I really should stop procrastinating but I never seem to be able to get around to it.
As you may or may not know I have been saying I will build a warré for a while. As you may or may not know I had a failed attempt at a warré inhabited by some less than picky bees. But now to those of you who say 'Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today' I say 'Ha!'. Enter stage right, my father. A man who was until recently was perfectly happy in his ignorance of bees, and who kindly (if nervously) helped me perform a split in May. A man who recognises my propensity to procrastinate and the plight of these poorly housed insects. A man who now HAS built a Warré.
Dad... Thank you... and the bees thank you too. By the way, can you give me hand moving them in at the weekend. Pleeeeeeease :D
Well after one month of hoping the queenless side of my split would settle on a regent I have finally intervened. On the inspection today there was no sign of a queen, no sign of brood, no sign of eggs, and possible signs of a dreaded laying worker *gasp*.
The queen-right side of the split however has now reached 16 bars of brood and I can barely see for bees. I found an entire comb with eggs front and back. So this was kindly donated to the queenless hive to give them one more chance of raising a queen. I will try and keep eye this time. Last time I think I left too many queen cells as I am pretty sure there has been two to three swarms from this split.
In other news a little cast swarm I caught (probably from the above) is doing well. My new assistant beekeeper Kyle helped inspect today.
He very much likes having his very own beesuit. We even managed to find the queen together (something for which i do not have a good pedigree). Mmm..mmm...mmm-bee, as my daughter named her, is a skinny girl but working hard. You can see all the eggs in the comb above her.
Oh and some more bees turned up in the nuc I have just managed to empty. Well the joke is on you bees! I still don't have a sixth colony because I already have someone lined up to have you Ha!
Yes, I know this a bee blog but thought I would tell you about our newest animals. My daughter Skyla said all she wanted for her 5th birthday watch some chicks she could watch grow into chickens *sigh*. I have been managing to hold out against my wife wanting chickens for seven years, now my daughter had joined the fray I knew I didn't have a chance. So it was at the beginning of May we visited a breeder and got 3X Rhode Island Reds and an Auracana, all just one week old. Skyla was very pleased.
We watched them grow, and grow they did. To have some idea of the a chickens growth rate they start of the size of... well... an egg. The "standard birds" you buy in the supermarket are then just 40-50 days old. That is quite some growing. Which takes quite some eating, and results in quite some.. well.. you knowing what eating results in. We were hoping at least two of the birds would end up being girls (pullets) and things were looking good. Two of the Rhode Island Reds had developed combs where as one and the Auracana did not. This was good news because although you obviously don't have favourites, the Auracana (or Fairy Blue) was the favourite we didn't have. Fairy blue was so calm and friendly. But then came the day that Fairy Blue crowed at us *sigh*. So it was that we find ourselves this weekend driving three cockerels back to the breeder.
Bye bye birdies
This time we collected three chicks who are a Rhode Island Red/Sussex hybrid. These should make much better layers and unlike pure breeds will continue to lay during the winter months.
Hello new girls
So, we now have a Rhode Island Red of 7 weeks (renamed Sandy), and three Rhode Island Red X Sussex called Starlight, Moondark, and Planet. I do love how my daughter names things. All I need to do now is finish the coop!
A bit more paint and a roof wouldn't go amiss.
Oh and just so you can have a little bit of bees. Here is my foster son Kyle loving having a bee suit all of his own.
So you know for some time I have been meaning to get around to building a Warré hive. Well as it turns the bees have grown a little impatient.
Before I had bees and was playing around with the different hive designs, I made a Warré... sort of. The Warré was built from old fencing boards which were more than a little warped. Part of the beauty of the Warré hive is the build simplicity. Warré recommends using butt joints rather than any more difficult means of forming a box. However, if you have wavy and/or bowed wood you end up with severe gaping at the edges, and a box that rocks on a flat surface. At least mine did. I completed the build as a dry run and dumped the boxes in the apiary just in case I wanted to salvage them at a later date. Well as it turns out bees aren't quite as picky about my wood-working skills as I am. On a quick trip to the apiary last night to check if the swarms I had housed were still there I noticed bees going in and out of a knot hole in one of the Warré boxes. This is right next where I put the national box swarm. In fact the national is standing on one of the Warré boxes to raise it off of the ground.
I am going to have to build them a proper Warré Hive (with windows of course) so they can over-winter *sigh* just need to finish the chicken coop first. These bees shall henceforth be known as Mata Hari and the sneaky bees.
