Jon

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 ...

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 ...