks since I last had a look, the virgin queen has emerged, “seen” off the old queen and has yet to return mated and start laying eggs. We know this because there are no eggs anywhere in the frames. I’m a little worried that something has happened to the virgin queen, as she should really have started to lay by now but the weather has been terrible and she may have only just managed to escape, just hope she hasn’t been caught by a surprise downpour. I’m going to give her until this weekend and if there are no eggs by then we’ll put a frame of eggs from hive Steph in so they can try making a Queen again (the confusion continues - more about this later in the post ~ Kat, ed)
Talking of Steph, I did a manipulation (swapping the boxes around ~ Kat, ed) on the hive yesterday. All six foundation frames in the top box had been drawn out with comb, meaning the next stage of the Bailey comb exchange could occur. (To find out more about the Bailey comb exchange please read our blog post about it here ~ Kat,ed)
I swapped the boxes over so the top box, containing the queen, is now on the bottom with a fresh clean floor. I removed the dummy board and filled the space with foundation frames, giving more room for the queen to lay (once they’re drawn out that is). I put the queen excluder on and then moved the old brood box on top.
Something that surprised me was that when transferring the bigger box to the top I noticed some queen cells present. The queen hasn’t been in that box for nearly 3 weeks now so the cells which were close to being capped must have been started using older larvae which I didn’t think was possible ... Not sure how successful these queens would have been, but I removed them anyway just to stop any swarming that may have occurred if left alone.
In swapping the hive floor out, a lot of bees ended up milling around on the ground so I placed a spare crownboard angled from the floor to the entrance and it only took about 30mins for the whole lot of them to march their way up back inside. Granted it started to rain a bit which may have hurried their ascent but it was a marvel to watch hundreds of bees marching the same direction en-masse.
Later that day …
Dodging lightning and barely getting everything closed up before the rain came, I managed to take a frame of newly hatched brood from hive Laura and place it in the Nuc. When I got to the apiary the sun was beaming down and there was no wind at all, I checked the thermometer on the wall and it was a whopping 23°C. With the weather being so nice, the bees were heaving in and out of both hives (Kate and Laura) but also the Nuc which is good as they only had young nurse bees and no foragers three days ago. Whilst I was rummaging through the frames to find the perfect one to put in the Nuc, I came across the frame we used to graft from. It turns out that the bees have repaired it completely within three days, which is incredible! You can’t even tell that the comb was damaged/smushed at all by our clumsy poking and prodding.
I saw Queen Laura, happy as Larry wandering around a freshly emerged brood frame and laying away. It was about this point that a massive rumble of thunder rolled across the sky and vast amounts of bees started to flood back to the hives in droves. I pulled out the best frame I could find of young larvae and eggs and closed Laura up. I then opened up the Nuc, gave it a quick looksie, found some cheeky queen cells that were too close together to use (unfortunately) and then placed the new frame of brood into the centre. It was incredible watching the bees all flood to the new frame is was like a vacuum sucking them all towards it. I tried to get a picture but unfortunately the heavens decided to open, and I needed to shut everything up and sprint to the car, flailing and high-pitch screaming in a manly fashion… One last check of the thermometer before I left revealed that the temperature had dropped to 10°C in about half an hour… Crazy right?
So, the fresh Larvae are in now (like I had planned), I’ll check on queen cell progress on Thursday which will probably be my next update. I may also check on ReFeeBee to see if the queen is laying yet.
Later that week … (Thursday)
Started off today by making up some pollen patties. The past few times I’ve tried to make some they dried up and turned rock solid meaning the bees had to do a lot more work to use them. I spoke to another beekeeper on a Facebook group I regularly post in and he said “try adding a few glugs of vegetable oil” so that’s what I’ve done. We’ll see how the bees do taking the patties down and if it makes and effect on brood rearing.
I went out at lunch as it was due to pee it down from 1pm onwards according to the met office. Unfortunately, as it was my lunch break, I didn’t have too much time to inspect the hives so everything was done in a quick glance.
I started with ReFeeBee as I was interested to see if she was laying yet… she was not…
I checked the entire Nuc and not one egg that I could find. I also noticed that they were making a load of empty queen cups. The bees were entirely queenless, which really sucks as if left alone they’d just perish. To solve this, I went into Steph and pilfered a frame of eggs, like I said I may have to do earlier in this post. Steph had some more cheeky queen cells started in the top box which I was miffed about. I knocked them down knowing that there are still eggs in the bottom box if the queen has done a runner.
I gave both ReFeeBee and Steph some pollen patties and I refrained from feeding them as they both had a stack of nectar and honey.
