It has been a long time since I posted on here. My last post was in May 2010. I suddenly stopped posting because I had been made aware that I had big problems in my apiaries. The bee inspector had indentified EFB in several of my hives.

EFB in my hives changed everything and I spent the remainder of 2010 trying to limit the spread from one hive to another.

2011 started with me still boiling up brood frames. I wanted to finish the brood frames before I started on the super frames. It took me months to clean up the allotment entirely - that meant boiling all of the spare frames in boiling water with soda crystals. And scorching the boxes, floors, and crown boards before moving them and the bees off the site altogether.

The allotment feels quite lonely without the bees now.

The Germans

First of all the German had a box full of queen cells that I found just in time. I made up two other boxes with the brood and queen cells but the queen cells were not on three separate frames to make three boxes easily. To make up three boxes I cut a cell out of a frame that had more than one on put that on a frame and put that in the original box for the flying bees to look after. On inspection the next day I found that they bees has cut a hole in the side it. I wasn't convinced that they had a queen so I put in a frame of brood from the WBC hive. They made several queen cells. Today I thought maybe I could cut a queen out of the frame and split the bees up into two but there in the box was a laying queen. Marked green. The queen cells were still on the introduced frame.

I took that frame and a couple of others out and put them in a nuc box.

P2, Ringland

Box P2, the box I removed the queen from, made all of it's queen cells on one frame. I cut out a section with queen cells from the one frame and attached it to another frame and left that in the brood box. The remaining frame with queens cells I put in a nuc box with a couple of other frames of brood and took it to the allotment apiary.

Gave more Thymol the hives in Ringland.

Tina, Box 6, Bill's bees

Two of Tina's daughters 2009 live in Tony's town garden and are doing really well.

I took a quick peak under the crown board on Tina's box in the allotment to find Tina wandering around on top of the brood frames. So something is not right there. The last time I looked in there she was on the frame of brood I had added leaving the small patch of eggs she had laid un-attended.

I have taken the queen in a nuc from Box 6 (GW's old box) and taken them to Old Costessy. The queen came from Luke's (darker) Essex bees that were united with half of GW's bees and after the colony in WBC hive were the strongest colony on the allotment last week.

I've sited two new hives from Bill's apiary in the countryside on the allotment.

Old Costessy, Honey Stripes

Found and marked three queens at Old Costessy. Both hives facing south and the hive at station one (the old hive on bricks). Made nucs up with two of them - hive facing south and station one leaving the poor bees frantic without their queens. There are a lot of bees in those two hives and if the weather stays good I should find plenty of queen cells in a weeks time.

Honey Stripes is alive in George's but not yet thriving.

Original boxes, P2 bees

I still have both of the two brood boxes that I started beekeeping with -- P1 and P2.

P1 is currently empty in Postwick

P2 is in Old Costessy and has surprised me with the quality of the brood laying at the start of this year. I took the queen out as a nuc on the 21st and put her in a brand new box and moved her to the allotment. I think the original bees were Norman's. They are on the remainder of his old frames that have hand made metal spacers.

In the middle of the day today the bees in the WBC hive on the allotment were so active that at one point I almost thought they were swarming.

The German Queen

I was intending to split up the two brood boxes that the German bees are in and had set up anther hive station and brood box to take thew queen. The top box was stores and empty frames with a feeder bucket on above the crown board. There was no brood in the top box and no sign that the queen had been up there.

There was no queen in the bottom box either - but there were plenty of queen cells and evidence that they were in the process of being torn down. One cell had hatched but there was no sign of any kind of queen.

To cut a long story short there are now three boxes with queen cells in them