2013

The year had a very bad start as the winter carried on through most of March and many colonies struggled to hang on long enough for the warm weather to arrive.

Once spring did get underway it was about a month late. However the bees did make both a spring and summer crop of honey.

August was hot and dry and the bees needed feeding if they were new nucs or colonies that had provided a honey crop.

EFB is still around in some of my apiaries and I had to destroy bees in both Ringland and in South Walsham. The apiary in Old Costessy had one case. I am about to move out of that site for good.

The autumn has been mostly good with warm weather giving a late crop of ivy honey.  

We have now passed the middle of November and the weather is still mild and the hard frosts of winter are yet to set in. The bees are still eating and flying.

The 2012 beekeeping season has been frustrating in that the weather has been most odd. Much of March was warm and sunny. In fact it was too warm and too sunny for that time of year. Although it did give me a chance to treat all of my colonies for Varroa.

Then April, May, June and half of July it rained much of the time with only a few days here and there when the bees could make honey. Every time the bees had a few days in which to make honey it was followed by a week of rain when they then ate the honey they had made.  Fortunately there were enough sunny days for the virgin queens to make their mating flights and I don't think queen mating was as badly effected as the honey production.

The only honey that my bees made in any quantity was late in the season from the end of the sweet chestnut flowering. Although the two hives I took to North Norfolk for the sea lavender did do well. Taking hives up to the coast for the sea lavender crop was a first for me this year and I may take a few more more colonies up next year.

The new apiary started in 2011 is going into the winter with twelve colonies. Hives 2,6,7,9, and 10 have bees from a selected 'gentle' queen that I first identified on the Bluebell allotment site in 2009. There are no bees at all on the allotment now. 

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.