Jon

We meet every Monday evening between 7 and 9.
This week the plan was to talk about general apidea management and how to keep the right amount of bees in the apidea once there is a laying queen and brood hatching.
Any apidea which had lost a queen got a frame of larvae from a queenright one to help stabilise it and stop any more bees drifting away. These will get a new cell asap.

The novelty was that we found 15-20 apideas with eggs and these were queens which emerged ...

I have a queenless cell raiser colony I set up just over 2 weeks ago by removing the queen.
This has been brilliant at producing cells with about 40 queens already introduced to apideas and another 40+ in the pipeline.
I went over early afternoon to graft another 20 into it and as I was approaching with the grafts I noticed it had a swarm in the air which settled 12 feet up a thorn tree just outside the apiary.
I opened up expecting carnage as I had 15 sealed cells in the box ...

Found one queen laying today from a batch which emerged on 19th June so just managed to get one mated before the end of June. Can only get better.
I have 50 cells with queens due to emerge next week and did another 50 this afternoon.

We got a batch of new Galtee queens on Monday morning which had travelled up North from Tipperary with a local beekeeper who attended the GBBG queen rearing demonstration.
I was expecting 2 but 13 arrived.
These were ones we ordered and paid for in January for distribution among members of the queen rearing group.
I introduced two to nucs I had made up the previous day and when I checked earlier this evening both were out and laying.

I also introduced two to queenless ...

I was just getting ready to head out to the allotment to do some weeding when my other half called me out to the garden where the air was black with bees.

The bait hives had been actively scouted all morning.



This time they chose a wooden national as opposed to the Payne Poly nuc.

But then a lot of fanning started and bees were going under the nuc.



Oops. ...