You may have noticed we were absent from last month’s newsletter – that’s because we have been so busy that we just didn’t have time to get a blog done! So, we are amalgamating May and June here.
Towards the middle of May we had some super hot weather. For us, this is when things started to ‘heat up’ and swarming began! Here you can see a swarm that we missed. Luckily, it swarmed straight into the pine trees in the apiary so it wasn’t a problem to recapture. A perfect height in fact! You can also see here the wildflower meadow on the brink of flowering. It is a beautiful sight when the flowers finally open.
Funnily enough, it was at the end of May that we had a big ‘June gap’. We found that many colonies had built up so much that when there was a gap in the forage, they struggled to bring in enough food to sustain themselves. This meant it was difficult at this point to make up nucs which would be able to survive until they reached their new home. Once the forage came back however, making up nucs suddenly became a lot easier as frames of stores were readily available.
May and June are our busiest times of the year, every year, because we spend so much of it face down in beehives and making up nucs! The majority of our nucs are British Standard which will fit National or WBC hives, but we also do a limited number of 14x12, Langstroth and Commercial nucs too. Each nuc is hand picked with enough frames of brood and stores to last it a while until it is rehomed in a full hive.
After taking off the nucs, we introduce our own queens back into the remaining hives, however this is not always successful. For example, take this WBC hive. This picture was taken after it had a 6 frame nuc taken out of it and it is on a double brood 14x12. As you can see, it is still rather full! We are not sure exactly what happened but we do know that the queen and attendant bees were still in the cage with the fondant - there are a couple of scenarios that may have played out but mainly we think that the colony was just too big to accept a new queen. Next year we will be keeping the colonies at a smaller size as we find acceptance rates of queens is much better this way.
Many of our colonies here are on double brood. Sometimes we get a build up of brace comb in between the two boxes but we leave this on until we want to take nucs off for a few reasons. We find this is a good way to check for varroa, as the drone cells come apart and we are able to see the contents. We find it is also a great way to check for swarm cells as the bottoms of the frames in the top box are a common place for bees to build them.
Heading into July, we are hoping for no more swarms (as the old saying goes ‘a swarm in July isn’t worth a fly’!) and a quieter month in the apiary. We will still be busy though as we continue to make sure that queens have been accepted into the remaining hives so we can take the bees into the autumn nice and strong.
