Jon

This morning I arranged to meet one of the our new BKA members. I've got to know him a bit over the last few months. He is a first year beekeeper with a single colony.
He is known to one and all as Tiny Tim given that he is 6' 11".
last week I discovered that he is is a native bee enthusiast and a BIBBA member.
He also has 15 mating nucs and is very keen to get going with queen rearing.
To some extent, as a beginner, he may be putting the cart before the horse with ...

I think I still have 4 of the queens alive.
On Monday I made up 5 apideas with nurse bees from my strongest colony and put a queen in each inside a hair roller.
It's best to leave the bees in an apidea queenless and closed in for a couple of days so that they are ready to accept a queen or a queen cell but I had the queens already so I put each one in a roller for protection rather than running them in the front door.
I left the apideas closed for 48 hours with a roller inside ...

A fortnight ago I went down to the home place to mark queens for my father. He has 12 colonies and I managed to find and mark 8 of his queens. There was one colony of very runny bees full of brood but I couldn't find the queen even after going through the box a second time. The box had a load of brace comb as it was one frame short.
When we had finished up, he noticed that the bees in this colony were running around on the front of the box like a queenless hive. I suspected that the queen ...

I did various bits of futtering about with the bees this week.
On Monday I checked the strongest colony and it had 7 frames of brood and a lot of bees.
I put a shallow in the middle of the brood nest to encourage them to build drone comb below.
Out of curiosity, I checked on Wednesday and the shallow was laid up with eggs and they had started to draw drone comb below. The box was bunged with bees and I decided to put a second brood box of drawn comb above and lifted the frame ...

19c today and I must have seen about 20 queen wasps out and about.
There were 6 around a little piece of fondant I had dropped beside a hive.
I saw several trying to get in a hive and and one was killed by half a dozen guard bees who dragged it off the landing board.

I marked two more queens (bees not wasps) and re-marked another whose spot had almost worn off. (couldn't count in last blog entry)
One thing I noticed is that most colonies have good pollen stores. ...