April - update from the bee hives
A week ago (first week in April) we did a full check through the hives. It had been three weeks since our previous check and the change was dramatic. Previously they had been active and healthy, bringing in lots of pollen, beginning to lay in multiple frames but still had some winter stores left in their one super. We had added an extra super just in case.
By last week the 2nd supers of both hives had drawn up comb and about half full of honey. Not bad in 3 weeks! But also both hives had several queen cells which which we thing are due running out of space in the brood box and thinking of swarming; the brood boxes (standard National) are well over half full of brood in various stages. The queen cells were still uncapped but we could see larva in some.
One other point of interest is that we had followed the FERA advice for varroa control and added a super frame into each brood box to encourage them to make free-comb for drone brood. To our surprise this worked perfectly in both hives although one had capped drone brood and the in the other some of the cells were already vacated. The plan with this system is that you cut off and discard the drone brood and with it a disproportionate share of the varroa brood. We did as instructed but found the drone brood to be entirely free of varroa. This seems a bit wasteful of the bees energy but they dont need that many drones anyway and it is quite an easy system so we shall continue.
As this is only our second year as beekeepers we needed to ponder on what to do with the queen cells. During the week we took advise on how to increase your colonies without needing to find the queen and managed to work out a plan. Yesterday we went back into the first hive and, as you might expect, most of the queen cells were now capped. We selected a nice looking 'dimpled' one, brushed all the bees off (see top pic) and transferred that and a couple more frames into a new brood box. We then squished all the other queen cells left in the old brood box.
The new brood box then went back on the same hive stack above an additional queen excluder to allow the bees to sort themselves out inside and some nursery bees to rise up the stack to tend the transferred brood.
Well it work fine with the exception of one unforeseen incident; our queen cell was at the base of the frame so we had not realised that when we placed the new brood box on top of the stack that cell was sticking out of the bottom fo the box with nowhere to go. We noticed immediately as the frame rose up at the top. The result was a slightly flattened tip to our queen cell and we have no way of knowing yet if that will prove fatal. We resolved this issue by adding in an eke to provide the vital extra space. The stacked looked massive when we had finished. (see pic)
Today we had a brood box of bees which we moved to its new site. Fingers crossed we didnt do damage and that by next week we will have a new colony.