Mid May 2020

Its the 17th May and been a really nice day.  A good day to go through a few hives. The oil seed rape is nearly over around here so time to be taking a good look in the supers. Oil seed rape sets remarkably quickly and by set I mean fondant hard set.

This is a small apiary of mine, only two colonies here at the moment, both very busy.  One has three supers and the other just one.  Two colonies in the same location, starting at about the same strength at the beginning of the season and yet one has three nearly full supers and the other barely started on its first.
The third hive you can see is empty and will be used for artificial swarming if either colony starts to produce queen cells, I keep an empty hive in every apiary for this reason.  I use nucs to collect swarms, so there is always at least one available wherever I am, just in case.

First swarms

Its early May, the oil seed rape is in full flower and so obviously its swarm time.  Had a call yesterday from my neighbour who has a building firm to let me know that a swarm had arrived on one of the sites he is working on.  I turned up at the site early this morning. Only the site supervisors and a couple of scaffolders were working when I arrived so social distancing was easy.

As you can see the bees had decided that a pile of site tressles was the ideal place to relocate.  There was already signs of comb being formed.  Its a lovely day today, warm and sunny, so just as well I arrived early before they started to liven up and start foraging.  I gradually moved the tressles apart one at a time placing the tressle on top of my collection nuc.  The bees moved down on to the comb one tressle at a time, in the end only leaving a few flying bees behind, virtually impossible to get them all especially this weather.  They have now been safely moved into a new hive and are flying strongly.  Not sure if the queen is there, but I think it’s likely judging by the way the bees are behaving.