A month on, and finally we had a nice warm Saturday. Were the bees building up explosively? Was I going to see swarm cells? Massed ranks of drone cells? Would they need a super? Hardly! The queenless one had gone, the one in the middle was down to bees in the super only with a small patch of eggs on one frame, and the 'strongest' one was down to a couple of frames of bees and brood in the brood box and in the super. It is going to be a long, slow spring build-up from ...
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 ...
'Into my hive an air that chills From yon far country blows ..' intoned the Queen “I beg your pardon?”, said one of her retinue. “It's poetry”, said another, “A Shropshire Bee, if I'm not mistaken.” “Quite right, though improved by myself.”, said her maj. “She's quite the polymath, our queen.”, said a bee on the edge of the circle. “An autodidactic polymath,” added another, not wishing to be outdone. ...
Finally, finally, finally. Making the most of the lovely day to finally get my hands in the hive. Although my eagerness to get the lid off the hive was somewhat tempered by one of the neighbouring plot holders coming over to introduce herself and let us know she's prone to anaphylaxis from bee stings. It took all of 3 second once she made her way to the gates for the smoker to be lit and the suit to go on. So let's get the numbers out of the way, right now there's: ...
The wait for a full inspection continues, I'm either in the wrong place at the right time or it's just that little too nippy to want to take frames out for a leisurely look around and attempt at marking HRH. As I didn't treat with OA over the winter I stuck on an Apiguard tray a couple of weeks back thinking that despite it being a little cooler than the manual suggests that I'd still get a fair idea of how bad the mite levels are and knock a good few down. Monday evening we took ...
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