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Thread: Will your bees attempt to swarm in May

  1. #11

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    Apologies It's usually my fault

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  2. #12
    Senior Member Jon's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by The Drone Ranger View Post
    Apologies It's usually my fault

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    You will surely be reincarnated as a 460mm2 piece of plywood with various flaps on it.

  3. #13

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    There is no doubt that a high proportion of hives will need attention in May to stop swarming...even early May or even before the end of April.

    I was out doing other things, but my team went feeding in Poly Langs near Edinburgh on Tuesday.......and came back with a report of only 8 dead from 250, and 60% strong enough to need an extra box as soon as the OSR opens, and about half of that 60% are completely wall to wall. I was on wooden hives that day and not ONE was at that power. Some not for away but as soon as the OSR gets going they will go like a rocket. End of May is almost 7 weeks away............only the poor ones will not have needed serious attention by then. In OUR situation that is.

    Three years ago, when it was a fairly early spring, we had the first incoming swarms at our yard (we keep no bees there so not ours) in the last week of April.

  4. #14

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    Hi C4u
    Glad it's going well
    I had a quick look in a handful of polynucs today
    3 frames of brood and one with 4
    Last year I convinced myself the cold weather would slow them up and it didn't

    Your polyhives will be the best bet for the rape then ?

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  5. #15

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    Quote Originally Posted by The Drone Ranger View Post
    Hi C4u
    Glad it's going well
    I had a quick look in a handful of polynucs today
    3 frames of brood and one with 4
    Last year I convinced myself the cold weather would slow them up and it didn't

    Your polyhives will be the best bet for the rape then ?

    Sent from my LIFETAB_S1034X using Tapatalk

    We are in the midst of moving them. However the poly aere way ahead of the average in wood up to now, but they had the power all through the winter. The reasons for the difference are more complex than wood v poly. The wooden hives I was at earlier in the thread were a ropey lot....but had been since last summer. They almost starved to death on the heather and their area did poorest, so they had less chance all round.

    8 dead from 250 is a most atypical outcome though..............its an almost freakishly good wintering and not in any way to be seen as normal.

    Its a very low loss year all round and we only have a small number of groups that are poor....but were all poor from last year.

    However, OSR is a by product for us. If we get it all and well, but right from day 1 we are looking at the first half of July, to have the maximum number of good colonies for the heather as we start moving to the bell about 5th July. (state of flowering dictates).

  6. #16

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    Quote Originally Posted by Calluna4u View Post
    OSR is a by product for us. (state of flowering dictates).
    Hi C4U - that surprised me. I thought moving colonies to OSR sites would have been part of the cycle, for the crop and to support expansion. In terms of honey yield what % would you say is your output of OSR v heather? As was mentioned elsewhere, I agree that we really do not promote heather honey enough cf that manuka stuff. The stores down south and in Europe should all be waiting (desperately) for the first of the season.

    But - I'm interested in your swarm control with those colony numbers. What is the strategy? Is it a vertical AS when Q-cells appear and raise the new Q for the heather?

    I've thought for swarm control this year I would try out moving the old Q into a weak but looked after nucleus colony (in poly or above a Snelgrove/split board) and keeping most of the bees to raise the new Q and hopefully get an early crop. On my sites - the timing of splits always seems to compromise the early honey yield.

  7. #17

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    Quote Originally Posted by Feckless Drone View Post
    Hi C4U - that surprised me. I thought moving colonies to OSR sites would have been part of the cycle, for the crop and to support expansion. In terms of honey yield what % would you say is your output of OSR v heather? As was mentioned elsewhere, I agree that we really do not promote heather honey enough cf that manuka stuff. The stores down south and in Europe should all be waiting (desperately) for the first of the season.

    But - I'm interested in your swarm control with those colony numbers. What is the strategy? Is it a vertical AS when Q-cells appear and raise the new Q for the heather?

    I've thought for swarm control this year I would try out moving the old Q into a weak but looked after nucleus colony (in poly or above a Snelgrove/split board) and keeping most of the bees to raise the new Q and hopefully get an early crop. On my sites - the timing of splits always seems to compromise the early honey yield.
    Last attempt at a reply before I give up....twp earlier plump replies were sent but vanished....maybe Gavin has banned me? lol....would be an act of kindness now we are very busy.

    We move all our bees to the OSR. It is a crucially important build up crop for us, and we do a lot of replacement of losses and equalising of colonies on that crop. We do produce SOME honey from it but as I said before, its a by product in a way. Nice to have and put a bit in the kitty but it is of little overall importance against maximising the heather crop, so not worth hampering the colonies in their development in order to get a harvest.

    The question about proportions of crop, well every year we hit, by tonnage, somewhere between 70 and 85% of our crop being heather. Add in the value of the crops relative to eachother and 85% of our honey derived cash return comes from heather.
    As you may already know we bottle none of this. All goes in drums to a stockholder and turns up as certain iconic brands and also keeps other domestic producers going when they don't have enough. Also do a few thousand pieces of cut comb heather each season for a few clients which also turns up in surprising places with surprising labels on it.

    The stores in England are only partly waiting for our honey. What is not generally known, given the high profile status of Scottish in relation to heather honey is that we are not the dominant producing nation. As much is produced in England and some of the quality from there is superb, then there is Norway Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Poland, France, Spain and even New Zealand, all producing significant amounts of Calluna honey. Because of that it would be very difficult to get a special status for Scottish. Btw, I was told last week by my trader friend that he is currently having to pay £26000 per tonne for Manuka..........as against about £7500 for heather (both figures are for bulk in drums, semi filtered).