It just goes to show all these rules we have for how to site bait hives to catch swarms are based on probability. I am obviously sitting at the outer edge of the bell curve for swarms. If there are enough swarms about and they need somewhere to go, they'll go in practically anywhere. It is odd that I lived in this village for years and I swear I never saw a honey bee. Then I caught a swarm at the end of last year and now I am at the point where my wife is saying "...do you really need any more bees?". This is colony five! Any more turn up in the bait hives I have out will be gifted to new beekeepers in the making. To coin a phrase from mylatinnotebook "... I do not want a sixth hive... I do not want a sixth hive...".
UPDATE: Bees in another bait hive... This does NOT count as a sixth hive...ish. They will go to a new beekeeper at my association.
Laying in bed last night reflecting on the evening and feeling more than a little sore from the events my wife mumbled sleepily to me ".. you shouldn't do beekeeping in a hurry...*snore*". I had to admit she was right (please don't tell her), if you don't have time to dedicate to complete a task, however it pans out, leave it for another day.
Remember the swarm trap that was occupied on Sunday?
I thought there weren't many bees in there. "Probably a small cast swarm...", "probably a queen cell I missed in my own hive....", was what I told my wife. Well.... I was wrong. There were a LOT of bees in that box, and they reeeeeaaalllly didn't like me!
Here was my evening (numbered list of mistakes below):
I decided I had a little spare time so thought I would collect the bait hive 1. This is the location I had a full bait hive stolen from in May so I didn't want to leave it there too long. It is a little remote and only accessible along a farm track on foot or by bike. So I cycled out to the bait hive in my bee suit 2. It felt good cycling out there as this is where I collected my first swarm last year when I "became" a beekeeper. I had moved another full bait hive the night before with no trouble at all. They were quiet as lambs and although I had lit my smoker just in case I didn't need it so felt a little silly. So this evening I didn't bring a smoker with me3. I thought I could maybe put the bait hive on my bike seat and wheel the bike to the apiary location but that wasn't going to work. So just like last year I corked up the entrance 4.and carried them the 3/4 of mile to the apiary. Remember I am wearing the beesuit, though not done up it was still rather warm 2. This should have been my first clue as to just how many bees were in there because it was very heavy. By the time I reached the apiary I was hot, sweating, and aching 2. I left the bait hive at the hive site to settle whilst I jogged back to the bait hive site and collected my bike, to cycle back to the apiary 2. 2. 2.
Buoyed on by the ease of the previous evening's transfer I decided to move the bees into their new hive 3. 5. BAD IDEA! From the second I took out the first bar 6.things were not good. The size of the colony meant they were comb building on all 9 bars of the bait hive having only been in there 1 1/2 days. So removing the end bar disrupted the cluster and must have rolled some bees against one another.... they did not like this. They boiled out of the bait hive making a noise like water hitting a hot skillet. All I had with me was a water mister spray with some peppermint oil in it. I was quickly covered in bees who were ready, willing, and able to show there displeasure for the treatment they had received that evening. I misted the air liberally in order to discourage the flying bees and hopefully mask the alert pheromones with the peppermint oil. They were having none of it. A group had rallied together on my arm and were tunneling up my gauntlet stinging as they went. A few had managed to master velcro and had gained access to the zip at my neck and found a sweet spot at my throat for stinging. Having got all the bars roughly in place I beat a hasty retreat to regroup. I grabbed my bike and cycled home shedding angry bees into the wind on the way, there I grabbed my smoker 3. and got it lit before heading back to the fray.I managed to get the majority of bees into the hive without much more fuss, the evening was cooling and having already moved the bars the cluster was intact and in the hive. There were still a few hundred bees on the bait hive walls which I was not going to try and brush or bang out. I put the bait hive on its side in front of the hive. The bees still in the bait hive will have to overnight there and move into the new hive in the morning when there sisters show them the way. I returned home aching of muscle, skin, and pride and soaked in sweat and shame. I fell into bed with a greeting of "...what took you so long?" from my wife. Having described my evening she imparted her sleepy wisdom only to leave me awake and thinking of all my mistakes... oh, and I forgot to put the bins out!
1. Never try and "fit something in". Have the time or don't do it. 2. Take your bee suit in a bag. It may be easier to wear it rather than carry it but on an evening where it is 17oC with high humidity you will sweat, and bees do not like it. 3. Never assume just because one lot of bees is calm one evening, another will be the next. Every colony is different. Over-prepare, it is better to feel a little silly than a lot sore. 4. Although this bait hive does have vent holes drilled in the side it would have been better considering the heat and humidity if I had placed mesh over the entrance instead. 5. These bees should have been left to settle in the new location for a day or so before attempting to move them into the hive. Placing the bait hive so the entrance is in front of the new hive entrance means that when you perform the transfer any bees oriented to that location will return to find the new entrance in the same location. By putting some grass in the bait hive's entrance it also prompts the bees to reorient. 6. There were no spacers at the end of the bait hive so all bars were for comb building. This isn't usually a big deal as it takes a colony a while before they have built across 9 bars. It is better though to leave a spacer bar at each end (~5-10mm) so you have access to each end without having to remove a comb building bar and disturbing the bees.
