May 2004
Don Rekkia: Owner of Flaxton Great Wood and his first
swam.
On Saturday, 1st May Paul put 4 Supers on the hives at Flaxton - the Oil Seed rape in the fields in the area flowers early in the season so the bees are already making honey.
We made our first full inspection of the hives here in the apiary at
Monk Avenue on Sunday, 2nd May,
checking all but Hive 3. This colony was left as we must let the new queen
settle down.
Hive 1 - colony seems OK and the bees are very active.
Hive 2 however was making emergency queen cells so the queen must have
died. That could possibly explain why the bees were trying to swarm! We
spilt the hive into four boxes each with a queen cell - hopefully this
will stop them swarming and at least one will produce a new queen.
Two
split colonies
John
is surrounded by flying bees
After our first hive inspection of 2004 - the "Spring clean"
in April - we had left the removed frames in an empty hive for the bees
to clean. Imagine our surprise when a passing swarm (not from one of our
hives) decided to move in. Lets hope they are good, docile honey bees...
The next weekend we checked the colony in Hive 3. There was some young
brood and eggs so hopefully there is now a new queen in the hive. One
of the four boxes from Hive 2 only had a few bees in it so we re-united
it with the main hive box using a sheet of paper and sugar syrup.
With all these bees at Monk Avenue Paul & Lynn carried out an evening trip to Flaxton taking a hive from Monk avenue. Bees must be muved at dawn or dusk once they have all returned to the hive. There are now five hives at Flaxton making the most of the Old seed Rape flowers.
Lynn by a dark car (I hope no one saw the bees in the
boot... And their new home at Flaxton.
For the past few weeks Dad has been building a "WBC" hive using
his own modifications from plans from the internet at his woodwork evening
class. This is a double walled hive, he has modified it to take stardard,
"national" size boxes insde. One of our next May jobs on 20th
was to sort through our stock of stored frames in the garage, an important
evening job Paul and I may have to do more often now that the number of
hives we now have are working at maximum capacity.
On 22nd May, Paul inspected our hives at Flaxton and noted the Supers
were nearly three quarters full - we must find out how to deal with this
thick, Rape Seed honey! On Sunday, 23rd we re-united the last of the boxes
we'd split from Hive 2.
Paul contacted the Beekeeping newsgroups on the Internet who advised him
to remove and jar the Oil Seed honey from the hives at Flaxton as quickly
as possible. Oil Seed Rape honey is a Monoculture from a single type of
flower and could soon solidify in the supers if left on the hives! Unlike
our mixed flower honey from our hives at Monk Avenue.
On May 31st Paul went to Flaxton and removed 3 full supers of Spring honey
from the hives.
But things were not as simple!!
While he was there he spotted a swarm in a tree nearby so, with the owners of the wood as an audience Paul captured the swarm in a neucleus box ....
The Swarm
in a tree
Shaken onto a sheet they
run into the box to join the queen
Watched by Don Rekkia the
owner of Great Wood.