Jon

Season hotting up

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Jon
, 23-04-2010 at 07:48 PM (2131 Views)
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 with the queen on it into the middle of the upper box.
I usually work with single brood chambers but I need to make some extra bees as I have promised to supply 4 or 5 nucs to my BKA for newcomers. Numbers have doubled in the past 2 years and a lot of the new people don't have bees yet.
If you believe that local bees are best, it's important to do something about it as the newcomers have itchy feet and will go to the bee traders who use imported queens if they can't source locally. I have no desire to see Buckfast or Carnica drones sniffing around my apiary and messing up my queen rearing.

I have 7 decent colonies and 5 which are weak, including one which is just a queen with a handful of bees in an apidea so not even a colony.
I reckon that when a colony dwindles to a certain point - under 2 frames of bees - it finds it very difficult to increase in numbers due to problems of heating brood and collecting enough pollen.
The dilemma is how much to reinforce weaker colonies with emerging brood from stronger ones. The stronger colonies are increasing well and I don't want to set them back at this stage.
I did however find a lovely frame of sealed brood which had just started to hatch so I gave it to one of the weaker colonies along with a frame of pollen. They all seem to have plenty of stored pollen at the moment.

There is a little bit of drone brood in the stronger colonies but it will be 3-4 weeks yet before drones are mature enough for mating.

The other thing I did this week was remove frames of stores and replace them with drawn comb. I leave one frame of stores in each colony in case there are a few rainy days where the bees can't forage. There are masses of dandelions out at the moment so not much chance of starvation. I saw quite a bit of fresh nectar in the comb.

I will use the frames of stores when I make up nucs next month.

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  1. Trog's Avatar
    Not too hot here - I've just given all the girls a morale-boosting tub of syrup each. They've been flying a bit but it's been cold for the past week and wet all day today (and rain forecast for the rest of the week). Been too cold to inspect them since 10 April!
  2. Jon's Avatar
    I meant metaphorically hotting up with extra tasks to attend to! The weather has not been that hot here either but we have hardly had a drop of rain for over 2 weeks so the bees have been foraging well once the temperature hits 10c or so.
    The stronger colonies have really increased the size of the brood nest in the last week.
  3. gavin's Avatar
    Do you think that a shallow frame in the middle is the way to go? This might depend on the size of the brood nest. Drone brood is usually peripheral I think, but can be anywhere. I usually put one at one end of an expanding brood nest, or one each end. Sounds like it is working anyway.

    In theory (I'm a great one for theories) alternating ends weekly for 2-3 weeks might be ideal, as then the mites emerging from worker brood will all have a chance to dive into those sacrificial drone cells. It is claimed that 90% of mites can be found in drone brood, so one full cycle of emergence should remove 90% of that lower spring mite population. As long as there isn't other drone brood in the colony of course, as that would just remain a mite factory.
  4. Calum's Avatar
    lots on the go here

    and here



    and here (video)
    Updated 24-04-2010 at 07:05 PM by Calum
  5. Jon's Avatar
    Do you think that a shallow frame in the middle is the way to go?
    If you stick it in the middle they will start to draw comb immediately. The bees don't seem to mind where it is as long as they can make drones.
    Assuming no mite problem, what I intend to do is take sealed drone comb from preferred colonies and place it in ones which I don't want to make drones. The better colonies will get a shallow every couple of weeks and hopefully the others will be happy with their donated drones.
    If mite levels go up I will do a bit of culling but currently they are low. They had Apiguard in September and Oxalic at the end of December. Last year the mite levels stayed low until the autumn. I was tempted to skip treatment and then they started to drop in September.

    Calum - we have as many dandelions as that at the moment. Is that apple or pear in the other photo? I would guess pear from the cut of their gib. I have 7 apple trees and one pear tree in the garden but not a single flower yet.
  6. Calum's Avatar
    The trees are pear, there are about 4 acres of apple and pear trees around my bee stand.. In this area they have alot of apple and pear orchards. - Second largest in Gemany (producing 250000 tonnes of fruit!). The dandelions are like that for kilometers here. -big yellow carpet everywhere!