Thanks Jumbo
I was wondering where everyone on here had gone
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I'm still wondering where everyone has gone
I haven't posted much either so if everybody is the same that might be the reason
When would AMM be ready to swarm normally ?
In most of the areas on SNHBS page I guess never :)
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About now.
PH
Just missed one :(
Late June up here, but it could be earlier this year. I still have a few colonies awaiting their first super. I only lost one last year but they were determined to swarm anyway. In the first few weeks of July last year it was swarmtastic up here. Luckily none of them were mine.
Once the rape comes to an end the bees really get into swarm mode
If you had a board on for the last month then you can take the old queen out to a nuc
Take your supers of 🍯 honey spin them out
Put the young queen in the bottom with the new wax
Get rid of some old frames from the top and take the board out
Then it's back to watching like a hawk
I thought you would be less likely to see swarming so far North Lindsey
Shows how little I know :)
I watched Countryfile Spring diaries this morning
About 5 mins from the end the new beekeeper had lost a swarm and spots varroa on the bees left
Then the bees turned nasty during the inspection and they had to retreat to the car
The joys of beginning beekeeping
He did have some honey though so not a total wash out
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If it was 40ft up a conifer you probably didn't miss much fatshark
Usually I find low down swarms on a post or bush will have a new queen and will stay put when hived
Ones that enter a bait hive will stay put
Ones at the top of tall trees where you risk life and limb just fly off even if you get them
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Mid-chest height in a sycamore sapling. Easy peasy. But gone by the time I extracted myself from back-to-back meetings. The only thing that remained were two tiny crescents of wax, no more than 1 mm long, and two or three lost bees.
I have a strong suspicion this was a cast from one of my splits. All the mated Q's were present and correct. I suspect I left an overly-strong box below the board. My fault ... I should have twiddled with a few more of those little doors ... or used a board with more than one in the first place.
I can't see 40 feet up into a conifer ... or at least I never seem to be able to see swarms in dodgy locations that others are demanding I remove.
Surely that's a clump of ivy?
Nope ... not a chance ... it's a crows nest
Asian hornet ... not honey bees ... definitely not bees ... very distinctive them Asian hornets
Bombus hypnorum ... very good for pollinating your dahlia/blackberry/rhubarb/carrot/prize onions ...
Bad luck you'll have to get Mrs fatshark a beesuit and a deputy sheriff badge
I was up a conifer yesterday afternoon
The hives that had chalkbrood I didn't use boards for
I relied on regular (ahem!) Inspections and bait hives with old comb
They prefer the conifer
Never again Grrr👿
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My bees can't tell that it's no longer May ...
However, by careful selection over several years (I only hive the ones I can reach ;) ) mine now never choose a site above shoulder-height ... just got one into a skep from a small, dead willow tree.
I can't really claim credit for them also choosing a dead tree, but it did enable me to remove a few awkward branches and twigs before dropping them into the skep. Distant thunder and rain threatening so it's probably time I hustled them into a hive.
Dumped the contents of the skep into a large nuc. There was only one solitary corpse on the sheet underneath the skep.
Attachment 2826
Looks like one of your Amm queens DR ... and just as dead.
I'm assuming this was a swarm with 2 queens from an overcrowded split ...
Least that one wasn't £35
Slip it into a cage with 9 or 10 angry bees and sell it :)
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Swarm free bees would be the icing on the cake to go with our varroa free status D. R. But unfortunately our bees are just the same as everyone else’s. Early July seems to be the peak time for swarms up here, the inexperienced beekeepers and those who don’t practice swarm management suffer the most. It’s not unusual for us to have 8 to 10 days of cool damp weather in a row and then when the sun comes out the bees are off like a rocket. It can even catch out the more careful beekeepers. The biggest villains of the lot are the leave alone beekeepers. I spoke to one this week who admitted they had only checked their bees once this spring!!!
Here are photos of a prime swarm in July 2015 at a friend’s apiary. I popped by to see if she was there and came across them, it turned out they weren’t even her bees. Although the bees went into the nuc I was trying to fit a quart into a pint pot and they scarpered a few hours later. They were caught on a nearby bush the next day.
