One bee keepers loss.....

Is there ever a good time for a swarm of bees to arrive?

That's probably a rhetorical question....but this week would rank of one of the most badly timed weeks for honey bee swarming.  Part way through the verifying of some 16,000 postal votes, after some particularly late nights, early starts and highly frustrating wrestling with remote access to spreadsheets that should have worked but didn't...I was hardly in a great frame of mind to receive a text asking if I could offer a large swarm a new home....

However; one bee keepers loss is another's gain,   never look a gift bee in the mandible and all those other maxims.  I said yes.

So it was that I came to be bee suited and booted on a Monday evening brushing bees out of a box into a spare hive...if in doubt turn the box upside down and shake'em in!

Stand back and admire them settling......

A few seemed to be a bit confused... or a bit disorientated from being rudely shaken and finished up underneath the hive.  It wouldn't be a worry ...unless the queen had ended up under there by mistake in which case come morning there would have been a big lump of bees hanging underneath the hive as everyone who had been shaken inside would have gradually realised she was outside and walked outside to huddle next to her and keep her warm...

Thank fully that didnt seem to be be the case and as I walked away all the stragglers and disorientated ones seemed to be walking steadily in the direction of the front door....

I've left them alone all week, but today was the day to investigate just how happy they were with their new home...

Early signs were encouraging....

A near full brood box of bees....

They were VERY docile and were busy "stringing" - this is when they link together to form chains hanging down from the frames and use their mandibles to manipulate the wax being exuded from their wax producing glands... gradually building up the hexagons of beeswax to make a nest for the queen to start laying in...

Look ....you can see right down to the shiny, new and clean bottom of the hive...

But the most important question to answer today is is there a queen? 

Soon enough I found evidence of her being there...

There were three whole frames of beautiful new clean wax cells...all with a tiny egg laid right at the bottom....

Wanna closer look?

All in all there were three frames of freshly laid eggs....that's c. 6,000 eggs laid in just over 4 days....this could be the start of a vigorously prolific colony....so where is she?

Suddenly in the mass of stringing bees there was a different shaped abdomen....

 

And then all the workers cleared and I got the opportunity for a great shot of her....

and a sudden burst of sunshine meant I over exposed the shot.  But anyway here she is in all her glory.

Now I need to decide if I'm going to re start my naming of queens......Anyone know any queens beginning with G?

Nothing ...... .and then two come along at once....

There's a couple of reasons bee keepers mark their queens...

You spotted her right?

Yep that's the first reason.

It's not essential to see the queen every week when you inspect the hive, its ok to just see eggs - eggs mean the queen has been there in the last three days.  But eggs can be a bit tricksy to see, especially on cloudy days.... so it is reassuring to see the queen and marking her makes her easier to see in all the other bees.

But to mark her ....first you have to catch her...

One of the easiest ways is to trap her in a handy spiky gadget called a crown of thorns...

And then all you have to do is brush off the workers who are trying to stay near her and dot her with paint as she walks under the gaps in the grid...

SIMPLES!

So that's Elizabeth marked! phew! 

The other reason bee keepers mark their queens is to keep track of how old the queen is. There's a cunning sequence of 5 colours (typically a queen has a maximum lifespan of 5 years) and a handy rhyme to help the beginner bee keeper get them in the right order for the appropriate year...

1    6     White          Will

2    7     Yellow        You

3     8     Red            Rear

4     9     Green        Good

5     0     Blue           Bees

It was almost too good to be true when the other  new queens from this year (2013 = red) wandered into view, I couldn't get the crown of thorns over her quick enough....

This queen has been being particularly elusive.  She is actually the daughter of Becky, the queen who made it through last winter.  So you'll have to forgive me if I feel a little sentimental about her.

Now if I follow my normal habit I need to find a queen's name beginning with F....so I'm off to do some research...'cos I have to confess I can't think of one right off the top of my head...unless of course you beat me to it?

Suggestions in the comments box below please....

Introducing Elizabeth....

You may remember a fortnight ago the bees from one of my hives swarmed and caused a huge excitement for a Friday afternoon?

Well in the last fortnight I've been trying very VERY hard not to go into the hive and see how they are getting along, simply because...well...its better to let nature take its course.  The newly hatched queen needs a few days to mature and then she has a window of about 5 days where she needs to fly and get mated.  Ideally with about 12+ drones.

So the bee keeper needs not to disturb this process and simply hope that the weather is good enough for queens and drones to fly.  If all that goes smoothly and to time about a fortnight after the swarm is hived there is a glossy new queen, measuring new wax cells with her legs and beginning to lay eggs in the bottom of them....

