Jon
Good news all around
by
, 06-06-2011 at 10:06 PM (2183 Views)
Well Gav may well have had good news re. the false alarm about EFB but I also had a good day.
I checked 10 apideas and found eggs in 8 of them.
This included the one I left closed up for 12 days and the two which absconded at the end of last week which I found stuck in bushes.
I am sticking with my theory that this is some kind of signal failure leading to all the bees leaving with a queen on her mating flight.
I saw the two remaining queens as well and they look to be mated but no eggs yet. They were bigger, walking slowly and had a circle of workers attending them. Virgins are small, run like crazy and are largely ignored by the other bees.
My drones must have been enjoying themselves, at least I hope the virgins were consorting with my drones.
Alan from my BKA also reported finding eggs today in two colonies he had almost given up on.
Thursday and Friday were two perfect queen mating days, about 24c and no wind.
One of the queens which I fished out of a hawthorn bush on friday with her cluster was on 26 days from emerging and 29 days today when I saw the eggs so those who say that queens need to mate within a couple of weeks have got it wrong.
The other 7 queens were about 3 weeks from emerging before starting to lay.
I love having extra queens as you can make an almighty cock up and put it right with a new queen.
I set up two queenright cell raiser colonies on Thursday and introduced grafts last Friday. On checking today they had started 32 cells. I grafted another 20 today as well. We have a second group - total beginners just off a course with no bees yet- starting up next week and they are all going down the apidea route for their first bees. It will be a bit of a frenzy to get the apideas filled but I think it is a non threatening way to get into beekeeping - long live the humble apidea.