    If you get to a situation where heather honey is an out of stock item you have made real trouble for yourself. You need to control stocks to ensure you keep your shelf space, or someone else will get in, and you might not get back. This applies equally well to the individual beekeeper in his favourite shop as it does to a honey type in a supermarket. Our stockholder rations it in times of shortage to avoid out of stocks with key customers, and in gluts will sell off bulk to Europe. He is content to sit on up to three years production if needed to be sure of seeing through times of dearth.

    Swarm control? well that's a real topic that I could write more than one chapter of a book on. There is no one system that fits all situations. Berar in mind we have this notional 5th July date in mind and try to both maximise the number of colonies in fighting trim for the bell at that time and minimise the interventions needed after that date as we cannot afford to be inspecting bees while migrating to the heather every day. What the orders of the day are is heavily influenced by several factors but most important of these is the calendar. How long do we have before going to the heather. Although not hard and fast we try to have the splitting ended by between the 15th and 25th of June....and after 15th its for remedial purposes only. We then let the queens off the lead by giving them a free run. Does it end swarming ? No, but it reduces it to level that is not economic to try to control.

    However the basic early season splitting is similar to that you describe. First we do splits to refill empty hives. Same idea as most. Old queen and a little brood down in a new hive on the site of the old, excluder and supers added back on top of that. Then old hive with most of the nest and nearly all the nest bees is moved away to a new spot across the site. Process for getting a queen into that unit varies depending on the availability of mated queens from Jolantas unit, virgin queens from same, hatching cells from same, or finally cells from good colonies on the days round. we tend to collect cells at site 1 for using at site 2....and so on...moving the cells on to the next group for use. The colonies own cells are perfectly acceptable too, if the strain is good.

    Once the empty hives are used up we go on to vertical splitting as you described. The split need not go on top of its own mother colony. We mark any with problems with TRQ on the front (there can be many reasons) and these will have a split from another hive put on top. This also minimises the number of skyscrapers.....as you get about three weeks from splitting in a flow situation before you need to do it again....in dearths they can be very dour to rebuild after splitting and little judicious use of the syrup tank can be needed to get them going again.

    This is all turned on its head if the queen is already fined down at all in preparation for swarming. Old queen down splits will tend to have a poor result from that system once swarm preps are advanced, and then you need to have an alternative strategy involving depriving the queen of all her FLYING bees so she them comes back into lay. Several options there. The big issue in this case is the old hive location. Lots of flying bees come back there in the mood for swarming action and can be quite a task to control and they will draw lots of fresh cells on any young brood you leave them with. Leave them no brood and they drift off into other colonies spreading swarm fever. Selecting a cell to leave in that situation can be awkward as they are not at all picky about selection of larva age and even sometimes gender. Some of the biggest juiciest looking cells are actually drones, and we work on the basis that if it looks too good to be true it probably is. It can be best in that situation to kill ALL cells and come back in 7 to 9 days and select a god ONE to leave or knock them all down and ad a hatching stage cell from chosen stock.

    Similar applies to the old nest taken away in conventional splitting, with the old queen in the new box on old site. If the queen cells you choose to leave in the split is going to take more than 2 or so days to hatch you can find that even in such a short time they will have started emergency cells and there will already be sufficient new flying bees before the first of the new cells hatches for the split to throw a caste or castes. Its not a disaster but its a pain, both to the neighbours and the loss of the selected queen, meaning you end up with an unselected emergency cell derived queen in the hive. These splits can all be boosted once established by superfluous brood from the mother half which will ease off her renewing swarming inclinations.

    Then we get to the second half of June, and all bets are off. Any colony with 6 bars of brood or more gets double deeped and the excluder taken away. By heather time we still have quite a mix of hive sizes depending on last splitting date. Aim is to have 80% double deep or better for the shifting day. The splits and mothers are marked before loading to make sure the correct ones find eachother at destination. Some time during the heather period we go round with a case of air freshener, lift the top half off, spray the freshener on the the top bars of the bottom hive and the bottom bars of the top hive, and simply place them back together and let nature sort out which is the best queen. There is no fighting as they have unity before the smell has gone. Within minutes the bees arriving where the top entrance once was find the lower entrance and start streaming down and in. Initially at least its important NOT to leave them a top entrance as this can encourage them to remain as essentially a two queen unit with separate nests which is a real mess to sort out in September. If the split (or on odd occasions the part that had the old queen) are queenless, or drone layer, or just failed to lay, that part is just shaken out and its box used to add to another colony. Virgins at the heather only get mated on a lowish percentage of occasions, so not worth persisting with. That's in an ideal world...we often don't have time to do some of this and virgins can be left until the seasons end and dealt with then, so those that WILL mate at the heather often get the chance.

    Realise this is WAY too long............
    Last edited by Calluna4u; 16-04-2016 at 11:00 PM.

  8. #18

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    1. Forgot to add in Ireland and Wales. They are also heather producers albeit at smaller tonnages.

    2. Our low percentage of blossom honey is actually in part a reflection of our management.

    However, OSR is being bred for ever earlier flowering dates, and ever shorter flowering periods. even without many modern varieties being poor nectar yielders, we have lost what were the key producing weeks, the later ones, that gave the harvest once the colonies had built up a bit. Its now almost finished in some years (especially the nice looking early fields) just at the time the bees want to get going in the supers. Some of my southern friends have a two to three week window now on oSR, and it can be finished by the start of May. we used to get 6 weeks but even up here now its a good bit less than that.

  9. #19
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    Not long at all, really interesting and informative, thanks for your time and efforts

  10. #20

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    Yes thanks C4u
    It's easy when it's cold to underestimate what stage they are at
    I looked in one poly nuc two days ago 4 frames of brood and 1 plus half food
    So that's likely to be early swarming and run out of food
    Certainly will need watching closely
    If you were sitting at home thinking "it's too cold there's plenty time" then that could be a mistake


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