Weekly Inspection – 27th April

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Weather: Warm with temperatures between 16ºC – 18ºC with forecast for mini heatwave in the week to come.

Forage: Still lots of blossoms out. – dandelion, Chesnut, hawthorn and cow parsley starting.

I managed to capture a swarm in the bait hive that I put out. Reasonable size with an unmarked queen – not my bees. I’d seen scout bees the day before and decided to check my own bees to make sure I hadn’t missed ay queen cells, The swarm arrived with a roar around 1:00pm and were all in the hive within 45 minutes. I waited until the evening and moved them to my home apiary and stuffed some grass in the entrance to get them to re-orientate once the foragers emerge and ensure the swarm dozen’s abscond.

My efforts at grafting with the Cloake board continue with mixed results. The grafting wasn’t successful but the queen raising colony had started its own emergency cells so will be OK. But to my surprise I found that the parent colony had 4 charged queen cells, so took the queen into a nuc with 2 frames of brood and stores.

Weekly Inspection 21st April

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Weather: Been fine and higher than normal temperatures 16ºC – 18ºC but still chilly in the evenings. Some showers forecast but temperatures staying above average for April.

Forage: Still lots of blossoms out – notably hawthorn, Chesnut and dandelion.

Been a strange week for my bees. Decided to start queen rearing with Cyan as I wanted to increase the number of colonies. Started grafting on the 19th April but only got 2 cells started. Probably down to me not being careful enough but also chose a frame that was new wax and the Chinese grafting tool was going right through the wax. Did a second set of grafts the following day – not sure of the success rate yet. I am using a Cloake board and raising in the same colony as they were started in.

Found 4 charged queen cells in Blue, so did a nuc split – original queen in the nuc in the same apiary. So shook extra bees in to offset foragers returning to the parent hive.

Finally found that Indigo was queenless and 2 sealed but scrubby looking cells, so took down. Plan is to requeen with a Queen raised in Cyan,

Honeybee on heuchara

Weekly Inspection 12th April

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Honeybee on heuchara

Weather: exceptionally warm for April with temperatures 18ºC – 20ºC.

Forage: Pear, dandelion and quince and laurel finishing.

First swarm of the season reported!

Need to start making up more supers and also add in drone trap culling frames.

Honeybee on dandelion

Weekly Inspection 6th April

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Honeybee on dandelion

Weather: very warm for this time of year – temperatures 16ºC – 20ºC. Still chilly overnight but perfect foraging weather.

Forage: Abundant blossoms out – Laurel, Quince and Blackthorn and dandelion and pear just starting.

Checked on Cyan and the progress of the Demaree – found lots of seared QCs – all small. Need to keep an eye on it to make sure it’s not going to swarm.

 

Weekly Inspection 28th March

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Weather: much improved and temperatures have risen to 14ºC – 17ºC. Chilly in the evenings but no frost so far.

Forage: Blackthorn, Cherry and Laurel now out.

With improved weather the colonies have started to expand and work the supers. Notably Cyan has doubled the amount of brood in just 1o days! Decided that I needed to perform a Demaree as it was running out of space and too early to split as there were no drones around.

River Mole Apiary

Weekly Inspection 18th March – First Look

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River Mole Apiary

Weather:started to warm up with temperatures 12ºC – 15ºC. Still relatively chilly but lots of activity of front of the hives, so after looking under the roofs could see that they had all taken down the Ambrosia fondant. Chose a nice sunny, warm day and had a quick check.

Forage: Blossoms starting to appear – mainly Blackthorn