July 2001
July 2001: The team is now three
Just when we thought all the bees had settled down and that
the swarming period was over Paul received a phone call on the afternoon
of Sunday, 1st July. This time it was not our bees that were causing trouble
however, but one of his friends calling from Huntington, a nearby suburb
of York to say he had a swarm in his hedge. Sure enough, when Dad and
Paul went round to see, there was a large swarm weighing down a branch
of his Leylandii hedge.
Paul and Dad, watched by a large family gathering from safely inside the
house, knocked the swarm into a skep and then into a nucleus box. They
left it to settle down and later that evening Paul returned to the house,
retrieved the boxed swarm and brought it back to the apiary in our garden.
Does this make our 9th swarm?
We decided to leave the swarms to settle down for a while
so we limited our next inspection on July 7th to our 3 main hives. Hive
1 - this colony is now more powerful and the honey super is now filling
up. We found about 25 queen cups in this hive.
Paul opens Hive 1
Hive 2 - we found three queen cups present and 1 open queen cell. This
was definitely the hive that provided our first swarm, now this is hive
4. Two full honey supers were removed.
Hive 3 - this colony is also quite powerful and active. We didn't look
into the brood box but we removed 2 full supers fron this hive.
A week later on Sunday 15th July we inspected the swarm boxes to see they
were doing. We put our latest swarm from 1st July into a proper brood
box because it was already quite big and very strong. Swarm 4 is now poor
but we found 2 capped queen cells in it.
We put some new frames of wax foundation into the 7th swarm to encourage
its growth.
But swarm 6 isn't so good. There were hardly any bees to be seen in this
swarm.
And swarm 8 was OK still had no brood.
Dad continued attending his beekeeping classes during July so now there are three of us to keep an eye on the bees. Now at last we could take stock of all our expanding colonies.
Dad bought some new parts to make another new hive: With
all this expansion we are going to need more equipment.