Honey Stripes

I am still opening up hives for the first time this year in some of my apiaries. I have been fairly confident that the three hives in the garden at Thorpe would be fine. Not so. The third hive had a double brood box full of stores and no bees at all. The middle hive had a small patch of brood and eggs but it was barely the size of my hand. It was only the old queen that was OK. Her yellow dot has nearly worn away but she was there and laying in the top brood box.

The two hives at the UEA site were in a much better condition. The hive that was knocked over in the winter has a very good looking new queen that I marked today and surprise, surprise they seem to be much better tempered bees than the ones they bred from which are in the hive next to them.

The new queen is large and striped and I'm going to call her Honey Stripes (super cell) . She is now in the top brood box in a stack of three with a queen excluder under that box. The frames need sorting out a little as there were a couple that were full of stores but were coming apart. I put several new undrawn frames in and it needs a couple more. It's possible that the brood that is in the box below will have queen cells made in it if the bees think the queen is too far away. They were eating fondant and still have a little left but I think I may put a bucket of feed on to help them draw out new wax.

I gave all the hives a Postwick a quick look. The hive that had the old queen that had stopped laying had two small queen cells in on the frame that introduced on my last visit. I put in another frame of eggs to keep them going. I may take the frame with the queen cells out and see if they can't make some better looking ones in their place. The other hives all had laying queens.