Spent the afternoon scraping propolis from apideas and putting frames in a box for fumigating with acetic acid. The bees in the garden were working hard bringing in pollen in a light mizzle with the temperature about 12c I still have 9 occupied apideas, 7 with laying queens and two with virgins which I presume will not mate now although I had a queen in a nuc start laying around 1st October. Some of the apideas are a bit weak and will hardly make it through winter but ...
A bit of an understatement, that. Devastated? Well, not that bad. Bad news certainly. I'm now certain that all the queens that were raised and have survived this year are infertile. That leaves me where I was back in the spring, on a knife edge. I badly need disease-free Amm nucs next spring, but as yet I'm at a loss to know where to get them. The lesson I've learnt from this year is that I cannot afford to take anything for granted, whether it be the supply of nucs/queens (that never materialized), ...
It's been a while! That queen displaced in early July to a nuc box found her way back to the cell raising colony after the first round of queens had been raised. How?! She was mated three quarters of an hour's drive away so shouldn't have known the site of the cell raising colony. The nuc box she'd been put in was about three feet to the side and behind the main colony. After the failure of that second round of queens I re-arranged the boxes to create the queen-right arrangement of Wilkinson and Brown, ...
Time for an update. The four at the heather came back heavy, and provided three full supers of cut comb honey. Yum yum. And many thanks to my helper, couldn't have done the heavy lifting without you. They have had Apiguard, one round only, which I hope will hold any Varroa problem at bay until the December oxalic treatment. The other three stayed put in the orchard and endured a wet August and most of September, and one of them went totally broodless for a while. However feeding has wakened ...
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