The last few months have been a busy time for the new beekeeper. You may remember that this is our second year of keeping honey bees and our first complete season of bee keeping.
As a new beekeeper, this year has been full of problems:
Covid 19 which from a beekeeping point of view has not been in itself that bad. Covid-19_and_Beekeeping_Update_v3 is the latest information relating to beekeepers and covid 19. Our apiary is at the bottom of our garden so safe distancing etc was not a problem.
We lost a queen or she went off laying which resulted in our believing our hive was queenless. Furthermore, the building of queen cells seemed to indicate that the hive was indeed queenless. However, there was still plenty of brood capped and uncapped. But we could not see any eggs as the light was not that good; even in the early afternoon.
That’s when we made our first mistake. We took down the queen cells and closed the hive up. A week later we opened up the hive and found two more queen cells. The bees were busy and although a little more prone to being aggressive were not that bad.
As a result, the frame with the queen cells was placed in a Nuc box with a frame of brood and two frames of food the front a rear spaces were filled with fresh undrawn foundation. Therefore, the nuc had all five available spaces filled with frames.
Over the next week, the main hive was still active and at least one orientation flight was observed. The nuc was left undisturbed to ensure that the queen cells or any young immerging queen was not damaged.
On a subsequent, visit the hive was inspected and no eggs or uncapped brood seen. In our opinion the hive was queenless and action was taken to rectify this state. Another beekeeper gave us two queen cells which we introduced to the hive.
A week later we opened the hive to find one of the queen cells had been taken down by the bees, the other was still intact. On opening the nuc we found that there was uncapped brood and eggs. We took this to mean that the nuc was now queenright.
Over the next few weeks, we opened the hive but no eggs were seen. However, the nuc was building strongly with capped and uncapped brood and egg. We did not find the queen to mark her despite carefully looking over the frames.
Three weeks after adding the queen cells to the hive we opened up to find no brood and the queen cell was still closed. On inspecting the queen cell is looked as if the queen was dead. We carefully opened up the end of the cell; close inspection indicated she was dead.
Obviously, we needed to combine the queenright nuc with the bees in the hive to ensure a strong colony for the coming flow.
Whilst in the garden one fine morning it became apparent that bees were starting to swarm from the queenless hive. Luckily they swarmed in the neighbors garden and we were able to collect them in a box; which we left there until late evening.
Usually, bees don’t swarm from a queenless hive. Therefore, we now appeared to have a queenright hive, a queenright nuc, and a swarm.
The swarm was transferred to a poly hive in the late evening and settled with fresh frames off foundation in the brood box and a rapid feeder in a super above a queen excluder.
Subsequent visits to the apiary indicated that the nuc was building strongly and there was a lot of flight activity at the original hive. There was little activity from the hive containing the swarm.
Incidentally, the swarm had not taken any of the syrup in the feeder so it was removed
In mid-April, we had some exceptionally good weather and decided to inspect the hives and the nuc carefully to see the queens and mark if possible.
On opening the original hive no brood was found or eggs. The nuc was thriving and looked to be building strength and occupying all the available space. The swarm hive was found to have eggs and capped and uncapped brood. Only in the swarm hive were we able to see a queen but unable to mark her.
A decision was made to unite the strong nuc with the queenless hive to enable the hive to build and survive. The newspaper method was used and all appeared to go well with within a day clear signs of small pieces of paper littering the underneath of the hive.
On visiting the apiary next morning the site around the hive was reminiscent of the D-Day landing with dead bees everywhere. Clearly, something had gone dramatically wrong. Bees were flying from the hive and returning with pollen on a regular basis.
Conclusions; one that the hive was not queenless in the first instance but the queen had for some reason stopped laying. The bees, therefore, intended to supersede her and that was what they did. We either took down or put the cells in the nuc and got a queen reared and producing brood. We must have missed a cell and this developed into a queen. We believe that the original queen may have still been alive and the new queen then swarmed.
We are entering the end of the season and extracted 6lbs of honey from the first hive. We have left them four frames with honey and a full brood box af supplies. The queen excluder has been removed for the winter and varroa tratment had been done.
The swarm hive will just about survive the winter if it is not too cold or wet. The bees have slowly built supplies but with no urgency.