GW

Furgle's bees (back link) didn't survive the last month. Maybe they couldn't cope with the wasp invasion although there weren't many dead bees in the brood box so that may not be the reason for their demise. I see that I noted that the queen was small.

GW's bees have made a good job cleaning the brood comb and stored a bucket of feed in them so far. I have isolated the queen in the bottom brood box so that I move her out and take her to Postwick in due course. In the meantime I have put another bucket of feed on. The queen is not good enough to keep on the allotment. The brood has too much chalk brood, the bees don't make honey and now they are not as nice to handle once the hive is opened as they were earlier in the year.

I also put a bucket of feed on the German queen and that got the bees very excited disturbing the balance in the hive next door. Norman's hive that had the queen in a nuc box on top of the hive that the bees decided to rob out. Once the bees start a robbing attack they go crazy.

I am still reducing hive entrances ever smaller.

Entrance blocks

I am limiting the amount of space the bees have defend at the entrance of their hives. I have reduced it on the strong hives as well the weaker ones although not by as much. It is good to see the wasps realizing it isn't worth even trying to sneak into the hives as they are so well defended.

The weather is beginning to change and there is not much summer left for this year now.

Postwick

It was another hot sunny day and I was able to check the smaller colonies of bees in Postwick without a veil or smoke.

Those nuc boxes that I gave an extra frame of brood to before leaving to go on holiday have generally done well with the exception of one that had all but faded out. I was able to transfer one colony from a nuc box to a regular brood and start feeding it. New entrance blocks were needed on several of the hives as there plenty of wasps around.

Last year's swarm is now the strongest hive on the site and again I stole one of it's frames of brood to give to one of the smaller colonies.

The Bowthorpe swarm has made no honey in contrast to the Laburnham swarm that was collected later in the year. The bees seem easy enough to work with and I'm sure if I feed them this autumn that they will make honey next year. But because of this year's performance they won't be bees that I breed from in the future.

I finally found (and marked) the queen that has been hiding from me all year and it's not supprising that she was so hard to find as she is dark, small and skinny. She is the kind of queen that beekeepers 'dispatch' and replace with another. Certainly the bees have taken all year to build up their numbers and fill a brood box and they have made no honey at all this year. I will keep her and feed the bees this autumn and wait for the worker bees to decide on when to replace her.

Honey Stripes, Old Costessy

I took one of the four supers off Honey Stripe's hive. The three left on do have some honey in them and today the bees were putting more in. Although it was a hot sunny day today the bees know that winter is approaching and the first three frames of the top brood box in Honey Stripes hive are now solid with stored honey and no longer contain brood and pollen as they did a month ago.

Willow2 (2009) was laying well and there is now a Willow3(2009) (daughter of Willow2(2009)) also doing well in what was the top brood box of Willow's hive last winter. (Honey Stripes is Willow2(2008)).

When this sunny spell is over and I have taken what honey there is off and the ivy comes into full bloom I need to put another new super and feeder on each of these hives.

Most of the hives at Old Costessy had laying queens although Norman's number three hive must have swarmed recently and was full of drones with more hatching out.

Midnight

A traumatised queen.

I have spent a sunny afternoon checking through the hives and nuc boxes on my allotment giving the bees fondant and a couple of the bigger colonies thymol crystals.

I marked a super looking black queen that I am going to call Midnight. (given that she sticks around!)

After packing up and putting my gear into the shed I walked back down the path to find a very distressed queen with a green wing outside and on top of the nuc box. I put her back inside but she really didn't want to go she was fluttering and running along the edge not knowing what to do. I taped around the lid and halved the entrance hole at the front. I havn't seen anything like this before. But it could explain why I have lost some queens and why some of the nucs have taken off. Maybe the trauma of marking is too much for them when they are so young and I should leave it until they have gone through a winter before I mark them.

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.

Ivy honey, North Walsham swarm, Normans allotment bees

I have been away from my bees since the 20th of last month. A long time at this time of the year and I have lost some bees as a result. In the allotment they were under attack from wasps as I was packing to leave and some of the nuc boxes may not have been able to defend themselves. Even the strong GW hive has a collection of dead wasps and bees under the entrance.

They have also been short of supplies and any it seems that only now new honey is being put into the frames. On the way into the allotment site I noticed bees on the first of the ivy flowers to open and as the weather is warm it is likely to be ivy honey that they beginning to store.

I have started to feed. I removed all of GW's supers that were empty yesterday and put on another brood box with frames from some of the failed nuc boxes that need cleaning up. On top of that I put a block of fondant. In the next week I will try to put feeder buckets on all of the hives and transfer the bees in nuc boxes to brood boxes. I intend to split up GW and take her in one brood box to another apiary. Then I will put newspaper between the remaining two brood boxes and replace some of the frames in the top box with a small nuc with a laying queen that is in a bee brief next to the hive. Given that the bees in the bottom box accept her they will all have a good chance of getting through the winter. They will need constant feeding for the next couple of months.

The queen cells from the German queen had successfully produced new queens in Norman's allotment hive and the North Walsham swarm hive. Both of which I have marked. However both hives also had queen cells in them. I took the queen out of Norman's brood box with a couple of frames and put her in a nuc box leaving a frame with two queen cells in the brood box.

The frames I had removed and put into a nuc box with the original queen cell (the reason I put in a frame of eggs from the German queen into Norman's brood box in the first place) also had a laying queen. But I couldn't find her to mark.

The NS hive had a brood box under a super and most of the activity was going on in the super frames two of which have queen cells. I put those frames into a nuc box with a couple of others and after marking the queen put her in the brood box with a queen excluder between that and the super.

I have no way of knowing how old the queen cells are so they could hatch before I find a home for them.