Jon
The missing Apidea
by
, 27-05-2011 at 08:53 PM (3899 Views)
I lost an Apidea about a fortnight ago. I have 18 and on doing a stock take I could only account for 17.
I have one in the back garden with a mated queen and two more at the association site with mated queens spare from last year. That’s 3 so far.
I have two not in use makes 5. I set out 11 with ripe queen cells at my allotment the weekend before last, one of them a double as bees absconded from Tim’s Apideas into one of mine and I had to give it an extension. Total 17.
I have checked every shelf of my shed in the garden and likewise the shed at the allotment.
I had an Apidea at some of the meetings of our queen rearing group for demonstration purposes so I e-mailed various participants to ask if they had found a stray one amongst their bee bric a brac. No joy there. I also made contact with everyone whose car I had been in and out of with a bag of bee stuff recently without a result.
This evening I was requeening a colony which I have been using as a cell raiser as it has been queenless for a month and is starting to get cranky. I was also worried about the possibility of laying workers. I removed the last of the cells from it (I got about 40 altogether) and put a 6 frame nuc with a mated queen and 5 extra frames in a brood box above it via 2 sheets of newspaper, the queen in a cage to be on the safe side as the queenless colony fills two brood boxes and I don’t want the queen getting balled.
I also had to put rollers on 21 queen cells in another colony which are going out to members of our queen rearing group tomorrow.
All fine and dandy.
I got all that done and then planted out a few lettuce on the allotment, winding down after the bee stuff.
It was then that I noticed a solitary Apidea in the far corner.
I checked it and it had bees on the point of starvation as it was closed up.
I checked the queen cell and it had hatched.
I refilled the food chamber with syrup and opened it up.
There was a lovely black virgin queen in it.
There were only about 3 dead bees on the floor.
I realised that I had left this one closed up for 12 days after putting in a queen cell and had completely forgotten about it as it was set out away from all the others.
The funny thing is, the weather has been so bad that none of the other virgins have been on a mating flight yet so this one may not even be disadvantaged.
Bees closed in an Apidea are supposed to be sprayed with a mist of water once a day but these ones obviously hung in there for nearly a fortnight without the TLC.