That was some swarm Lindsey it was a bit ambitious putting them in a nuc
They look very black ready to export I would say :)
It must be great with no varroa they are a pain
Once bitten twice shy fatshark
I was putting a few new queens in mininucs today
One didn't make it because she hatched early
So I took a side by side picture
The one on the left cost £35 is mated and sold as AMM
The one on the right cost nothing is a just hatched virgin and is grafted from my own stock
They are both dead and gone
You might be asking why I bought the left hand one
I'm wondering that myself
I have had a possibly false impression that people selling queens are more competent
I am pretty sure now that is not the case (puppy farm springs to mind)
,
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Here's one of mine ... a local mongrel but reassuringly darker than your recent purchase.
Attachment 2831
I'm baffled by the concept of importing amm queens so that one has "native" bees.
Hi mbc they won't be native
Or local
They would be amm
But in this case they wouldn't be any of those things
In fact in this case they wouldn't even be alive
I bought that one instead of say a Carnie or buckfast to see what was on offer as Amm
I wouldn't want to mess up the local gene pool :)
I hope people reading this will see what arrived and think twice
In the fairly recent past hundreds of Amm queens were imported from France every year and delivered all over Scotland :)
They weren't native either
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Nice queen fatshark I like the look of that one
I would be very happy with her
At the end of the day we can't all be grafting from Collonsay bees
It's a pointless excercise in most locations
The notion that an insect is worth £35 verges on ludicrous
Then I read people thinking their open mated Amm should be worth £50 or more (super ludicrous)
People selling instrumental inseminated queens at £110 (mental)
What's more these beasts are totally unproven other than laying up a mininuc
There's a lot of hype and not much substance
Queens are so easy to produce you need to be mad to buy them at those kind prices
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Oh! :) Well, compared to DR's sad-looking yellow Amm, yours was a very fine-looking queen, Fatshark.
Not Superglue ;) ... fast shutter speed and a willingness to sort through dozens of rubbish images to find one half-decent one. I've got (or had, they've been deleted now) any number of her out of focus, walking around the edge of the frame, rear view only or any combination of the three.
The other secret is a large image size so you can crop very hard. If you go for macro shots your depth of field and (as you say) ability to manipulate the frame at the same time makes it very hard work. If your original image is 20+ megapixels you can photograph big chunks of the frame, avoid getting in your own light, use a narrower aperture to get better depth of field etc.
Some of the new high-end small cameras now take 4k video in which they change the focal plane. That way you take a small burst of video and sort through it for exactly the shot with everything you want in focus. Incredible technology (but this one was taken old-skool).
I'm so gullible. No wonder your queen looked so good. I think it's time I get a new camera to help out. Thanks for the advice!
Kitta
Is Donald Trump related to Mussolini
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Weather bad just steady drizzle here lucky it's getting better by Thursday when next lot of cages get put on Queencells
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Having just completed some inspections I thought it was time to resurrect this thread. My strongest boxes are too busy collecting nectar to do anything more than pull a few 'play cups' at the moment with wall to wall brood and supers filling nicely. However, another week like this and it's all going to kick off ... (famous last words, what's the betting they'll all clear off this week sometime?).
And while we're waiting ... how's this for an apiary with a stunning view?
Attachment 2923
On a clearer day your can see the Rif mountains in Morocco from this spot ...
No .... That's Benachie - surely.
A bit higher than Bennachie ... with more vultures.
Another difference ... the sun is shining ;)
Well it's kicked of for me in Lancashire had to do five artificial swarms today, majority of stocks brood boxes full of brood and nectar the perfect storm.
That's a lot of work; a lack of space or swarmy girls?
I had a swarm yesterday - due to emergency queencells that appeared after the time i thought they wouldn't. So there was the desired queencell that was open plus some others....
