Blog Comments

I was talking to someone yesterday who has bees at oil seed rape and he says it is running 2-3 weeks late this year.

Your bees seem to be in good shape for a productive season.
Mine were in far better shape this time last year although I should be able to get back to where I want to be by the end of the summer. I have about 8 which are ok and the same number of 'dinks'. All the queens are ok and laying normal worker brood, albeit very little in some cases. Surprisingly there were no drone layers after the poor mating weather last summer.
I need to get a couple of cell raisers up to double brood strength asap to get the queen rearing started.
My losses, which were mainly the nucs I was attempting to overwinter, were lost to dwindle rather than missing queens or drone laying queens.

It has been a terrible winter for beekeepers in NI. losses seem to be heavy and widespread.

The prolonged cold certainly isn't helping the spring build-up. And that starting from smaller clusters too - at least smaller than last year. Last year we had large bee populations going into winter, lots of fresh young bees, and a cracking March. Those with masses of experience were saying it would be a swarmy year, and so it was. By that measure this year is going to be completely different. Maybe the Apideas will stay at home this year.

Been cold here all week.
Hope the temperature rises soon so the bees can get a bit of pollen and rear some brood.

The man does seem to be talking sense and I tried that today at the association apiary - where three colonies now have queen cells. Half of yesterday's grafts had taken so I grafted again into the empty cups today.

I have only found queen cells in 2/16 full colonies so far this year and another one at the association apiary.
One I split and in the other case i removed a couple of early stage queen cells and gave the colony a couple of supers.
I have also found a couple of supersedure cells. I usually remove these in spite of the prophets of gloom who say the queen is about to stop laying.
I found a really nice one at the weekend and it was in a colony headed by a queen I graft from so I made a nuc with it.

If you do you artificial swarm by removing the queen and about 5 frames of brood to a nuc it is hard to see how they will swarm as the queen will have no flying bees within 24 hours and the other part has an open queen cell. I remember Steve Rose recommending doing the artificial swarm this way and I think the man is talking sense. If you leave the queen with the flying bees the swarming urge may be hard to suppress and you get more queen cells created right away after the split.

I extracted 10 supers in the last two days in an effort to make more space.

Despite the wintry weather overnight the sun came out at lunchtime and the bees were flying strongly a short while ago. The site is sheltered and the sun hits the hives so the 8C in the shade probably was quite a bit higher at the hives. They appear to be holding their own stores-wise, no doubt helped by the many old pear trees in flower at the front door as well as dandelions and sycamore nearby.

Better day today. Mine fly strongly when the temperature hits 8c if the sun is out.

Beautiful pictures,....... must plant a J quince . lost one a couple of years back......

There is plenty of silver birch around here as well. Must watch out for the catkins.
It is often used as a screen for industrial estates.

No, silver birch. The common one around here. I shoogled a tree and clouds of pollen came off. Didn't see birch in the pollen counts for the weekend so it has probably started in the last day or two. And now the back of my throat feels hot and dry. I may be allergic.

Is that downy birch you are talking about? I planted a few of those in my garden as they do well in waterlogged soil.

27th March, 20+ C, the birch catkins are releasing pollen for goodness sake (it has often been the first week in May when they blow), and today I added a second brood box to my strongest colony.

It was Ethel the gardener in the big hoosie who pointed me to the Japanese quince. It was in a very warm corner of a walled garden so I guess that the bees hardly needed an excuse to go there. There were lots of them though.

Funny, I have a couple of Japanese quince in my garden and I have never noticed the bees on it. pollen of all colours coming in at the moment so spoiled for choice.

It does. That bee and others like it are in a series of pictures from that day which didn't make it into the blog. Some of my colonies are a bit mixed but some of the bee(s) in these pictures do look very carnie-like. They aren't necessarily mine as there is another beekeeper a little way S (less than 1 km) and I'm sure his bees are partial to a little Japanese quince too.

You need to get Steve Rose to surreptitiously scan the wings. The bee in the first pic looks suspiciously like Carnica to me. Dark, but the bands on the thorax are very wide, although the bee in the 3rd pic seems to have a negative DS as judged by holding a piece of paper up to the screen aligned to the correct points. Scientific or what.

That one in the bottom picture had four frames of brood today and lots of bees - it should romp away in the coming weeks. It also had sealed drone brood so queen raising can start soon!

Canon digital EOS camera, set the focussing to manual, focus at a distance I think is suitable (use a hand or point it at the hive roof), zoom lens on fairly wide-angle, hold it near the entrance looking along or up on a sunny day, and hit the button lots of times. Amongst the scores of pictures will be a few you like the look of - and for SBAi you can crop the image quite heavily to get it to the 800 pixel width I use for here. I lodge images on the SBAi server separately and link to them, but Photobucket and similar provide a service which works in the same way. For close-ups of stationary bees again I fix the focus and take a few shots moving the camera nearer and further. Usually the shots are useless!

Gavin, I'd like to ask a non-bee question about the top picture. Could you tell me what focusing you use please, because no matter how hard I try I never manage to capture a decent picture of bees in flight.

There are quite a lot (not necessarily a football reference there). Yes, I would have taken the mouseguards off but I forgot to take some envelopes to collect some of the corpses on the floor so left them on. Maybe through the week.