Friday 10 July 2009

New colony arriving soon

I dropped off my new hive with Fabiola today. She's very kindly been bringing on a colony for me which is currently sitting in a nuc on her allotment. This weekend she's going to swap frames with bees from the nuc with the empty ones in the hive and leave the hive to sit for a day or two. Then, on Monday evening I'll be popping over to pick it up and move it on site. It's very exciting for me, though perhaps slightly ambitious to be trying to run two colonies at this stage. I'll have two quite different colonies. The original one seems to be large and strong. The second will be initially quite small (a few frames) and I'll need to be conscious that the priority is to let the colony build up so they're in good shape for the winter. Whilst I was at her house, Fabiola showed me the 72 jars of honey she's just pulled out of 2 supers. Wow! I hadn't realised that each super could yield that much honey. I found it interesting to note that she told me it's her style to leave the bees with one brood box only during the winter and feed them well. This is similar to the advice I've heard from others, though I've also heard advice to leave the 2 brood boxes on plus a super and don't bother to feed them (much). It's all a bit confusing really, but I'm starting to get the impression that beekeeping is an art for which I will need to develop my own style. Having said that, at this stage I'd rather err on the side of being conservative and somewhat generous to the bees, and anyhow I'm not in it primarily for the honey.

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