I now have 9 apideas set out, each with a recently hatched queen, 7 from a galtee daughter which mated with mainly galtee drones and 2 from another of my queens with some Galtee genetics. I have done the morphometry on them and on that basis they look good. I also distributed 6 grafted queen cells on the point of hatching to members of my bka on saturday. Mervyn brought round a frame of larvae from a Galtee queen on Saturday morning and 11 grafts got started from that although we we ...
I am having mixed luck with the cell raising so far. I set up a queenright cell raising colony about a fortnight ago and tried my luck at grafting. It started and sealed eight cells and then tore down 5 of them. I did have one hatch today but stupidly I forgot to bring an apidea with me so I had to bring the virgin queen in her cell and a cupful of bees home in a margarine tub with a hastily perforated lid. The queen was still in her cell at this point but had ...
I checked through that big colony I moved to my allotment site yesterday and found and removed several more queen cells. It has brood in a deep and a shallow and from the age of the youngest larvae I reckon it lost its queen on Wednesday 27th April. On the very last frame I checked I found a queen cell with a little flap hanging which looked like a virgin had emerged. It had cocoon debris inside as well. Having been on the point of closing up, I now had to sieve all the bees ...
I spent three hours this afternoon helping a friend from my bka sort out his bees. He found queen cells last week and removed them but subsequently reckoned they had swarmed anyway. I checked his colony today and could not find a queen. There were no eggs and the youngest larvae were around 1 day old which would put the swarm date last Thursday. I removed all queen cells I could find bar a single open one. They are on brood and a half and the box is still completely bunged ...
Updated 02-05-2011 at 11:09 PM by Jon
Just back in from another entertaining evening with Tiny Tim. We had to move two colonies of Tim’s from a site of his to our new mating apiary at Minnowburn. Tim picked me up at 7.30 and after a half hour drive we were at the site. The colonies were blocked up and ratchet straps put on. I commented that one colony had a lot of dopey looking bees hanging out the entrance which can indicate a surfeit of bees and impending swarm preparations. TT had checked this one ...