I arrived at the other apiary and it started spitting a bit. Nothing too bad and the bees were still flying in and out of the hives, so I decided to give Kate a look as it’d been a while. The queen has moved into the top box and the bees are drawing out the frames… well… they are doing some contemporary art in the form of honeycomb.
I think it’s because the foundations warped a bit in the heat a few weeks ago and the bees took this as an opportunity to show me their flair. I apologised and then ripped all of this burr comb out because although it looks fun, it’s an absolute nightmare to manage if they decide to hide queen cells or get a disease in there.
I flopped a pollen patty between the two brood boxes and then topped her up with syrup as there are still frames to be drawn (properly this time please!).
The rain was starting to pick up so I did a quick check of the Queen Rearing Nuc. I could only find 2 queen cells which had been started, one on the new frame I put in a few days ago and another on the very end frame which had no brood in at all… how strange… At this point, the heavens opened. I threw on a patty, filled up the feeder and then ran back to the car flailing and high-pitch screaming in a very manly fashion.
Even Later that week … (Friday)
Today I received an email from Octopus Energy letting me know that they had mentioned me in their blog about clean energy businesses: https://octopus.energy/blog/powered-by-octopus/ I’m really chuffed that someone like an energy company was willing to get in contact and then talk about us to their massive customer base. I wrote quite a fair bit about my business for them and they seemed to have only cherry-picked the bits where I mentioned them, which is understandable thinking about it, as you all know I’m one to waffle on a bit. Overall though, I’m overjoyed to have had the exposure from them. Thanks guys (if you’re reading this).
A bit of sunshine broke through the clouds at lunch (how apt) so I nipped out to do something called “cutting out”.
Cutting out is usually done to relocate a feral beehive to a new home, so if a fallen tree has bees coming out of it a beekeeper may be called to “cut them out”. In essence it means that you cut away at comb so you can fit it into a hive, it stops you destroying most of the bee’s hard work.
The next step of transferring Steph to one of our hives permanently was to cut away the comb from inside the larger 14 x 12 frames and then trim them down to fit our 'National' frames. I did this by first shaking the bees off the frame and taking it well away from the hive, so any spilled honey won’t promote a robbing frenzy. Once in a relatively safe place, I placed an empty national frame on top of the 14 x 12 comb. I used a very strong, sharp knife to cut the comb, using the national frame as a template. Once the wax had been cut, I used some side cutters to sever the wires holding the cut comb to the 14 x 12 frame. I removed the cut comb carefully and placed it into the empty National frame, securing it with elastic bands. The bees will eventually secure the comb to the frame and chew the elastic bands away, dragging them out of the entrance for me to bin. I did this for all six frames and then placed them in the brood box, removing the place holding foundation frames so they could fit.
That’s it, Steph is now officially transferred to our Abelo hives! Only took two months… Annoyingly I got stung twice so I’m guessing Kat will be overjoyed when I tell her/when she’s editing this. On a positive note, I got to try the honey Steph produced this springtime and my god… it is gorgeous… I let Ian (the head gardener for the landowner) have a try and he was blown away stating “now THAT is proper honey!”
I thought he was going to be grossed out as he had to dip his finger onto a not particularly clean piece of plywood, covered in all manner of bee humours, to taste it but fortunately he is of hardy stock. He also offered to talk to the landowner so they could house fifty hives of mine at some point… I think he was just excited. I’m currently waiting for Kat to get home so she can have a try too!
This weekend …
What a glorious morning and afternoon we’ve had today (Sunday)! The sun was out, the temperature was >20°C and the bees were buzzing happily. I coerced Kat from her work to come help me clear the excess comb from Steph. I’d left it in the roof so the girls could remove all of the nectar still left in the cells. I’ve recently found out that Kat REALLY enjoys scraping wax off frames etc (So Satisfying! ~ Kat, ed) so I used the excuse that she may need to clean up any brace comb the bees have made to tempt her out.
We arrived at Apiary 2 and went straight to Steph to start the clean-up operation. We were expecting bone dry comb on top of the crownboard with maybe a couple of bees milling about. We lifted the lid and bees boiled out, the comb was still full of nectar and they had started attaching the comb offcuts to the roof. We smoked the bees away as much as possible and started trying to remove the comb, which was surprisingly hard as it was all stuck down. The crown board was open so we were a little worried the queen might be milling about above the crownboard. Every piece we removed we checked for any eggs and fortunately, we found none.
