The bee inspector

We had a visit from the bee inspector to the allotment site. There are four bee keepers on the site with a total of (I think) 23 hives altogether. No serious problems were found and as Neville emailed he was "... was very impressed with our standards and the general quality of our bees."

He found the bees on Students permaculture plot the hardest to handle but generally liked the others.

The bees in my hive next to the WBC had moved the cluster to one side of the brood box and had made enough drone brood under the shallow frame at the edge of the box for the inspector to do an uncapping test for Varroa. There were mites present and to my mind too many. I was saying I would put an Apistan tray in there now but the inspector advised not to as it would "put the bees back three weeks " and that I should put a frame of drone foundation in next to the brood but not the split the brood. I sure in the past I would have done exactly that and put the foundation bang in the middle. By getting a frame of drone brood laid and capped and then removing it I would be removing 75% of my mite population.

I marked a few more queens.

As it was a sunny afternoon by the time the bee inspector had finished I checked the hives at Thorpe and Postwick.

I think I will loose the middle hive in Thorpe. I put a couple of frames of brood in from the old queen's hive but fear I will just have wasted those.

I have started pulling the double brood boxes apart in Postwick and putting the queen in the bottom box under a queen excluder.

I marked the swarm queen.

The bees in the 'old queen's' box have not decidecd to make another queen cell. The nuc box was the only one in Postwick I didn't open today.

Old Costessy

I bought a hive of bees today from Norman and took it to Old Costessy.

UEA apiary

I made a quick visit today and put the brood box that I had taken off Stripes hive on her mothers hive next door. There is no queen excluder on this hive that now has a brood box at the bottom with plenty of sealed brood and a super sandwiched in the middle that is crammed with stores (probably mostly ivy). The super on the top has new frames in the middle and a couple of broken frames with stores on one side of the box that I plan to remove as soon as the honey in them is used.

Old Costessy hives, UEA Stripes

Old Costessy hives.

I opened all four hives today. Marked the (young) queen in the double brood box. She was in the bottom box so I have put the queen excluder down to the top of that.

I didn't see the other two 2008 queens that I would like to mark. They are in the one hive that faces South and the hive on bricks. Both seem to be laying well and both hives have plenty of stores but there was signs of a Varroa spread virus as there were one or two bees with deformed wings. This is an indication of high mite infestation so it was good to see the Apiguard trays (that I put in the hives on my last visit) were empty. I put three more trays in - one in each hive.

I took a quick look into 'Sticky's' hive just enough to see that she was laying. She is beginning to lay in the top brood box so I gave that box a liberal sprinkling of thymol crystals.

I have made other visit to Golden Stripes hive and pulled it to bits and put it back together again. In the process I have given the hive a clean floor and put the brood box to the bottom. The middle brood box is still in the middle but now on top of the brood box with the queen in with the queen excluder between the the two. The third brood box I have taken off altogether.

Stripes mother is a swarm queen (circa 2007) who's bees are not the easiest to handle. The swarm was originally picked up in Hellesdon and taken to Old Costessy before being moved to the UEA site. On a full inspection today I was pleasantly surprised to see that she was laying extremely well and had covered over half the frame in the brood box and started on the super frames (they are on a brood and a half) and only just started laying drone brood.