Neils
It's good to be back.
by
, 27-03-2011 at 11:48 AM (3544 Views)
After 6 months of watching the cabin fever set in across the various forums where some exploded more frequently and spectacularly than others over the winter it's great to finally get out and up to my elbows in bees again. I've missed you ladies.
Despite the weather inevitably turning yesterday compared to all of last week, I opted to carry out a quick inspection of the two colonies on the allotment apiary. One in a 14x12 the other in a Double National.
The plan was to get the Double National down to a single brood box. It's the smallest, from watching the entrance, of my three colonies and I really don't like using double brood boxes. I thought giving them a single brood box might help them along a little and once they're a bit stronger I want to bailey change them onto a 14x12 Hive.
As we shuffled frames out of the top box there were two frames with brood present the rest of the frames a mix of stores and a couple of frames of foundation at the edges. The stores have been squirreled off to make nucs later and a few frames of rather grotty comb are destined for the solar extractor we've been promising to make for the last 2 years.
In the bottom box we stumbled across her Majesty and turns out I must have marked her at some stage last year. This surprised me a bit as I don't normally mark queens in their first year and I had cage and paint ready just in case.
As we were closing up the national, we started to attract an audience, albeit it one at respectful (ish) distance. A winter of doing talks seems to have paid off as as we started to get ready to go into the next hive the call came out "tell us what you're doing". Commentating on what you're doing is actually quite good fun, maybe I should start doing it all the time, audience or not as a means of focusing on what it is I'm trying to do.
Both colonies are looking pretty good to me, both have plenty of stores, brood in all stages, enough new, clean frames to play with to keep them busy and as we have a box of the stuff about to go out of date, I've put an apiguard tray on the National Hive. The mite drop is a little higher than I'd like at the moment, they're still a little way off needing a super (or being ready to bailey change them) so it seems a good excuse to use it up. The temperatures are just high enough on the forecast next week so I'll be interested to see what happens with the drop on this one.
There is obviously a flow on from somewhere but I'm at a loss to explain what. Maybe I need to wander further to find out what's in flower but I'm not complaining.