Well, June has been a rather wet month to say the least! Chances to go out beekeeping have been limited to just a few sunny days, and the sunny days at the end of the month were perhaps just a bit to hot to put a beesuit on!
The photo above was taken one day when we went to inspect the bees…as you can see, not ideal weather for beekeeping!
June is always an odd month however, with the typical ‘June Gap’ coming into play and we have experienced this here at Rand - lots of brood and bees but not a lot going on in the way of stores. The photo below shows the underside of the top brood box of a double brooded colony – there are plenty of bees at this time of year. Starvation alerts have been sent out reminding people to feed their bees if necessary. At this time of year with the colony potentially at its largest in size, it has more mouths to feed than at any other time and with a lack of forage, the bees can easily starve. This can be made worse by taking off spring honey and not providing bees with an alternative food source so be sure to keep an eye on stores.
Our bees here are doing well, with newly mated queens in all the hives. As last month’s issue explained, we used the Quintrex cages to introduce newly reared queens to our colonies this year and it has been very successful. The emerging bees within the cage have accepted the queens as their own and the queens have mostly gone on to be good layers. One or two new queens have come out drone layers but that is not really a surprise as we got a lot of heavy rain here around about the time the reared queens needed to be out mating, so perhaps some did not get mated properly when they went out. Drone layers will only ever be drone layers so as soon as these are identified, they need to be changed for a good laying queen.
Swarms are getting fewer and further between…thankfully. This year has been a very swarmy year! Despite our best efforts, some colonies have swarmed this month, but luckily not very far away so we have managed to catch the majority and re-home them. The photo below was taken as we hived a swarm one warm day early in June. If you look closely you can see the lugs of a dummy board poking out at the side – this is just what we had at hand to create a runway into the hive for the bees to walk up.
As we move into July, we are really hoping for no more swarms! Everything has been reduced down as nucs have been taken off or artificial swarms have taken place. The frames which have been taken out have been replaced with nice, new foundation so hopefully this will give the bees the room to expand, reduce their impulse to swarm and mean they are on clean combs for next year.
