Brood being uncapped
How did I do?
I managed to expand the number of colonies over the course of the season from 8 to 14. However, I lost 2 in the Autumn – I suspect the queen stopped laying and the colony dwindled out as there was no capped brood and no bees. So I’m going into Winter with 12 colonies of which about 6 are very strong in terms of frames covered.
The increases were down to a mix of splits, swarms and a large bait hive swarm. Interestingly I collected about 6 swarms this year on behalf of my association and only 2 of them were prime swarms so I wouldn’t recommend a swarm to a beginner as their first colony. Even the prime swarms didn’t develop very well over the course of the season and the queens needed replacing. I united the caste swarms to try and get 2 strong colonies but found that they didn’t take off and expand; so once again had to resort to replacing the queens.
As the weather was exceptionally warm this season I did quite well with the amount of honey I collected – around 150Kg including 25Kg as a Spring crop which is a rarity for me. I entered my honey in the Surrey county show and got a 2nd for 2 jars of medium honey – so was super pleased with this. My soft set honey however didn’t get anywhere as the top wasn’t fully set – so will need to work on my technique to get it to fully set. I’ll change me seed honey to make sure that I can get the honey to fully crystallise and set.
Looking forward to 2026 I seem to have one strong colony that has exhibited Varroa Sentive Hygeine (VSH) behaviour – brood was being uncapped in the Autumn and the colony had very low mite counts – around 2 mites per 100 bees when my other colonies were around 5-8. So I didn’t treat this colony with Apiguard like the others and will see how they get through the Winter. As well as low mite counts they are also a nice tempered and productive colony. If they don’t need treating in the Spring I’ll use this colony as a breeder colony and re-queen some of my other colonies.
