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.

Original boxes, P2 bees

I still have both of the two brood boxes that I started beekeeping with -- P1 and P2.

P1 is currently empty in Postwick

P2 is in Old Costessy and has surprised me with the quality of the brood laying at the start of this year. I took the queen out as a nuc on the 21st and put her in a brand new box and moved her to the allotment. I think the original bees were Norman's. They are on the remainder of his old frames that have hand made metal spacers.

In the middle of the day today the bees in the WBC hive on the allotment were so active that at one point I almost thought they were swarming.

The German Queen

I was intending to split up the two brood boxes that the German bees are in and had set up anther hive station and brood box to take thew queen. The top box was stores and empty frames with a feeder bucket on above the crown board. There was no brood in the top box and no sign that the queen had been up there.

There was no queen in the bottom box either - but there were plenty of queen cells and evidence that they were in the process of being torn down. One cell had hatched but there was no sign of any kind of queen.

To cut a long story short there are now three boxes with queen cells in them

Drones, drone brood added, first queen cell,

At last. Today we had a sunny day without a cold without a cold breeze coming from the North East.

Some of the hives now have a few drones in them.

I have put a frame of drone brood into the three strongest hives at Old Costessy.

The Bowthorpe swarm have made themselves a single queen cell.

It seems to be about time to start thinking of breeding some new queens but as we have had a late start to spring I going to leave it for a few more days before moving any queens out of their hives..

Thorpe

I opened up and put thymol in the three hives at Thorpe. All three had laying queens but none of them were large colonies.

What I did 10th April last year 2009

Ringland. Honey Stripes

I opened up and put crystals in three hives at Ringland. That's all four hives there treated now.

I gave treatment to Honey Stripes colony in George's back garden. George's garden is quite small with a third taken up by a patio. The hive is sited to one side of the garden next to the patio. When bees die in George's garden they seem to choose the patio to die on and today there was a fair number of dead and dying bees on it. Some may have been deformed bees. Certainly one bee was being carried out of the hive as I inspected it. Maybe some were old bees from last year.

Honey Stripes was there and still marked red and laying but there must also be quite a high mite population in the hive too. There was also some chalk brood. There was no shortage of stores. Hopefully the crystals will knock out the mites that are there now and give the bees a bit of a chance and we can treat them again in a couple of weeks and knock out the new emerging mites.