Jon

  1. Big Bang Wednesday 15th June – a whole lot of shakin’ going on.

    This is going to be the trickiest logistical exercise to date.

    Apart form our queen rearing group, there is a group of about 15-20 beginners who have signed up to get a queen in an Apidea. We are meeting next Tuesday evening and the agenda is to show them how to assemble and manage an Apidea.

    The problem is that I have over 30 cells due to hatch on Wednesday and I suspect some of them will hatch early on Tuesday.

    If they hatch on Tuesday, it is feasible ...
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  2. Good news all around

    Well Gav may well have had good news re. the false alarm about EFB but I also had a good day.

    I checked 10 apideas and found eggs in 8 of them.
    This included the one I left closed up for 12 days and the two which absconded at the end of last week which I found stuck in bushes.
    I am sticking with my theory that this is some kind of signal failure leading to all the bees leaving with a queen on her mating flight.
    I saw the two remaining queens as well and they ...
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  3. First mated queens in the apideas

    I looked at a few apideas yesterday and found eggs in three so the queens must have flown between Wednesday and Friday in the good spell of weather. That's 20 days from queen emergence so just in the nick of time as 25 days is regarded by many as the date where a queen turns drone layer.
    I am assuming they are not laying drones and will know for sure when they start to cap the brood.
    I have queens in eleven apideas in this batch and am hopeful now that the majority of them will start ...
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  4. Another busy week with the apideas.

    I had 15 cells due to hatch last Sunday 29th May and all of them turned out duff.
    I opened quite a few and all the queens were dead at the purple eye stage which I reckon is about 4 days off hatching.
    The cells had developed normally and were sealed at the right time – 4 days after grafting. I can only speculate that they were chilled. We had a huge storm on 23rd May and temperatures were low all week. Some beekeepers even had colonies blown over. My dad had one with two supers on ...

    Updated 02-06-2011 at 09:03 PM by Jon

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  5. The missing Apidea

    I lost an Apidea about a fortnight ago. I have 18 and on doing a stock take I could only account for 17.
    I have one in the back garden with a mated queen and two more at the association site with mated queens spare from last year. That’s 3 so far.
    I have two not in use makes 5. I set out 11 with ripe queen cells at my allotment the weekend before last, one of them a double as bees absconded from Tim’s Apideas into one of mine and I had to give it an extension. Total 17.
    I have ...
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