Grizzly do you remove your cups?
Grizzly do you remove your cups?
No just leave them but they are on new(last year) frames and just haven't built any cups yet.Originally Posted by Calum
Picked up a second swarm this morning, they seem to come to us now, both have settled within 10 feet of each other maybe 20 feet from the apiary. Two nice prime swarms and definitely not ours (wrong colour to be from my friends hives and I've got no laying queens at the moment).
made two nucs today, both six framers. The stock scale is up 15kg on sunday no wonder they are in the mood to swarm.
Wood honey coming in now, pity I was looking forward to a good spring honey crop, now we will only get a mix..
Oh well the second super will be going on most of the colonies tomorrow, and thats me out of frames. With only 4 casts done!
Today I wasn't supposed to be doing bee things, we went up to sort out the allotment.
My friend arrived in short time, we'd looked at one of his hives that appeared to be queenless 4 days ago. There were apparently two queen cells in the colony and we weren't sure whether it was swarming or supersedure. There were still eggs in the colony but despite going through it twice we couldn't see the queen.
So we decided to put the two frames with queen cells into a nuc, come back today and see if we could see eggs anywhere and take it from there. We knew there shouldn't be eggs in the nuc as we were pretty sure the queen wasn't in there, we were hoping to see eggs in the main brood box.
Today, there were no eggs in the Nuc, no eggs in the main colony, but a bunch more queen cells that we'd almost certainly missed looking last time. We think now that they've swarmed and are possbily one of the swarms we collected. we didn't before, but once again, queen cells are easy to miss when they're covered in bees, the new ones were on the frames of drone brood.
We decided to knock down all but one of the queen cells in the main brood box and leave the nuc as is, it's bled all its flying bees and we'll move it again next week just before the queens start to emerge, this way seems like hedging our bets. There's enough bees and brood in the nuc to keep going, plus stores. If the queen cell in the main brood box doesn't do anything, hopefully we'll end up with a queen in the nuc. If we get both, maybe we'll sell the nuc on.
All this swarm talk is making me twitchy. I last saw my bees 5 days ago when I thought: 'Hmmnn, must give *that* one a second brood box at the weekend, and *those* ones more space within a week'. Maybe I can slip away at lunchtime tomorrow to do the deed. I'm sitting here with that mixed aroma of western red cedar, beeswax and PVA glue, the smell of spring equipment assembly. Nice.
Is that the stuff from aphids on spruce trees? That seems awful early.
The sycamore flowers are about to open and the horse chestnut is already in flower in Balmy Belfast
Sycamore well out here. The dandelions seem to be at their peak too which seems wrong somehow. I think that they usually manage to bloom before the OSR but this year the OSR was very early. Maybe they (the dandelions) are sticking to the calendar but some other things not? Where is a botanist when you need him ....
The blackthorn and the hawthorn are in flower at the same time here. I can't remember that happening before.
Blackthorn flowers late March and Hawthorn mid to late May in a normal year.
Apple blossom 3 weeks early as well. Pear and plum normal flowering time. Dandelion flowered early but there is still a lot about.
Oil seed rape about normal as well.
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