Last crop of the year

Its midday on September 26th, its miserable, close to raining, 14C at best and yet the bees are working their socks off.  The reason for all this activity, Ivy.  It started to flower really early this year and looks set for another couple of weeks.







On this apiary there are a few big old trees that are covered in ivy, and I have never seen so much flower on it.  As all the hives here are right under the ivy I guess the poor weather is not preventing the bees from flying.

Queen Bee production

The kit has started to arrive so that I can hopefully produce my own Queens for sale next year.
I have reached the stage where I have all my colonies producing huge broods, that are very calm and this season,  swarmless, just about an ideal combination.

On the right is a pile of artificial queen cells and the 'hair curler' queen cages that prevent the emerging queens from escaping into the colony and fighting each other.

This is a single artificial queen cell assembled, once the cell has been capped the ' hair curler' cage is placed over the cell and is a tight fit to the beige plastic cell outer casing.

Grafting tools, these are used to scoop up from the donor colony a one day old larvae along with its royal jelly, then push the larvae gently into the artificial cell.  My wife is going to be doing the grafting, I have big fat 'blokey' fingers, which renders me incapable of carrying out such a delicate operation, apparently.

A national brood frame with ten cells that I have attached ready for next season.  I am going to be using the Ben Harden method of queen rearing, a well documented way of producing queens in queenright colonies.

I am designing a 4 compartment mini nuc box, so that the entrance for each small colony is at right angles to the next.  Pictures will be up as soon as I produce the first one.

Supercedure

supercedure cell

If left to their own devices bees can and will make some dreadful decisions, as one of my best colonies has demonstrated by trying to supercede in the second week of September.  Supercedure cells differ from swarm cells in number and placing.  Generally supercedure has only one, sometimes two queencells, and they will be in the middle of a frame.  Swarm cells are usually built in numbers around the edges of a frame.  I have to use generalities because with bees there are always exceptions to the rule.
This one though is a textbook supercede, a single queen cell in the centre of a frame. A month ago I would probably have allowed this to carry through to its natural conclusion, which can mean two Queens occupying and laying in the same brood box, the old queen and her daughter.  This is not as rare as you might think.
But this late in the year and with the weather about to go downhill it is unlikely that a new Queen would be successfully mated.

caged mated Queen

For whatever reason the colony knows, or thinks their Queen is failing, which is why they are trying to replace her.  So before the colony decides to do something even more drastic I stepped in to manage the situation and remove the resident Queen.
Its for occasions like this that I keep mated Queens banked away in mini nucs.  This is my last spare Queen of the year, so fingers crossed that there are no more mishaps.
In a large busy colony like this one I like to introduce Queens using this type of cage. The cage with the new Queen inside is placed over a patch of emerging brood.  As the young bees hatch they automatically take the new Queen as their own and after a week or so the Queen can be released into the colony.
I have had a 100% success rate with this type of introduction..........so far.