There are 4 hives at the Association apiary’s new site at Barns. All now have laying queens, and have been gathering a good crop of honey – all have almost one full super of honey, one more super each will be needed shortly. In past years we’ve left each colony a super of honey for overwintering, and the surplus is sold to fund the next year’s work, apart from some honey set aside for our rent. The lime has flowered early this year, and is already coming to an end, but the colonies have made good use of it, producing beautiful white comb. In colony 2 the queen has been particularly busy, full frames of sealed brood quietly waiting to hatch. Will need to keep an eye on this one in case it gets crowded and thinks about a late swarm. Most colonies had 6-7 frames of brood and larvae.
None of the colonies had queen cells – each 2 or 3 “play cups”, but none was charged.
The “grumpy” colony has now settled and is just as calm as the other three hives – whatever upset it is now all sorted. The queen is laying well, and they have a pleasing store of honey building up well. 10 days previously they’d had a sealed queen cell, so they were left – the brood box will be checked in 10 days’ time.
Apart from checking that each colony has a laying queen, that she has plenty of room to lay, there are no queen cells and the colony has plenty of food – we check the varroa board under each hive, to count the number of dead varroa there. Dividing the number of varroa by the number of days since the last count gives the DMD (daily mite drop) for the colony, which is a very rough guide to the number of varroa present. 5-10 varroa is unfortunately the norm, the colony can cope with this – but more than 10 and treatment is needed. We were surprised to find that for the 3rd consecutive count, the DMD was 0.5 or less. David has carried out sublimation on these colonies, spring and autumn, and we’re delighted to see this result. It’s still a very low infestation rate, perhaps also helped by longer intervals of queenlessness occurring before a new queen starts to lay. As a back-up, we could also open some of the drone brood, to see the level of infestation in them.
The other task for the day was sorting out 2 apidea: one was queenright and bursting at the seams, the other had no queen. We had hoped to try to unite the 2, but the design of the apideas makes this impossible. The queenright colony has been headed by a very vigorous queen, the bees so pushed for space that the inner roof was now firmly cemented to the combs. Plan B resulted in creating a nuc within a brood box – confining the apidea within walls of foam insulation to minimise heat loss, and opening the floor of the apidea so they could expand downwards onto brood frames.
We had hoped to find a queen cell for the other apidea, but none was found – we will see if another source of a queen cell can be found.