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.

Hives, first look of the year

Last weekend, the 12th April I managed to at least open all my hives, only really had time to make sure a queen is present force her back down into the brood box and return the excluder. Glad to say all queens present and with capped worker brood in all colonies everything seems to be in a good starting place for the beginning of the season.
I am constantly baffled as to how two colonies, side by side, almost identical going into the Winter can be so different in the Spring. In a two of my apiaries one of the colonies is already on nine frames of brood, the other on just three. The OSR has just started to flower so colonies need to be at their strongest to take advantage of it and three frames of brood just doesn’t cut it. As soon as drones appear (no drone brood yet), I will breed some queens as replacements for the weakest colonies, as usual, no panic this year as I have decided not to produce queens for sale, and I will not be taking on any teaching this year either. That was a decision I made at the end of last season and considering what’s happening in the world right now seems fortuitous.

Late March 2020

Its now late March and has been a bright sunny week, but we have a howling North Easterly and its freezing cold.  The bees are out and about for a couple of hours around midday as the plums and damsons are in full flower.
Due to the corvid 19 lockdown it will not be possible for me to help out at any of my trainees apiaries for the whole of the summer the way things are going, but I will still be doing the rounds of my own, they are mostly remote and its highly unlikely that I will meet anyone.  Beekeeping is my occupation and hardly something you can do while sitting at a computer and bees are not creatures you can just leave to get on with it.  Feeding all the colonies at the moment as I have always felt that this is the most dangerous time of the year, low numbers in the hives, low food stores and cold weather are a bad combination.

2020 Beekeeping

             Not the traditional start to my season nor the usual time, it will be another month at least before I would normally consider opening my hives for the first time.  But this week I have had two calls to remove bee colonies, the first from a garden shed, the bees had been there from last summer but unfortunately the shed had been crushed by a tree that had blown over during one of our recent storms. It was out of my area but was able to put them in touch with a nearby beekeeper, so hopefully that all worked out.

The second call, just yesterday, was to a colony that had taken residence in a little owl nest box last summer.  Its the second time I have removed colonies from this box, the last was five years ago.  On both occasions there were fertile little owl eggs in the nest.  Not much a pair of owls can do if bees decide to take over their nest site.

With the front of the box removed you can see the amount of comb and bees.  The box is about a  300mm cube.  There is capped honey and larvae, and eggs.  Cutouts are not my favorite job with bees, its extremely messy and usually causes lots of damage to the colony.  All of the comb in use was moved into a nuc, Some of the comb was empty so that will be melted down.  I strapped the nuc down to a tall pair of steps and left them for a few hours. On returning all but a small number of bees had moved into the nuc which I closed up and moved to one of my apiaries.

The owl box was cleaned up  and the front replaced, hopefully the owls will  return and raise a family.

Just a quick update on the owl box colony from yesterday, this is them today, very active despite its only 10C.  They will move into the hive they are sitting on once the weather improves and they have increased their numbers.