Jon

An amazing improvement in the weather today so I decided to mark some late season queens which I didn't get round to doing last year.
April is a good month for marking a queen as there are usually not too many bees in the box.
Call me an old fuddy duddy if you like, as Woodrow Wyatt used to say before going off on a rant, but I use the tried and trusted 'crown of thorns'. Thats thorns without either an E or an apostrophe, although I did buy it from Thorne so it was once a Thorne's ...

The weathermen are claiming that the sky is going to fall in on us towards the middle of next week so I did a quick check on stores. There is a good chance that bees won't have much foraging time for a week or so.
I was hoping it might have been a bit warmer today and although bees were flying, it was a bit nippy for inspections.
The bees were working hard bringing in yellow pollen, probably from willow. There were also a lot collecting water from various sources which probably means ...

I got three samples back this morning, one of my own (34) and two from my father's apiary. (Sample A & B)
Thanks again to Roger Patterson for taking the time to do them.




Surprisingly, his two samples are showing more hybridization than mine, probably from Carnica Drones as his bees are very dark with little or no sign of yellow banding.
He has a neighbour a quarter of a mile away ...

I released the queen I had left in a roller cage overnight.
The two colonies seemed to combine without fighting.
In theory, a queenless colony should look on an introduced queen as a gift from above but you never know with bees.
I removed the roller cage and then a frame from the nuc.
I placed the frame on its side and set the roller cage onto it, releasing the plug.
You can see the queen leaving and the bees immediately starting to groom her.
Sometimes ...

Yesterday I checked the final two nucs and found that one was down to two frames of bees but no queen whereas the other had just a handful of bees and a queen. The one with the queen is a colony I overwintered in the garden shed which had barely 2 frames of bees in November. It's surprising it survived at all given the lack of bees for heat generation in the winter we have just had.
I decided to combine them rather than loose the bees from the queenless nuc.
I brought the queenright ...