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We has Terry Clare as a visitor at our regular queen rearing group meeting tonight - fresh up from Gormanston last week.
I just heard this morning that he was in the neighbourhood.
It was nice to be able to show him our set up and we had about 25 beekeepers in attendance as well.

We had nothing special planned but about 8 mated queens were removed from apideas and new queen cells were put straight in.
Terry was able to cast his eye over a few fine looking queens ...

saw a classic supersedure situation today with a queen of mine in her 4th season.

This colony tried to supersede last August but I inadvertently captured the daughter in an apidea when she made a pit stop with her mating swarm on a fence post. This was apiary vicinity mating. At the time I could not work out where the stray queen had come from but I found an opened supersedure cell in this same colony the next day.
The old queen overwintered anyway but the colony started weak ...

Moving to new servers, different error message from earlier.

Many thanks FD for your assistance last night with the frames, and on Saturday.

On Saturday we had a grafting session for various enthusiastic newbees and nearly newbees, and a look to see how the new nucs were coming along.

ESBA1, which featured earlier on here and is largely Amm (thanks Jon) and has daughters in Speyside now, spawned six splits plus the mother. One of these splits failed and yesterday lunchtime I dispersed the frames and remaining bees to neighbours ...

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 ...