As we roll into July, we’ve been reflecting on what’s been quite a mixed month here at Thorne HQ in Lincolnshire. June brought us both a strong honey flow and a fair bit of head-scratching over queens and colonies that have been doing their own thing!
First off, we’ve had a few casts turning up in unexpected places, like this empty hive. It seems no matter how closely you watch, there’s always one that slips through the net.
Unfortunately, not all colonies have requeened well. We’ve come across a few drone layers this month, which is always a disappointment. It’s a reminder that good weather doesn’t always mean good mating if the timing isn’t quite right. Because of this, we’re already working on breeding new queens for next year.
The honey flow has remained strong throughout June, which is unusual, as we normally see a June gap in forage. Thankfully, this is keeping the bees happy for now. We have seen bees expanding quicker than we can add frames in the hives, as you can see from this photo!
However, we’ve also come across several colonies that have become pollen bound which we think may be due to lack of a laying queen in some cases. Without eggs or brood to feed, the nurse bees have packed every available cell with pollen, which has clogged up the brood nest. These colonies can really struggle to recover, so we’ve been going through and swapping frames out to give them some space and hopefully encourage better laying if a queen is present.
On a similar note, it’s always a bit of a waiting game when you’re not sure if a colony has accepted its new queen. But instead of waiting for weeks hoping to see eggs, we’ve started popping in a frame of eggs from another colony into any we’re unsure of. It’s a great way to test things; if they draw out queen cells, we know they’re queenless. If not, we just have to wait until she gets going.
So, June has been a real mixed bag – lots of promise and productivity, but a few challenges thrown in to keep us on our toes. July should start to calm down a little here in terms of taking nucs off for sale and so we should be able to fully concentrate on setting the bees up well for the rest of the season (and dare I say, winter?!).
