Month: April 2013

Well its been a mixed inspection this time round. Two WBC’s coming along nicely at Hastingwood but in need of some replacement frames. The Queens seem happy enough but the new one needs marking and clipping. On that note I just picked up some little snippers called “deadheads” the other day at Wilkinson’s that will be perfect for the job.
Anyway, the next few hives at matching tye were struggling a bit. One had very few bees and a queen, the other had 4 frames of bees but then emergency queen cells and no eggs. So now I have one fewer colony after a newspaper method merge. Well one was struggling and would have not built up quickly enough to catch the rape crop; and the other would have ended up with a virgin queen with no drones about to mate with.

The last hive on site held a surprise or two though. Apart from being the only hive that seems to be touching the pollen patties, it is also building up wonderfully. Four 14×12 frames of brood, right across the frames; the hive full of bees (and at lunchtime too, so the foragers would have been out) and lovely fresh honey coming in. Won’t be long til they will be needing a super. One little sting to the wrist, but with a result like that who could hold it against them.

On to the last site and, if you can believe it, better news. Seven frames of brood! So, you know what seven is the magic number for, yup, time for the first super of the year, Hooray! One sting from this hive, but what is that amoung such good news.

This year I have some supers that have drawn comb and some with just foundation. I am told that alternating comb-foundation-comb will improve the rate that the foundation is pulled out and so that is what I have done.

The other hive on site was doing well, up to 4 frames, but not quite ready for a super yet.

Both those hives are on standard national frames and I plan to comb change them on to commercial frames. More so that the colonies have made a mess of the combs and the woodwork is old. I may go back to having a couple of standard nationals there another year with some new/repaired woodwork.

I inspected mine yesterday. Touch wood, they have all made it through, but they look very lacking in bees.

How many frames of brood do you have on yours?

My best are on old nationals in my parents back garden which is very sheltered so I guess that has helped a bit. Those two have 4 and 5 frames of brood; others however on commercials are FAR less well off, only having 1 frame on each hive. They are in a more exposed position, which made it ‘fun’ to inspect on Sunday without the bees getting blown off the frames. Interestingly the deep nationals I have have faired better in the same location with the commercials, but they are in WBC shells so maybe the extra bit of insulation helped. I have one where I saw the queen but I think no brood at all, but then I was in a rush to put it back before the clipped queen blew off and I lost her.

I had a fair bit of white hard honey too, I figured it was the rape I gave back to them and got them to take down in autumn, but I guess it would have been Ivy.

The fun, interesting part of the weekend was that both the national colonies were bringing in some very blue pollen, I should have taken a picture really. It looked like this :

and from a bit of research I think it is from :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_squill

given the colour and the time of year.