June 2005
On 6th June our first job of the month was to inspect the swarm of bees Paul and Dad had collected from Huntington in May and put it into a full size brood box with some frames of fresh wax for them to expand. Hopefully this new colony will be docile - the type of bees we want!
A brood box is prepared the nucleus box frames go in the
middle: Bees run up into the new hive
The 7th was spent cleaning old frames and making up more new supers of frames for the Summer ahead.
Paul went to Flaxton on Wednesday 8th June to collect 3 full supers of the first of this Spring's Oil Seed Rape honey -
it has to be collected this early because it sets hard and would soon
solidify in the frames on the hive if it is not removed and spun from
the frames.
So on Thursday 9th we spent all evening merrily spinning and extracting
honey, decanting it into clean plastic buckets.
Spinning honey in the garage: John & mum taste the
spoils!
June 10th and more hectic trouble lay ahead.
Lynn's elder brother John said he had a swarm of bees nesting in an old
settee in his back yard.
Sounds rather fishy. Something odd, I thought.
Paul went to investigate.
They turned out to be bumble bees which are now hived in Paul's back garden
at Stockton Lane.
Bumblebees in the sttee, Lynn's brother John with the
hived Bumblebee nest
Friday, 10 June became worse when Mr. Cook, our neighbour, complained
of being stung in his garden, and a swarm of bees had descended on his
honeysuckle again.
Threatening words were exchanged. Oh dear!
We checked our hives, but found all hived colonies seemed so the swarm
had not come from us!
Our aggressive hive could be the cause of Mr Cooks sting ?
This angry, wild colony is too aggressive. It must go!
We also increased the height of the green mesh netting on our apiary,
covering the last open side so the bees must now fly up 12ft. before they
can get out.
Not very good for the bees themselves, but at least they will fly higher
and hopefully over head level.
The aggressive hive now dwarfed behind the 12 foot fence
Dad
fixes the new fence
But where had the swarm in Mr, Cook's garden come from?
We checked all our hives. None of them are strong enough to swarm yet!
So, where has it come from?
Another swarm from somewhere else but I don't think Mr. Cook would really
believe us!
Paul took the swarm to his garden on Stockton Lane so that it can settle
down and late in the evening on 14th June he and Dad took the aggressive
hive (minus its honey) to Flaxton. I think we shall be glad to get rid
of it!
The aggressive hive in its carrier: And in the car boot:
Paul drove very carefully!!
Because none of the hives at Monk Avenue are capable of making honey at
the moment we stored all the supers of honey from the aggressive hives
there until we can put them back on a hive to be finished off.
On 16th June inspected Hive 2 to see if we could put the half-filled supers
of stored honey on it for the bees to complete.
We inspected another hive (the one from which we had removed the queen
cell) to see what was going on. No brood was found - oh dear! The queen
must have died so we united it with the nucleus box we had removed in
May.
Note paper dividing two colonies. The eat through this
and unite
Paul went back to Flaxton on 17th to retrieve the rest of the supers of
Oil Seed Rape honey and strimmed the grass around the hives. The honey
was quickly extracted into tubs before it went hard.
On 26th June Paul brought the swarm from Stockton Lane back to the apiary
at Monk Avenue.
We inspected Hive 2 again on 28th and found it had some brood so we put
the stored frames from the aggressive hive back on this hive - hopefully
we will get some honey from it this year.
The swarm was too good to waste so we expanded it into a full size brood
box. Hopefully it will make a nucleus colony for us.
The swarm transferred into a brood box