It has been a while since my last post. A combination of poor weather and personal commitments has kept me away from my bees and my blog respectively. However, a week ago the weather turned fine for a day and I had the opportunity to go and have a look at my bees. I was eager to see how my two good colonies were building up. It was a very pleasant sunny day. The temperature was 18.5 deg C - far too hot really to get all suited up, but the perfect opportunity to make my second thorough inspection of the year.
As I opened up hive number one, I expected to see at least two or three frames of brood, but I found only half a frame of sealed brood - no eggs and just a handful of large larvae. I also found three sealed queen cells. Had I lost a swarm already? On closer inspection the queen cells looked like emergency cells - they were extended worker cells and did not look as if they had been started from queen cups. With the age of the brood in the colony I concluded that the queen had failed or died around the 25th of April - a month after my first inspection, so at least this time I was not to blame!
I removed the smallest of the queen cells and opened it of find a well formed white queen, so the queen cells had been sealed for at least a few days. There was very little stores in the hive so I decided to give the colony a rapid feeder full of light syrup to keep them going. Hopefully a new queen would hatch and mate successfully, although the quality of such a queen would be at best doubtful because the colony were forced into raising an emergency queen under far from ideal conditions.
Hive number two contained four good frames of brood and four frames of stores. The queen was not seen directly, but there were plenty of eggs and larvae of all ages. I was concerned that the queen was running out of space to lay so I removed two of the frames of stores and inserted two super frames of drawn comb into the brood chamber. This will provide room for the queen to lay, and the bees will build wild drone comb at the bottoms of the frames which can be removed as a varroa control measure (drone brood is capped for a couple more days than worker brood and varroa mites prefer it to worker brood for this reason) or the drones can be left to emerge and assist in the mating of virgin queens. The two frames of stores that were removed from hive number two were bruised (to encourage the bees to use them) and were inserted into hive number one, further boosting their stores. I also took the opportunity put a super on hive number two, just in case there is a sudden large flow of nectar...
Hive number three contained plenty of bees (including drones), but no eggs, larvae or brood, so I am fairly confident that I did indeed manage to kill the drone laying queen during my previous inspection. This colony is therefore hopelessly queenless and this needs to be addressed as soon as possible.
My nuc still contained a fair few bees, but again there was no sign of any eggs, larvae or brood. The inside of the nuc box was mouldy so I decided to transfer the frames and bees to a clean new hive. Some of the frames contained a few mouldy cells containing pollen and these were cut out as the frames were transferred into the new brood chamber.
So there you have it. I have one "good" colony out of four! It is now exactly one year since I obtained my first bees, and although I have gained a year's experience, I can't really say that it has been easy! I have asked around regarding the availability of queens and even nucs, but have not come up with anything because it is still very early in the season and we have not have had any decent spells of weather so far this year. I have spent a few days thinking about the best way forward and have been reading up on queen rearing by various methods including Miller, Cloake Board, Swarm Box and the Ben Harden method.
My current plan of action is:
1. Leave hive number one to requeen themselves. The virgin queen(s) should have hatched by now. Hopefully the weather will improve and the virgin queen will mate successfully.
2. Leave hive number two rear some drones and then use it to rear some queens using the Ben Harden method. This method has minimal impact on the foraging ability of the queen cell raising colony, however it will involve grafting which is totally new to me. Should be interesting! Any good quality queens produced could be used to requeen hive number one and three if necessary, as well as replace the queen in hive number two who is now in her third year.
3. Unite hive number four (previously the nuc) with hive number three and then give them a frame of eggs and larvae from hive number two and let them try and raise a new queen.
Keeping bees is certainly a challenge, but that's why it is such an enjoyable and satisfying hobby.
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