Month: May 2013

Quick note – Good news from the hive. That hive where I was doing a frame change, and she wasn’t laying. Well after I changed the order so the new box was on top, they started building comb for her and she started laying when I checked last saturday.

Phew. Well now I can get on with doing it to two other hives.

In other news,

that queen seems to have lost a middle leg…
the WBC in matching green had more queen cells, and I plan to bailey comb change to artificial swarm this weekend.
I finally got some more frames so I can start patching the gaps I had, and swapping out broken / hole-y comb
the two other hives at matching are still not building up. I am thinking of using the below recipe to see if that improves matters.
1 x Tsp Tea tree oil
1 x Tsp Wintergreen oil
1 x Tsp of Spearmint Oil
10 drops lemongrass

Put a cup of water in a blender and then the oils. Blend to emulsify the oils
make up to 1.8ltr with water.
Pour 40 ml of this into 1.5 ltrs of 1:1 syrup shake up well.
I’ll see if that improves anything

I checked my 14×12 WBC the other day, and its packed to the rafters with brood. They were so packed in that they were making comb on the bottom bars and the queen was putting eggs in. They also had 5 queen cells on them. I didn’t see the queen, but I saw loads of fresh eggs (standing on end in the cells), so I was fairly sure she was present before knocking down all the queen cells. They had a super on but had just not touched it at all, so I took off the excluder to see if that would encourage them up there.

It does pose a quandary though, unless you have two WBC hives, how do you do an artificial swarm?

Well I’m going to try a bailey comb change / demaree swarm control. Basically putting the current colony above a box of new frames, with the queen in the lower box separated by a queen excluder, then once she start laying swapping the ‘clean’ box to the top. This will supposedly reduce the swarming intent and also reduce the varroa count significantly as the old lower box is left.

On the down side it will require a good number of lifts, so its lucky I have a couple of spare ones, not entirely sure they will fit, but we shall see.

In other news, I have 1 national that I just made brood and a half, another that I tried to comb change onto commercial frames where the queen is refusing to lay in the new area. I have two hives where things are just not building up quickly, and two that are running low on space that I just put supers on. So in short, nothing that is going really well while not causing issues.

So last week (Thursday 9th) moved to rescue my Buckfast queen “Danish Lady”. The colony was just not building up right in the previous inspections; in the last I could see no sealed brood, few bees and no sign of her. I thought the treatment with varroa guard had done for her.

So, I planned to have a shook swarm into a nuc. I prepared ahead of time, nuc, sheet, frozen comb, some stores and foundation. I put a super on the floor, put a mesh floor slide board up to it to make a ramp. Putting a sheet over both, I put the nuc on top, took the lid off to allow insertion of the queen to the hive; so her scent would draw the others in.

I went to the troubled hive and started taking frames out, starting with ones with no bees. Where I found bees I shook them onto the sheet in front of the hive after looking for the marked queen, all going to plan.

Then I found a patch of sealed brood. Ahh, the queen was doing slightly better than last week and is still here somewhere. So, plan B, not all new frames, I wasn’t going to throw this lot away. So I continued to shake off bees and pulling out frames; no more brood, just the one precious patch.

I checked the bees on the sheet and there she was, with a bright green mark; don’t know how I ever miss her, but there you go. I picked her up on the edge of a hive tool and popped hee in the top of the box along with her brood. Great! Brood in, queen in; the bees should smell them and follow along now… well come on then, in you go, I don’t have all day.

Oh, did I forget to mention it was windy; windy enough to probably blow away any attractive scent … oops.

Well, time to get the bees moving in, maybe if they see their sisters going in they will get the idea. Smoke them up into the nuc, shake the sheet towards the nuc, shout “come on, she’s in there!”; all tried with small levels of success. Then the smoker ran out of fuel. After a top up of slightly damp grass I got some nice yellowish smoke; oh yeah raining a bit too, not ideal conditions.

Anyway cutting a long story short, I got most in and the others can take their chances with one of the other hives there. I took the nuc away and drove home slowly due to forgotten hive straps.

The bees seem to be getting along ok in my garden for now, so I will cross fingers for a good build up.

Lessons to learn

• Hive straps
• Have multiple plans
• Weather is a pain
• Pheromone smell travel best without wind
• Steeper angle on a ramp will allow you to smoke bees ‘up’. Smoking sideways tends to scatter them.
• If you are in a rush, the bees won’t be.