Relief

I appreciate it's all a bit involved for readers about Hive Amidala and how I was worried the colony had swarmed.....anyhow during the recent hive splitting exercise I removed some wild (drone) comb from the bottom of the frame where the queen cells were, and I popped this in my bag. I only checked it this morning (to show the kids some comb) and was DELIGHTED to spot eggs at the bottom of every cell. This gives me good confidence the queen is still in residence. I'm also pretty sure I removed all the queen cells to form that new colony (Cleopatra) so all is hunky-dory. Will the Amidala bees still think of swarming and make more queen cells, or will the removal of all those bees mean there's enough queen pheromone to go round the rest and they will want to stay? I don't know, but I now feel more in control and am looking forward to my next inspections. I will certainly have my nice bright white marking pen at the ready in case I do spot the queen this time.

Hives record

Until now this blog has doubled as my Hives Record. This has been disfunctional for two reasons:

• It means I write too much and bore my readers
• The hive record format is not consistent between inspections and so is not comparable or interrogatable through time

Following a talk on hive records at the excellent Ealing Beekeepers Association yesterday, I intend to try to remedy this by removing the blow-by-blow inspection reports from the blog, and instead using Google docs (spreadsheet) to record my records of my hives. Here's a link to the Hives Record which I will keep up to date after each inspection. The format follows the BBKA guidance, though I have tweaked it slightly. The challenge, of course, is to make it succinct enough to be painless, verbose enough to be useful, and readable enough to be transparent. Comments are welcome. (I'll be updating it for a few more days yet.)

I'm thinking that what I need to accompany this is a laminated sheet with the same data fields and a wipeable marker so I can make summary notes whilst I am at the hives for subsequent entry into the spreadsheet. I have heard that some people take audio recordings of hive records whilst they inspect, though I have it on good authority from the person who wrote an article about this in Beecraft that he does not do this himself!

And the naked link:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ang92v02Z0p7dGFwbU9qTnF4UHN1RUxZdHdwdjQwU2c&hl=en

And text for me to copy (including link - will this work?) in every blog post regarding an inspection:
Hives Record updated.

Hive split and fingers crossed

Having consulted with the nice people at Ealing Beekeepers Association yesterday (cheers Andy!), I decided to go through with splitting the hive and creating another colony as I had originally planned. The view, given the recent weather, the spotting of eggs on Thursday and so on, was that the old queen was likely still in the hive and the removal of the remaining queen cell (actually I think there may be more than one left on that frame) and a bunch of bees might do the trick. If the old queen was NOT there then the workers will be able to create an emergency queen cell, and in any event I have time to requeen if they do not or if a resultant queen is not a good one. As I looked through the hive I DID spot some more eggs, indicating that the old queen probably is/was in the hive. Interestingly, though, these eggs were not in a neatly laid pattern but instead laid sporadically across the cells of the frame on which I spotted them. Hhhmmmm.....

The operation was fairly simple. Since I had an old national brood box (half full of honey) on the hive above the queen excluder I just moved the frame with the queen cells and brood into this box and put in an additional frame of brood in from my other hive. I made this up as a stack (bottom to top): crown board, super, brood box, crown board. I then wrapped it with a cross of strong straps. The crown boards kept the stack sandwiched without a heavy roof to contend with, and both have their feeder holes covered with plastic mesh which I pin down (I do this to all my crown boards). I used the super in the stack since the queen cell was protruding below its frame in the brood box and I wanted to make sure it did not get bashed. I threw the lot in the back of my car, sprayed it with water to keep it cool and drove to my mother-in-law's stunning garden just outside London in Gerrards Cross (about 15 miles from the original site). The site is perfect: hidden on a low flat roof with easy exterior access, discrete, south facing, sheltered from behind with a huge hedge and in a very garden-rich area. Together with a stand, varroa mesh floor, roof and entrance reducer it looks beautiful in place. Pictures coming soon. I've named the new hive Cleopatra. The colony has a decent store of honey, two frames of brood, at least one queen cell (hard to see on that wild comb below the frame in question and there may be three), and really quite a lot of bees too. Moving the bees seemed to have been quite simple. I hope they weren't too traumatised by the experience.

The little apidea mating hive I have in my own garden seems a failure. I opened it this afternoon to find only a few (50?) bees remaining, all rather stuporous with none of the natural comb I had hoped to see being built from the frame tops, despite my having melted starter wax strips in there beforehand. The queen cell I had wired in had been abandoned, and so wasted. Shame. Why the failure? Not enough bees? Inclement weather for the past few days? I don't know. It does seem to me to be quite a big ask to dump a small number of bees in the box and hope the will just get on with even a little comb building whilst in those new surroundings. This tiny group of bees seems to lack any critical mass. I think what I'll do is put the apidea, with the bottom entrance open, above the feeder hole of a crown board in a happy hive and get those bees to build the comb in situ, so that when I put the box into action it's all ready to go. Then I'll try again if and when I feel more confident and I have more queen cells to spare.

