What have you done today bee-related?

[Japey Edge]

Thanks Patrick, that's going to help me a lot!

Learning so much every day!

[Patrick]

I certainly never stop learning with bees..!

It is noticeable the prevalence of the clergy and well to do in the 1800s and up to the modern day in beekeeping and many were very influential and contributed a large amount to our knowledge and observation of bees (and much else in the natural world come to that). They also often lived in quite spacious rural properties which comfortably accommodated bees within a trot down the garden.

Their beekeeping may not have necessarily reflected the slightly less advantageous circumstances many of us manage bees in...

[NigelP]

Brought the last 2 hives back from the rape which has now finished. I was very appreciative of my hive lifter as I couldn't have manged to lift them without it, even having removed three full supers from each the day before!

[Patrick]

Due to half term was able to inspect in the middle of the day for a change. Always easier than my usual push on against fading light trying to find any sunshine to see eggs. Every piece of woodwork out of the shed at the moment. If I need to hive a swarm for someone I will have to use a large teapot .

Queens laying well and most new queens in lay ( had a lot of “queenless” hives last week and suffered my annual period of doubt ). Nice crop of apple honey in the offing.

Two colonies appear to have drone layers though which is irritating and I will probably shake out whatever as not worth waiting and ruining the combs as well.

[AdamD]

Inspected a nucleus colony that I previously though was queenless and had put in a frame of brood to check. I left the inspection too late. There was an open queencell on the frame, two still sealed and two that had been/were being destroyed by the bees - being broken down at the side. In one the queen was gone, in the other an immature queen was there but appeared to be immobilised with one wing sticking out of the side of the queencell - maybe being pulled out after being stung by the first-out queen?

[Patrick]

Interesting- I had a similar mixed signal colony yesterday. Vertical split, queen in bottom box. Several QCs had been raised in bottom box, but all but one had been torn down at the side by bees. Remaining cell fairly average but seemed intact. Marked Queen found and no eggs obvious.

I wondered if there was a continued swarm attempt aborted and instead supercedure of older queen in play. I decided to knock out cell (which turned out to have quite mature virgin inside) and return queen.

With hindsight I think I made mistake and should have removed old queen and left single cell.

Never mind, have new queen in top box anyway so can unite to her. With very little swarming last year have too many older queens still knocking about and plans to do queen raising have been abandoned this year with other more important things taking precedence.

[Jim Norfolk]

As a little experiment, a week ago, I moved a large number of capped queen cells on their frames into a nuc rather than cut them all out to leave just one. The result today my nuc has one decent looking virgin queen plus several cells from which a queen had clearly emerged and others which had been attacked from the side. I now have my back up queen should the one cell I left fail for some reason. Queen rearing the lazy way

[Patrick]

Lazy possibly, highly sensible definitely. If you have a single hive taking an insurance nuc with spare cells seems a no brainier.

Seems one of few occasions when they do actually reduce to a single cell as is often claimed..

[Chrisbarlow]

Solid game plan Jim. More folk should do more of this

[NigelP]

Just finished a few days mammoth extracting sessions...and manged to sell off last years surplus spring honey in bulk...to leave me room to put this lot. About double on last year (after the beast from east slowed things down).
Normal pattern.... bees actually on the rape brought in far more honey in than those having to fly any distance to it...and some early honey is not rape, judging by the dark colour it's set to.
The beauty of poly hives and their heat retention.... out of 100's of frames extracted I only found one where where a few cells had set....but boy was it getting viscous to extract in these cool temperatures.