We were a bit puzzled as to why so many bees were above the crownboard so we lifted it up to see how many seams of bees there were underneath. They were full – as in completely, no room to move, heaving full. Both of us looked at each other in complete and utter shock as we didn’t think the hive was that full the past few times we checked on it. I guess condensing the two half-full brood chambers into one small brood box made a big difference. We threw on a queen excluder and two supers in the hopes this will give them more space and reduce the want to swarm. I’ll check her next week if there is a sunny spell as with that many bees in such a confined space there will no doubt be a couple of swarm cells started with our luck.
We then moved onto ReFeeBee, deciding that next week we’ll do a cut out on her 14 x 12 frames too, as we really should give the woman her stuff back soon. We looked through all of the frames and found a couple with eggs and newish larvae. I’m still unsure if it has a mated queen as the frames with eggs had two eggs per cell again like before. I wonder if the old queen is still in there but just failing slowly. Next week we’ll use a “shaker box” on the entire Nuc to try and find her, then dispatch her humanely, if necessary, before giving the colony another queen.
A shaker box is an empty brood box with a queen excluder attached to the bottom. We shake the bees into the box and only workers can make their way out. This leaves the queen and any drones, too daft not to fly away, inside. It's the best way to ensure you find the queen.
Once closed, Kat and I had a wander around the grounds as the weather was stunning. We found a bunch of apple trees in blossom and vast amounts of bluebells which made Kat happy. This site, once full of bees, should have no problem giving the girls the means to make us lots of yummy honey.
We travelled to Apiary 1 to check on the Queen Rearing Nuc and as we were walking past Laura we noticed the huge amount of activity coming from her entrance. Remembering the state of Steph we looked under the crownboard to find her jampacked too! We threw on a queen excluder and two honey supers as well then left her alone. I only checked on her a few days ago when I added a frame of brood to the Nuc so I’m not too worried about her currently, probably look at her more thoroughly midweek. I know all of the checks on the different hives seem to be done in a bit of a chaotic manner at the moment, but it should chill out soon once I’m done queen rearing and can just focus on the honey flow.
After giving Laura some space, we went to the Queen Rearing Nuc. Our goal was to find at least two capped queen cells and then place a divider in the middle of the nuc turning it from a 6 frame nuc into two 3 frame nucs. What we found were eight queen cells in total, two were uncapped and six were capped. We removed the uncapped ones straight away as we only want capped cells. One of the capped cells was sharing a wall with one of the removed uncapped cells, so that went too as there was no way of leaving it undamaged. We now had five capped cells left to decide on which to keep. One was runty so we removed that but the last four all looked like really good cells. A statement from Michael Palmer (beekeeping genius) popped into my head. “queen rearing is about 60-70% effective, a lot of queens won’t be able to leave their cell, some are born with deformed wings, many get eaten or killed when they go out on their mating flight. Keep every queen cell your bees make, raise more than you will ever need and give the excess to friends or other beekeepers. Never waste a good queen cell.”
So that’s what I did. I scampered off leaving Kat a bit bewildered with her hands full of bees and came back from the car with two small Chinese Poly Mating Hives. These tiny mating nucs can be managed by only a handful of bees so are super useful for queen rearing. First, I filled the small feeder with a lump of fondant (while Kat hid in the shade due to the temperature in direct sunlight), then placed the lid back on. Secondly, Kat cut one of the cells free leaving lots of comb space around it, to ensure the developing queen wasn’t damaged accidentally. The comb above the cell was squished flat and a toothpick (or twig in our case) was pushed through, this helps the cell hang in the nuc. Thirdly, we brushed about a cup full of bees into the tiny mating nuc and then situated the queen cell under the middle frame. Finally, Kat taped the lid down tightly as these nucs were coming home with us.
We removed two queen cells, situated them in the two tiny mating nucs and placed them in the shade while we finished off what we were doing with the main Queen Rearing Nuc. There were now two queen cells on separate frames, like we had planned (huzzah! A plan finally coming together!). We slid in the divider and ensured each side had a queen cell, stores and a bunch of bees. We topped it up with syrup and closed it up, not to be opened for another three weeks (7th of June). We picked everything up including the two tiny mating nucs and took it all to the car.
The two tiny nucs will now stay in our garage for two days before I take them to Apiary 2 and open them up. Hopefully in that time they will draw comb on the small frames and get accustomed to their new little home.
That’s it for now, plenty to keep us busy so we’re sorry if these posts haven’t quite been as regular as we would have liked. We promise we’re updating as much as we can!
We hope you’re all safe and well and we’ll be in touch with another post soon.
Greg & Kat