UEA Bees

Nice sunny day.

A chance to take the last colony on the allotments site (UEA students) that is still in temporary box and put them into a regular brood box and give them some food. I've run out of used brood boxes and are making new ones now.

The UEA student's allotment now has three colonies there. The original swarm queen that I had collected last year from the Univerity and two of her daughters. So these can, I think, be called UEA Bluebell Allotment bees.

I removed the used supers off Tina's hive and put more wet ones to replace them.

I took a few frames of honey and the old box feeder off the hive at the end of the allotment. This hive housed the first swarm that I collected at the start of the season and was re-queened with a queen cell from Tina's queen.

I'm still trying to sort out the swarm that was housed in haste on a pair of supers and today I isolated the queen (marked red) in the brood box that I had put on a few weeks ago. I put that brood box between two queen excluders so now the bottom set of super frames will not get eggs laid in them. One frame had a slab of drone brood along the bottom so I removed that. This hive has had it's two recommended doses of Apiguard in the last month so I thought I would check this drone brood for mites with my uncapping fork. There were still plenty of mites in evidence and they were alive and living on the drone grubs. It looks like this hive will need more than two trays of Apiguard to get the mites down to an exceptable level. At least removing that chunk of drone brood will help a bit.

As it got dark I visited the hive on the UEA Bluebell Road site and took off a super of honey and put more frames into the top brood box. The bees didn't like that at all and I got stung through my gloves and through my trowsers. I put a full bucket of feed on the hive as the bees have lots of work to do now in drawing out the new foundation in the new frames in the top brood box. I need to go back and pick up the spare super frames that were in the top brood box that are now outside the hive.