What have you done today bee-related?

[MickBBKA]

Temps forecast to be over the usual 8-10c this next week and up to 21c. So its going to be swarm week. As its been way too cold to do any propper inspections and the little darlings will have been building Q cells for fun, I am going to be fire fighting all week.

[JoJo36]

Blimey, just looked and similar albeit a little lower next week too!!
Yours up North sound all ahead of mine down South but hopefully the warmth will pick them up??!!:)
Hard hats on Mick...............

[MickBBKA]

Over the last few days I have inspected all 32 colonies I have. Only one has less than 16 frames of brood. Yes its the last remaining poly hive. It has 8 frames of brood and I am done with this rubbish. Once I make a couple of brood boxes I will relieve this poor colony of this dreadful situation. This has been about a 6 or 7 year experiment for me and very conclusive. Poly don't work here !!

[AdamD]

I still don't get why poly's don't perform for you Mick.

My lot are on around 10 - 12 frames of brood at the moment; I need to put two brood boxes on a couple as they are somewhat squashed in and OSR is coming in thick and fast.
I wonder whether colonies expand more quickly in spring the further north they are as the daylight gets longer quicker? Has anyone ever done such a test - to compare, say Hartlepool with Southampton??

[NigelP]

Too many variables Adam, the strain of bee used can make a big difference in numbers. My Buckfast hives where always way ahead of the locals in the spring That was in the days of keeping both.
I too am puzzled by Micks failure with Poly. I use nothing else and my double brood polys are on about 14-16 frames of brood and rammed with bees. My over wintered nucs have exploded since being put in poly hives and needed supers last inspection.
Today I'm going to collect 12 supers that had clearer boards put on a couple of days ago. With much more to come, as the weather and the rape are coming together at the right time. Hopefully going to be a busy summer.

[AdamD]

Some of the OSR honey is capped but not quite ready. Nor am I, as I need an hour or two to get everything ready for a mamoth extraction. Assuming the weather and plants continue to yield, I have just the last few supers to put on and that's it.

[Patrick]

It’s been a rather odd one so far this year. First emerging apple blossom started in cold and windy weather, several big colonies wall to walk brood but even though now in a heatwave nectar still seems oddly elusive. We only had 5mm rain the whole of March and not much in April either and the ground is hard as a rock. I am wondering if it is soil moisture deficient or simply all the arable land around here is now potatoes and maize and OSR is off the menu. Loads of dandelion in flower but not seen an insect on it, hence wondering about soil moisture. Last year spring crop it was solid rain and cold and bees needed any honey they did collect more than I did. Rather puzzling and frustrating tbh..

[JoJo36]

Sorry back to queen introduction!
I've got 2 colonies now, one on a snelgrove as swarmy and the other was going to snelgrove too!
Thinking aloud, when my new queens arrive would you put old queen above into downstairs colony and hope they remember her from a couple of weeks before she was taken and place new queens in the top snelgrove boxes with the nurse bees??!!
If they are accepted, then thinking off uniting and keeping maybe one queen in a nuc box (only have one) and squashing the other one, uniting both boxes with new queens??!!
Third hive, useless queen will just squash a couple of days before and hope the bees are so desperate for a new queen that they will accept her??!!

[AdamD]

I don't use Snelgrove boards so I'm not the best one to answer about those.
In general young bees are better than acceptance than older ones.
Yes, I tend to keep the odd spare queen in a nuc as a 'just in case'

For the useless colony; I have caged an unwanted queen for a week before removing her. In this way you have no queencells in the hive (usually!)) and no eggs/larvae from which to make a queen so the bees have no choice to accept her if they know what's good for them. [This isn't something that I have seen written in books though. Maybe it's just my fantasy that means I think it works!]
(I have seen it, where a colony accepts a new queen after being queenless for a few days, however they are in the mood to generate queencells at this stage, so they continue to do so as they have material to work from. And the new queen swarms out a few days later).

[Ericm]

Third hive, useless queen will just squash a couple of days before and hope the bees are so desperate for a new queen that they will accept her??!!

If you are replacing one queen immediately with another then give a quick squirt of air freshener as you add the new queen. It helps confuse the pheromones and acceptance is far greater.