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.

First orders !!!, Last swarms ???

What a year, I have never known anything like it.  Bees virtually starving at the height of the season, now the ivy is coming into flower a month early and the girls are going for it, all my colonies are heaving and supers filling.  No swarm calls for over a month and then two on Sunday 19th, that is just about the latest I have ever collected a swarm, surely coming to the end now, there comes a point when even the bees must realise that its getting too late for a swarm to survive and the princess to mate.
Its too late for the swarms I collected to follow my normal procedure, by the time they go through a brood cycle it will be late September, way past the time of year I would consider uniting.  So they will have to manage the winter as they are and be requeened in the Spring, one of them has eggs already, I will check the other tomorrow.

And I have just had the first orders for colonies for early May 2013, I don't even start to advertise until November.  Its easily the earliest I have taken orders. The advantage early orders get is that they can choose their colony, do the last few inspections of the year with me, be there when I treat with oxalic acid, decide if they would like to keep the overwintered Queen or have the colony requeened in April, and they have a price fixed at this years rate.  It helps me loads, judging how many hives I need to construct and how many Queens to organise for next year.  I will be producing Queens in numbers next year, I usually only keep enough to get me through the year, but next year I will be producing a surplus to sell.

BBC CBeebies

The site at 8.15am

On Sunday we manned the stand for our local beekeeping club, Boston.  It was a CBeebies day.

We arrived at 8.15am to a fairly calm and organised site nearing   completion for the one day event in Kings Lynn.  Amy was running the show and seemed relieved that we had arrived, but she was very organised and soon sorted everything we needed.

Our marquee

Dawn andAmy

All our kit

All The kit was offloaded near our allocated area,  opposite the newts and beside the slugs and snails, don't ask, I didn't.

Candle rolling

My wife Dawn was in charge of candle rolling and I was to look after the
observation hive and honey tasting
Set up was straightforward and by 10am when the first batch of 500 children with their parents were let in, we were ready, or at least I thought we were.  By 11am they were three deep around the stand and I was beginning to feel a little shell shocked, at 4pm we ran out of everything, by 5pm when it finished my brain had melted.
I didn't know that many children existed and they kept coming, thousands of them.  We actually managed lunch at 5.15pm,

But it was a great day and a fantastic way to get children involved.