BBKA Forum

Frame making and then more frame making.

NigelP wrote: ↑

18 May 2019, 10:13

Ohh the joys of the local bees in my area....
Left swarm overnight in nuc with no frames so this morning added frames and frame feeder....chased around the garden and up my trouser legs.... This is a swarm the size of a large grapefuit

You wouldn’t have a video by any chance Nigel?? Just asking... :lol

You really do have some extraordinarily aggressive bees round you. I wonder how it has arisen? I can’t help thinking tolerating poor behaviour has played its part, allowing recent new beekeepers to just assume it is normal and so on it goes.

Personally I would take up another hobby if my bee interactions were as fraught.

I think it's covered by "local bees are best"...despite them not being best and "senior" beekeepers perpetuating this myth so no-one knows better.

The thought of you dancing in the garden with bees does make me chuckle. Was it the fox trot or more contemporary ? Mindst you , if it was local girls maybe a bit of Morris dancing.

Added a frame feeder to them tonight....total colony size is covering about 1/3 of a single frame....still attacked me...ungrateful barristers. Guy who marked the queen is an absolute hero/masochist....

So a prime swarm the size of a grapefruit that is as nasty as, is not going to be much use to anyone. I guess you could get rid of the queen and then park an old girl in there or a queencell at some time. Or do they resent other strains of queens and they are difficult to re-queen?

Removing full supers and putting empty ones back in there place.

I did a 'hard' Demaree on Saturday to help me find the queen I have never seen.

The previous week the colony had been on two full brood boxes and 5 supers, with no queencells. At the weekend queencells were evident so I put a queen excluder on the floor and an empty brood box plus just one drawn comb and two of foundation. I then shook all the bees from the two brood boxes into this brood box, then put the queen excluder on top, the supers, another queen excluder, and then the two BB's - minus queencells. Two days later I took the hive down to the lower brood box and there was the queen on her one frame as I had hoped - with no eggs so she was ready to leave. She is now marked a fetching pink and clipped as well. In the top brood boxes, I removed all queencells again and put in some grafts as the colony is suitable for queen-rearing. The next job is to check the progress of the new grafted queencells, re-check for unwanted queencells and clear two of the supers over the top brood boxes.

Hope all goes well Adam

Sounds pretty much 100% success Adam, nice when a plan comes together