Either my Bee Math Sucks OR ... well the bees are messing with me!
I have spent a lot of time reading books and forums about bees they could at least pretend to go along with things.
Comb with emerged queen cell and capped queen cell.
So, the story goes....
On the 17th May I split the hive (22 days prior). So from this day on no queen was present, all brood was either capped, larvae, or eggs.
On the 31st May (14 days later) I inspected. On this day there was a beautiful capped queen cell. I thought wonderful this queen cell must have been made from an egg, if it had been made from a young larva it would already have emerged. Queens take 16 days to emerge from the egg being laid, eggs remain eggs for just 3.5 days. Since this is 14 days after the queen was removed an egg MUST have been used. This being a Saturday the queen would therefore be born on the Sunday, Monday or maybe Tuesday. She takes a week to then become sexually mature so may make her mating flight the following weekend.
On the 8th June (22 days later) I inspected. The beautiful queen cell had hatched as expected. But HANG ON, there is another one right next to it! Go on look at the picture, tell me my eyes are deceiving me! Surely this isn't possible! For there to be a capped queen cell present there MUST have been a queen in there laying within the last 16 days. This is 22 days after the split. I am very confused if anyone knows what is going on please do tell me.
It surely cannot be that the queen has emerged, mated, and starting laying already. The weather last week was awful and she will not have been sexually mature, and even then it would take 8 days before the cell is capped. The only option I can see is that there must have been another queen cell that I missed. The new queen has managed to get mated and has started laying. Then the bees have decided to make another queen cells anyway.
It might well support my other news!
Sunday was supposed to be terrible weather. It was supposed to rain all day. It did not. It was hot and sunny :) After the hive inspection my family and I decided to have the day in York. On heading to the car I noticed some activity at the bait hive on my shed roof ~9am.
During lunch I had a phone call from my slightly panicked neighbour to say my shed was "...covered in bees". He said they had just all appeared and made a lot of noise. He thought it was motorbikes on the main road. I told him all would be fine, an quietly hope that was the case.
On returning the bait hive now looked very busy ~4:00pm:
The swarm had clearly moved in. This is a homemade national style brood box. I got a sneaky pic of the bees later after moving them to the apiary. They don't look like my bees, they are all far too uniformly coloured for my little mongrels. Since they only just moved in they shouldn't be orientated to the position so the move shouldn't affect them.
While the day was so nice I went checked another bait hive.
Woo-hoo two-for-two. This one seems to have less bees in so I will give them a day or two before I move them in case this is just advanced scouting. These may well be my bees but either way I will try and give them a good home.
So first things first, I inspected the hive (now two hives) on Saturday morning, My wife was decidedly unimpressed as we had somewhere we needed to be but I wanted to get in there and see if everything was ok.
There was a cloud of bees surrounding the hive enjoying some much needed good weather. I inspected the left side of the hive first (my daughter Skyla's side). It was quickly obvious that this was the side the queen ended up in. This is a little unfortunate as this was the side in which I placed the queen cell. Thankfully, they had torn the cell down so the realm of "Phoebee" is still intact. They had certainly kept busy whilst I was on holiday with three more bars of comb full of brood and honey were built out. The right-hand side (my foster son Kyle's side) had also been busy. In the absence of a laying queen they didn't have much brood to look after so they were just making honey. There was some capped drone brood in place (as they take longest to hatch) and there was one beautiful capped queen cell waiting for me on one of the comb edges. So with any luck she will hatch and mate soon. The main concern I have here is that she enter the wrong end of the hive on her return from mating and fight the old queen. I did have something of a boo-boo in that the hive. It had been working so hard making honey I found one comb built out to two inches thick (maybe more). In trying to handle it I managed to break it and had to remove the comb to stop all the honey leaking into the hive.
Only the very top was capped off so this was my very first (accidental) honey harvest. The bottom part of the comb I squeezed out and have left near the hive for the bees to have back.
I suspect the honey to be predominantly oil seed rape (canola) honey because: a) Its light colour. b) Its taste. c) The fact that the hive is less than 100yds from 30 acres of it.
That fact that I found a capped queen cell and it is 14 days since the split says to me they made this queen from either an egg or a day old larva (if my bee math is right). Queens emerge on roughly the sixteeth day so that is ...eh... Today! Happy Birthday Princess "Thumbee'lina" (Kyle's name for the new queen to be) here's hoping your reign goes well.
