Bill's bees, WBC

Bill's bees. At the start of the season I bought two brood boxes of bees from Bill who keeps his bees in a clearing in a small wood out in the countryside near Dereham. Within the first month of having them I took out the queens from each and forced them to make queen cells. What happened to each hive is an object lesson in what can go right and what can go wrong. One hive had no bees in when I got back from my holiday. The other hive (the one I call Bill's Greengage hive) has two (link back) brood boxes of bees and the top brood box has eight out of the twelve frames filled with capped honey and if I hadn't stolen some frames earlier in the year with honey in to give to other hives it would have a complete set of twelve. That queen has not swarmed and just got on with making honey. The other hive swarmed (maybe because it also needed a brood box of new frames) with their first new queen then failed to requeen and finally got robbed out when I was away. That final disaster was possibly my fault for not closing down the entrance before I left.

I have one other hive with a queen from Bill's bees that have also made honey. They have provided my with an object lesson in hive entrance control this year as they have propalised the bottoms of the brood frames to restrict the access to the brood box. Bill's bees make more propalis than my other bees. Interestingly they had a super on above the brood box with no queen excluder but they haven't taken the queen up into it to lay and have only used it to store honey in. That honey now needs to be taken off as I spotted a deformed winged bee on my inspection today and that is a sign of a bad mite infestation so treatment of that brood box is now a high priority.

One hive that doesn't need treatment at the moment is the WBC hive the smells strongly of thymol and although it has honey in the supers I don't think I can extract it because of the thymol. The queen wasn't marked (she is now) which supprised me. These are the best natured bees I have.

On closer inspection the early Ivy that is blooming in the hedge on the way into the allotment didn't have bees on it. It did have wasps and hover flys (looking like large wasps) and ladybirds. I notice that the ladybirds are also fond of my greengages along with the wasps. However, there is a honey flow of some sort coming in (maybe it's the golden rod) and some dark orange pollen being collected too.

I took the fondant of GW's hive and I'm cutting it up and giving a lump each to the nucs.