ESBA Apiarist

End of the season

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It's been a while! That queen displaced in early July to a nuc box found her way back to the cell raising colony after the first round of queens had been raised. How?! She was mated three quarters of an hour's drive away so shouldn't have known the site of the cell raising colony. The nuc box she'd been put in was about three feet to the side and behind the main colony. After the failure of that second round of queens I re-arranged the boxes to create the queen-right arrangement of Wilkinson and Brown, widely known as the Ben Harden method. Unfortunately by that that time the Varroa population - which had been high and was knocked down with Apistan early in the summer - was back to high levels and the subsequent attempts failed at one stage or another.

However there was one Apidea with a late queen cell. The small queen was seen through much of September. Last week the Apidea was still brood and egg-free so we gave it some syrup. Yesterday there were a few larvae and a sheet of eggs. Looks like this one mated at the end of September or early October. I think that I have a queenless colony and if so I'll put the Apidea over newspaper over the feed hole.

Summary at the end of the season? Not so good, due largely to queens failing at every possible stage including weeks after coming into lay. We have seven colonies going into the winter after more queen failures, a couple of fusions, and a donation of a weak nuc to a queenless colony. None of these are very strong but if most survive we'll be in a good position next year.

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  1. Jon's Avatar
    Hi Gav.
    Any beekeeping is always going to be a curate's egg - good and bad in places.
    Overall I have been happy with my lot this year.
    I reared over 100 queens, most of them for our queen rearing group, but a lot of them are producing some yellow offspring which has surprised me as I try and saturate the area with my own drones.
    I picked up a bit of useful info yesterday about a guy who has just got back into beekeeping this year and probably has quite a few colonies. I checked on google earth and he is 1.3 miles from my mating apiary at the allotment. I need to follow this up as he may have Buckfast and this would explain all the yellow banding I am getting. I brought 6 apideas with virgins to my garden in late August and of the 5 that mated, 3 produced workers with yellow bands. I have a couple of amm colonies in the garden so was quite surprised by this but the same chap is less than 2 miles away.
    At the moment the overall health of my bees seems to be good. I had very little varroa drop after apiguard treatment. I have 14 colonies, 5 nucs and 8 queens in apideas going into the winter. The apidea thing is an experiment as I want to see if I can get them as far as April which is the most crucial point for needing spare queens. 4 of the 8 are queens I would like to keep and evaluate so fingers crossed on that one.