Muppet

Oh, such a muppet. It's all been a good learning experience, fair enough, but having read further (I have read all this stuff before but apparently I have a leaky head) it seems that swarms leave the hive "around the time the queen cell is capped." So the chance is that my queen left shortly before I inspected yesterday. Probably. Since there were still eggs there. Gee, there were still a load of bees left in the hive, though. Anyhow, this dawning realisation makes my actions today (see prior post) even more idiotic. I'm upset with myself, and upset for my bees. It's quite possible that last queen cell will make it through and no harm will be done (save having lost my original queen a fair few bees), but I should have spotted those queen cells in my inspection last week (they will have been there then, I think, (or perhaps I have been a tiny bit unlucky with the timing and they were just being built up). It's all good learning, and I shall try to use these experiences to make me a better beekeeper.

Bad beekeeping

I am so upset. I'm sitting here in a really black mood. It was stupid of me really.

I cooked up a plan on what to do with my queen cells. Re-checking of "Guide to Bees and Honey (Hooper), "Bees at the Bottom of the Garden" (Campion), BBKA's "advice to beekeepers, and a number of web resources http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman/artswarm.html I decided on a slight twist on the typical - see the bottom of that Dave Cushman link where it says "my particular favourite method". I even lined up my mother-in-law (who lives 15 miles away) to agree to take a hive in here garden. All ready, I headed on site with new floor, a couple of supers, roof, etc - I won't bore you with the details. Anyway, the procedure, much like any artificial swarm, relies on finding the queen. For 40 minutes I checked and checked. I deeply regretted not re-marking her during an earlier inspection earlier in the year when she was easier to find - I could find her nowhere. Had she already swarmed? I could still see tiny larvae in the hive (bah - I should have searched more carefully for eggs, which I know I had seen yesterday). The 3 queen cells were still in place. I then made the sensible decision to abort and shut up the hive and de-kitted.

Then it struck me - the idea of an idiot. I had the little polystyrene mating hive with me - why not go back in and take one of the queen cells out, a few bees and get cracking trying to set up a new colony that way? After all, that's why I had bought it. So, knife in hand I began: opening up the hive and cutting. I ruined the first queen cell. I still could have stopped at this point, but went for the next. This was cleaner, and I got it into the little mating hive with some bees I quickly brushed off the comb (ha - would it not be ironic if I had got the old queen in this process - this does not bear thinking about) and I shut it up. I got the hive home and it's now sitting in my garden, having had the little feeder filled up with thick sugar solution. The bees are out (and in I hope) and perhaps it will work, perhaps it would not.

So, why so stupid? Well, what if the old queen HAS swarmed? This was not obvious from the number of bees in the hive, but it's a big, vigorous colony so it's possible. I've just removed 2 out of 3 queen cells, arguably leaving the smallest, and if there's no incumbent queen this is just not an acceptable risk for my favourite colony. Again, this process was really only sensible if either I had knowledge the old queen was still in residence or if I had removed the first queen cell cleanly.

Of course if the old queen has NOT swarmed, then I'm not well set up either, since there's still a queen cell in the hive. It's just not ideal - and all because I could not find the queen - and all because I had not adequately marked her or rather not remarked her since her spot had worn off.

I'm dreading my next inspection in a week's time. Fingers crossed that by then I'll find something to smile about.

Queen cells !

Queen cells - 3 of 'em - in Hive Amidala. Today's inspection went well apart from that. I spotted eggs in that hive, though the queen eluded me. I'm guessing she's still in there......

What to do?

It's all somewhat complicated by where the queen cells are. I've recently moved onto a deep brood box in which there are lots of deep frames and one normal depth frame which I had moved into that box when I introduced it a few weeks ago. THAT'S where the queen cells are: beneath the shallower frame. This greatly confuses the typical "artificial swarm" techniques I read in the books. These are the first queen cells I've had to deal with, and I am looking for answers. A made-up variation on the books' version of the artificial swarm springs to mind - I will think this through further. I'm also tempted to employ one of my 3 new apidea mating hives. I'll get my thinking cap on and report back. Tomorrow's weather forecast is good. I'll need to spring into action then.

As a footnote - I had planned to put another super on Hive Amidala, but the old standard depth brood (acting as a large super above the queen excluder) is still only one third / one half full of honey. These bees are not swarming due to lack of space. And they're still cracking on with drawing comb in the the new deep brood box area, so that's not why either. I guess they just want to swarm. Anyway, thinking cap on....

Bee pictures from Spain

My recent volcano-extended trip to Spain gave me the opportunity to take some pictures I thought I'd share.
I don't have a proper macro lens on my camera (they're expensive) and this is about the limit of what I can do for close-up photos.