Swarm caught and put in a hive without too much bother as the swarm was at waist height. There was one emergency queencell already open so I opened the rest and all had queens that came out sprightly enough. One went to the tiny swarm I caught the other day.
so far so good. touch wood and all that. no swarms so far this May but quite a few damerees.
I am afraid to tempt fate by saying none from a normal colony so far - just the 'operator error' above.
I looked at one colony a few days ago and it had 11 frames of brood and a dummy board in the brood box so they were rather cramped - although they had a lot of super space although that was also full - I usually give a second brood box at around 9 frames of brood and the colonies build up to around 14 or 15 frames for me. OSR is about to finish so as well as having to deal with the honey, the reduced forage may result in a change in hive activity.
I am afraid to tempt fate by saying none from a normal colony so far - just the 'operator error' above.
I looked at one colony a few days ago and it had 11 frames of brood and a dummy board in the brood box so they were rather cramped - although they had a lot of super space although that was also full - I usually give a second brood box at around 9 frames of brood and the colonies build up to around 14 or 15 frames for me. OSR is about to finish so as well as having to deal with the honey, the reduced forage may result in a change in hive activity.
Intervened just in time yesterday, double brood colony with loads of charged cells, five capped! In most cases they were at the bottom of the frames of the top brood box as per the book but also a lovely big supercedure cell right in the middle of a frame.
2017 queen but I've never been sure her bees like her very much.
All kicking off here now ... got a call for a swarm 7pm yesterday evening ... I'm just back from work, have not had my tea so they'll be fine until tomorrow ... famous last words.
Call at 9am "they've gone". You win some and you lose some.
Most hives now have split boards in and (drum roll) I'm actually running out of supers so have been busy building frames most of today :)
The weather for the week ahead is predicted to be good and I've just discovered the farmer has planted a big area of field beans near one of my apiaries ... result ;)
Swarming kicking off in some apiaries but yet to really get going in others.
Lightweight! ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by fatshark;39514.. [I
I'll be interested to hear how the field beans go. Haven't had an appreciable flow from them here in my limited experience (and C4U says similar from his exceedingly extensive experience) but there is always a first time. Usually it is winter beans that yield in England I believe.
Just have to finish this super then I'm off to let beginners loose on colonies 3 weeks further on from visit number one.
Spoke too soon, despite being A/S'd with two nucs taken off and almost all the brood and cells removed, they still swarmed. While doing the splitting the queen was running around piping - no cells quacking back that I could hear - is that an indication that the decision had already been made that they were already for the off?
Subsequent reading has suggested that swarm control methods which separate the queen from the flying bees seem to be more successful, so far I agree.
You generally hear the quacking after a virgin or virgins have emerged. The establish queen may also pipe around the first swarming attempt but as they will go (in good conditions, as we are having) around a day after the first cell is capped then her daughters are not developed enough to respond. The quacking comes when mature virgins are being held in by the workers, usually to regulate the process of issuing casts.
I've intervened in colonies with piping and quacking (by opening or destroying all queen cells) and they've always stayed put. Even with the original flying bees in that box (having removed the old queen into a nuc at the first sign of queen cells).
Perhaps you missed a queen cell? In a colony with a piping virgin and a sealed cell remaining, losing a cast is quite likely.
On queen cells and their positioning, forget the stuff in books about swarm cells and supersedure cells. Swarm cells can be (and often are) on the face of the comb. Perhaps a quarter to a third of those I've seen this week are like that. Supersedure cells can be on the edges of comb. The dogmatic statements in some books are just wrong. I tend not to trust supersedure attempts anyway - they can change their minds. Out of the swarming season I may leave things alone as long as the established queen is clipped.
Obviously separating all the flying bees from the queen works temporarily. If the queen is in a busy box then the colony will still be in a swarmy mood and once enough bees have graduated to swarming (and they've made more queen cells, even partly finished) they could be off then.
To control swarming I now just separate the queen from the queen cells, leave only one queen cell in a queenless box, and keep it that way by removing extra cells made later. Doesn't matter whether the flying bees are with the old queen or with the queen cells.