Your gallery of 2D plots

[Rosie]

Jon

Are you planning to rob bees from the nucs during the winter for testing? I had planned to wait until spring to test mine.

Good plots, by the way.

[Jon]

I don't think 30 bees makes any difference to winter survival of a nuc.
Anything which looks weak I would leave alone.
Plot 86 is from a nuc but it is a 7 frame correx nuc and it is well filled.
Sometimes I take a few dead bees from the floor to get a rough idea of where things are and i take a proper sample when the colony is stronger.

There are a couple I re-queened quite recently which I won't be able to test until next year when the older bees have died off and a couple where I added a frame of brood.

Sure it whiles away those chilly autumn evenings!

If anyone is interested in having a go a morphometry but doesn't want to pull the wings off bees, I can send you a few scans to check.
The software is free to download, drawwing is the software for measuring the wings and Morphplot is Peter Edwards' excel sheet for representing the data.

Bibba also has links to the downloads

[Rosie]

Beware of BIBBA's links. They were out of date when I last checked them.

I have a backlog of other people's samples to keep me busy for quite a few winter nights.

[Peter]

Hi Folks

Up-to-date links to DrawWing and Morphplot (and much more) on our Links page here:
http://www.stratfordbeekeepers.org.u...tm#Morphometry

[gavin]

Here is the first two of my 2012 queens.

Right hand one is a pair of specs, obviously, but I'm not getting anything from the first. Maybe there weren't enough bees in that nuc to get a proper signal. Could be a disc sanding device.

Nearly 30 more still to check ...

Good.

[Jon]

Jimbo.
I claim my first Mars bar of the season.
This one is a sister of 86 which I posted the other day but this one mated from an apidea in my garden.
I made up a nuc with her at the start of August and it is now a decent sized colony in a 7 frame correx box.

col.90.jpg

[gavin]

That one is so good you should be able to have it deep-fried.

Is it one of those moon buggy things with an antenna dish on the side?

[Jimbo]

Sorry only a mini mars bar as there were only 35 wings. You get a full size bar with 50 wings and a king size with near 100 wings. But well done anyway
I havn't taken any samples so far this year as the mating was so poor and I lost a few of my better queens so I am not expecting anything great this year

[Jon]

You are a cruel man Jimbo - expecting me to lure another 15 bees from that nuc to their doom in the scanner.

I have another one here but barely worth a punnet of broccoli.

This was a queen which hatched from a cell I missed in the top box and the virgin pulled down a row of grafted cells.
I am not even 100% sure of the origin as I put brood frames from a couple of different colonies in the top cellraiser box.
Nice calm colony.

col.105.jpg

[Jon]

Yet another plot.
I am glad this one looks decent as it is a queen I had marked down as a potential breeder a couple of months ago. The colony is really calm and very strong. It is in a 7 frame nuc and I have already taken a couple of frames of brood from it to bolster weaker colonies.
A great granddaughter of a Galtee queen.
This one also mated from an apidea in my garden.
No yellow banding visible in any of the workers.

col.88.jpg

This one looks decent as well

col94.jpg