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

Stung!! :*( whilst helping....

Well it had to happen eventually, and today was as good a day as any, but I'm a bit miffed that I got stung,  for the first time as a bee keeper, whilst trying to help a colony of bees into a newer and much better home :(
So I'm typing this ( and watching the Tennis at Queens) with a fatter than usual index finger and it smarts - but mainly because I can't bend it properly to type !  :(

Some back story to set the scene:
Our apiary manager had been called in to deal with a swarm and discovered that the source of the problem seemed to be a pile of old bee keeping equipment from an x-bee keeper who had given up some 12+ years ago.  Most of the old hive pieces were completely rotten and some adventurous bees had found their way into the corner of a rotten box and figured it was a good place to start a home....

So he'd gathered up the hive pieces where the bees seemed to be and after quarantining them in a separate apiary for a few weeks had brought them to the teaching apiary to hive them and see what we'd got.  Today's lesson - cutting naturally formed wax out of a hive and tying it into a newer frames to put into a hive.

Step one: Set the new brood box up on a brand new stand and crack open the old hive (a darned site easier said than done)

 




Firstly we were greeted by a lot of drones on a very propolised crown board and a wiggling wax moth caterpillar - ugh!

 

But what a sight awaited us!  The bees had filled the box with wax comb - with natural bee spaces and judging by the colour - had been doing so for quite some time!  (brood comb - where the Queen lays eggs starts off white and goes yellow, then brown over time as each subsequent hatching grub leaves a little bit of pupa behind in the cell.  Anyone want to guess how many times these cells had been used?

We set this box aside and prized our way into the second.  The bees seem to have organised themselves to treat this second box as a "super", - lots of fresh pale wax most of which was full of wet stores - new nectar that they were storing and evaporating to make honey...

So now all we had to do was cut the comb out of the box and tie it into the new hive - Simples!

 

Or NOT ! as the case may be !! 

Then someone had the great idea of breaking the sides off the box -  we didn't need or want to re-use it so it, as it was already mostly rotten, it should be fairly easy to break apart...

Look at all that lovely wax comb..built with perfect bee spaces...
So ..time to cut it out...piece by piece and look for the queen...... are we all ready? because its surprisingly heavy and you have to catch the pieces as they topple over from being cut....

Right in the middle is where most of the bees are so its just a case of shaking the bees off the comb into that new hive we set up (right at the top of this page).

 

And that was exactly the start of my downfall !  Shaking bees off open stores is messy work and it was a matter of seconds before my hands were covered with honey and then of course a few bees came along to drink it back up.  They'd worked so hard to collect it of course it shouldn't have gone to waste so I can't really blame them for scavenging.....however the little blighter that stung me....well....she was a rotter...'cos it really REALLY hurt!  :( 

Then to add insult to injury the battery ran out on the camera so you will have to wait a while longer for me to tell you the end of the story 'cos I need to beg the photos from our other photographer...
That's all for today folks!

Honeycomb Heart

Today promised to be a typical April showers kind of a day so I wasn't really sure if we'd get to open he hives at the apiary as all.  I'm quite like a bee in that I don't much like to be out and about in the rain....so I was delighted when the showers held off long enough for a few hours bee keeping.

After last weeks "Shook Swarm" we were expecting to find the bees busy building honeycomb on the new frames ready for the queen to start laying in... early signs of bees in "strings" looked good ....

Some of them had been very busy and built some rather wonderful, if somewhat wasteful honeycomb shapes....

 Can you see the shape?

We also found an intruder the bees had dealt with!!

This is an invading bumble bee - she probably went in to rob a drop or two of honey - but she was dispatched with a sting and the covered in propolis - can't have been a nice way to go - but its certainly an effective way to deal with thieves

The day ended with a demonstration of "hiving a swarm".  A swarm had taken advantage of the warm weather earlier in the week and made a break from where they were but had happily fallen into a friendly bee keepers hands.  So - how to get them from the cardboard box into the hive???

The answer - shake them onto a plank of wood and let them walk in!

This is surely where the science of bee keeping meets the art of keeping bees - allowing the bees natural behaviour to work for you - they walk up and into the dark place that looks like a great home - hey presto - the swarm are in your hive!