Artificial Swarm part two

Well, it worked! We went down to the hives earlier this week and had a quick look. Sure enough, there was a small patch of new brood in a very busy hive. We didn't look for the queen herself as it seemed pointless to upset the bees during the OSR season but we did take the opportunity to put on a super.

The original hive is obviously less busy - less bees - but there was fresh brood so the queen is still laying. We have decided not to unite these two hives. I have two queens arriving shortly and we will replace the original queen and then work on building up both colonies for the summer harvest.

We also did an artificial swarm with a second hive back at the house. It was packed with bees and brood but queen cells were there in force so we decided to deal with it in the same way.

In case you are wondering, the blue mark on the bottom of the hive means that we found and marked the queen. Blue was last year's colour - this year, 2011, is white.

Artifical Swarm

We inspected the hives yesterday. At the house the wild hive was ok but nothing special and the other three were bringing honey into the supers. Lots of brood but, surprisingly, no queen cells. We left them to it and went to our out apiary. There the hive was heaving and with queen cells a-plenty. Since we had no extra equipment with us we went back the house to get things ready and make a plan.

We have always bottled out of doing an artifical swarm in the past. If you don't know exactly what you are doing it is disturbing to try and work it out with thousands of bees getting understandably angry and pinging you. This time I was determined. The weather this morning was perfect - sunny and almost no wind at all. I took out Clive de Bruyn's book and made notes. I sat down and talked it through with Max. We prepared a hive with floor, box, frames, crown board and lid and off we went.

This is what we did.

1) Moved the original hive onto the ground and replaced it with the new hive. In this new hive were frames of both drawn and undrawn foundation. The drawn foundation was placed so that there was space for one frame between them.

2) Found the queen in the original hive. This took some doing but the whole exercise depends on finding the queen. We placed the frame she was on into the new hive together with the bees on that frame. We also checked that there were no queen cells on this frame.

We then replaced the queen excluder, the super with honey its frames and the lid.

3) We relit the smoker! This is a fairly typical exercise but actually it worked to our advantage as it gave all the flyers time to go back to the new hive and settle down.

4) The original hive was placed about three metres away. We then went through all the frames and removed all but one queen cell. We chose the largest cell and were careful not to shake this frame at all as it can damage the larvae.

5) We closed up this hive.

So now we have a queen from 2010 in a nearly empty hive but with all the flying bees still going back to this hive with nectar. She has a frame of brood which will hopefully keep them in that hive - de Bruyn says that without a frame of brood they are more likely to abscond - and she has the super with some honey in it.

Close to this hive we have a hive with one queen cell and frames full of brood and honey together with all the non-flying bees. Gradually these bees will start to fly and bring in nectar; in the meantime they have plenty of stores in the frames. The brood will start to hatch to boost the numbers. With any luck the queen cell with hatch, she will mate and then start laying. This will take time. What they definitely cannot do at the moment is swarm - they don't have a queen and they can't fly.

And the point of this? Well, if we had left everything as it was the old queen would have swarmed as soon as a new queen had hatched. I would have lost all the flyers and lost a good deal of the honey harvest. I hope very much that I have fooled her and the bees into thinking that they have swarmed already. In a week or so we will check again to check she is still laying and there are no new queen cells.

Will it work? We'll see!

My wonderful bees

I feel that we have definitely taken a step up the beekeeping ladder this year. If that sounds like pride, well, it is and no doubt it will be followed by a colossal fall but let me explain.

Last year we had so many swarms we had difficulty hiving them all. It was entirely our fault because we simply weren't experienced - or confident - enough to take the required action at the required moment. "Go away and think it over" is good up to a point - the point being that the bees are following a timetable of their own and will happily carry on regardless of the shortcomings of hesitant beekeepers. This year I knew it would happen again unless I worked it all out in advance in my head so that action could be taken on the spot.

Because of the cold weather we were unable to open the hives until late April/early May. We were thrilled to discover that all our colonies (four plus the Wild Hive) had survived the winter and were busy bringing in pollen and nectar, the brood was expanding and all was well. However, the Oil Seed Rape period also bought a sudden onslaught of queen cells. This year I was better prepared. Still not confident enough to risk all the colonies I decided I would divide two of the hives by putting a frame of brood with a queen cell, together with nurse bees and frames of honey, into a small 6-frame hive. As I couldn't find the queen (she was unmarked) I couldn't do a proper Artifical Swarm so I knew I'd still have a swarm from the main hive but at least I had a back up.

From the other colonies - the two I didn't touch and the Wild Hive which I can't manage in the same way - we had swarms as predicted but as we were here we were able to rehive these as required.

So at present we have four main hives and the Wild Hive, plus four small hives containing either collected swarms or the divisions. We went through these last week and were thrilled to discover brood in all of them and were also able to mark the queens - I think I need marking practice though as the blue mark is more like a blue streak!

The next job is to combine weak colonies with strong ones and I hope to do this later in the week. Photos will follow and I'll try to keep up to date from now on.