Jon

Big Bang Wednesday 15th June – a whole lot of shakin’ going on.

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Jon
, 11-06-2011 at 07:35 PM (2872 Views)
This is going to be the trickiest logistical exercise to date.

Apart form our queen rearing group, there is a group of about 15-20 beginners who have signed up to get a queen in an Apidea. We are meeting next Tuesday evening and the agenda is to show them how to assemble and manage an Apidea.

The problem is that I have over 30 cells due to hatch on Wednesday and I suspect some of them will hatch early on Tuesday.

If they hatch on Tuesday, it is feasible that we hand over the apideas replete with virgin and cupful of bees later on that evening, assuming there is time to do a whole lot of shaking earlier in the afternoon to fill the apideas.

If they don’t start hatching on Tuesday, we will put the cells in anyway and check on Wednesday or Thursday to ensure that a queen has emerged into each Apidea. I have another 6 cells due to hatch on Friday so these could be used to replace any which fail to hatch. In a way it is easier if the cell has hatched as you drop the virgin into the bottom of the Apidea and tip the cupful of wet bees on top of her. It guarantees that there is a queen in the Apidea.

The priority tomorrow is to get roller cages around the cells so I will have to do that tomorrow morning. I got caught out a couple of weeks ago when cells started to hatch nearly two days early and I had queens emerging from cells as I tried to place them through the hole in the transparent cover of the Apidea.

The members of the queen rearing group will be bringing along Apideas on Monday evening as well but these ones will already be filled with bees and just need the queen cell to be added. I also have another 7 in the shed which need to be filled with bees. Hopefully there will be enough cells to go round. Sometimes the bees start to pull them down when the weather is bad but I have a feeder on the two cell raiser colonies so hopefully they are happy enough.

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  1. Jon's Avatar
    What a frenzy it was. Alan Jones called for me about a quarter to four and we headed for my allotment to sort out the queen cells and apideas. We filled 19 Apideas and put the queen cells in. We also put the queen cells in another 10 which had been pre-filled with bees by members of the queen rearing group. The final two cells went into apideas from a previous batch which had lost their queens. Alan also brought along 8 Apideas with bees and queen cells from one of his Galtee queens.
    That's a total of about 60 at my allotment. My drones must think they have won the lottery.
    It took us nearly 3 hours to do the apideas and then it was off to talk to the beginners and show them around the new association apiary. Back home after 10.00.
  2. gavin's Avatar
    We demand a photograph of the 60 Apideas at your allotment! And the carpets of expired drones if they go in for apiary vicinty mating. That is quite some effort.
  3. Jon's Avatar
    A lot of people are reporting that their drones have been kicked out already - presumably due to the bad weather.
    One of mine started as well so I gave it a bit of extra feed.
    We have had only two perfect mating days in the past 6 weeks. Yesterday was a possibility although the maximum was about 17c rather than 20c. Today could be another possibility as 19c is predicted. Just need a blink of sunshine in the afternoon.
    I only have 4 colonies producing drones in significant numbers but I am removing drone brood as it is capped and moving it to the colonies I don't want making drones. There are thousands of drones in some colonies.
    I need to requeen several of these and let them make their own drones.
    The queen I am grafting from is unrelated to my drones so I should be ok.
    There are others I want to start grafting from later on in the season.
  4. Jon's Avatar
    Checked earlier and I think 25/31 hatched.
    I did take a photo of a stack of 30 charged Apideas piled up on a table and will upload it in due course. Gav I am at my limit for uploads. Any chance of an increase? It's mostly scattergrams which appear in threads so I don't want to delete them.
  5. gavin's Avatar
    Oooo .... didn't realise, sorry. I'll go and fiddle in the innards of SBAi. You have probably noticed that I put my pictures directly on the SBAi server and link to them. The images are usually 800 pixels wide. If you or anyone reading this would like to do that too, I'll happily provide the service. Email me a JPG 800 pixels wide named <yourname>_picturefilename.jpg and I'll upload it and link it to your post when I can (usually evenings and weekends). Otherwise upload it yourself as before using the usual route and vBulletin will present it in that box you get for linked images.