Jon

We meet every Monday evening between 7 and 9.
This week the plan was to talk about general apidea management and how to keep the right amount of bees in the apidea once there is a laying queen and brood hatching.
Any apidea which had lost a queen got a frame of larvae from a queenright one to help stabilise it and stop any more bees drifting away. These will get a new cell asap.

The novelty was that we found 15-20 apideas with eggs and these were queens which emerged on 5th July and 7th July, grafted from one of the new Galtee queens on 23rd and 25 th June

I found four of my own apideas with laying queens and these were queens which emerged on 7 th July so just 8 days from emergence to egg laying. I have never known them mate so quickly before but we have just had a week of sunshine and 25c temperatures. I can see now how it is so easy to rear big batches of queens in places where the weather is more reliable than in Ireland.