ESBA Apiarist

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.