And look who I found today...

surrounded by a classic circle retinue of workers...

Look at those glorious long orange legs...

Ladies and Gentlemen.... the new Queen .....Elizabeth.

Sprinkles ....and then some more....

....I'll contain my grumbles about the train service being halved before a single snowflake had even fallen.... and concentrate instead on just how different it made everything look.

Coming round the next to last corner on the way to work the sprinkles were already sticking to the pavements and the (in)famous green bridge was looking distinctly grey in the swirling flakes..

 

The walk to school (and the office) was getting ever more interesting, and as the river started to disappear as well it was no wonder really that flights from Heathrow were disrupted...

 

All told it wasn't a day to be dreaming of firing up a wood stove on a houseboat...

 I wasn't really that surprised when I got the phonecall to say the boys' schools were closing early and the sight of trains in the snow at Wimbledon was really quite a big relief

 

Even if there was a cloud of snow whirled along the platform by every intercity passing through...

 

Anyway we all got safely home and snuggled down to see how much more snow might fall overnight.... I'm sure there were some small folk dreaming of snowmen! ( I know I was)

Sure enough we woke to a mini winter wonderland in the garden...although it did look like the foxes had beaten us to running around in it...

 

 

But whilst it was fun building snowmen and throwing a few snowballs I did find something to worry about...
Bees cluster together and shiver to generate heat to keep the colony warm - queen at the centre - imagine that all the way through the winter in a snuggle of 34' ( mmm yummy). Anyway a quick look at the snow on the roofs of my hives hints that all may not be well in Abigail's hive....

Becky looks like she might nicely toasty on the inside tho'....

The big question is how long do I leave it before opening Abigail's hive to investigate if she really is ok in there?

Meanwhile back at the Apiary

I've only missed a week of bee keeping classes at the Apiary ( last Saturday I skived at the Sandown quilt show) but it felt like AGES since I'd been there. It was such a lovely day, 23' and bright sunshine with lovely fluffy white clouds scooting above us in the wind and with the gentle sound of the infant school summer fayre drifting over us we set to work....

Steve had brought 2 colonies from his Apiary which needed to be homed in new hives....

 

As soon as we opened the first colony it was apparent there were lots and lots and lots of bees in there!! 

 

Just look at how many were hiding in the roof!

And as soon as we started going through the frames we found lots of queen cells,  this is the colony indicating to their existing queen that they are running out of space for her to lay eggs so would she mind laying them a new queen and, then taking some workers with her as a swarm, would she please go and find somewhere else to live. (This is not a good thing for bee keepers as they lose a lot of bees and honey and its even less of a good thing for nearby neighbours of bees) Before she goes, the workers make an extra large cell (it looks like a peanut still in its shell) which they pack with more than the usual amount of brood food to grow a new queen......we stopped counting when we found eight queen cells....

We clearly needed to do something to prevent this colony from swarming, there was no sign of an actual sealed queen cell - but there was a rather fat grub in one of them...

But before we could decide what to do we needed to establish the existing queen was still there... now she had been marked (with a yellow dot to indicate she'd hatched this year) and had had her wings clipped so her chances of flying away were low and our chances of spotting her should have been high, and indeed - there she was....

 

So with the queen safe in the hive we decided to move some of the queen cells into the colonies that had lost queens in all the miserable weather in April.  Carefully re-loading the frames that would stay in this hive and brushing the bees gently off the frames we were going to move - so there was no danger of crushing the queen cell or damaging the grubs developing in them.

Shake the last of the bees in from the roof of the old hive box and jobs a good 'un.

Now it was time to move onto the (previously feral) colony that we homed into a new hive 2 weeks ago (see this post)  now it was time to see what they'd been up to!  It seems that old habits die hard with bees...

They have built a pile (that's a technical term) of brace comb straight under the crown board...These girls clearly like building wax! and as for them breaking down the old wild comb and re-organising themselves ...well err....

No.....quite simply NO.... these girls haven't got a clue how to organise themselves, never mind a booze up in a brewery (mead anyone?) so in true "grasp the nettle" style we decided to re-organise the hive for them. Normally a hive starts at the bottom with a brood box, then "supers" are added on top for the bees to store honey "upstairs". So, we wondered, if we reversed the normal situation and gave them another week to sort themselves out - could they? Here's how it looks now...

That's a super of random honey comb on the bottom, a brood box in the middle and a super of empty frames  at the top...so tonight's $60m question is can they sort themselves out? 

Phew!  What a busy couple of hours bee keeping... but today we got a traditional reward for bee keepers - a finger of fresh honey straight from the comb....

.. yum yum yum....nom ...nom....nom