4 good hives going strong.
- The dark blue hive colony swarmed last week and made itself at home in the light blue hive that was empty on the side. I had deliberately left the hives that I lost over winter in place in order to catch any swarms that occurred. Interestingly with a choice between a light blue wooden hive and the green poly hive the swarm chose the light blue wooden hive.
- Red and white hive has a honey super on, with loads of bees and is growing nicely.
- The two poly nucs and the green hive and the dark blue are empty of bees but full of frames, awaiting swarms or new queens.
- Red and green is a double brood building up a population to split with the new queens.
- Purple hive has just been fed with new eggs as the queen was only laying drones.
Last week there was tall grass all a round so I took out the strimmer. Strimming early evening when the bees had gone to bed and work as quickly as I could in a suit seemed to be the way. Cut back all the grass to prevent the ants from climbing up to the top surface. Strimming looks to have been successful. Need to sort the ants on one of the hive stands.
Plan going forward
The main plan at the moment is to raise new queens using the population in the red and green double brood to sustain them. I have 5 nucs and 2 empty hives so should be able to build 7 small colonies that have virgin queens to build up into 7 good size colonies. Red hive was my best performing hive last year so should produce some really bice queens. Lots of drones around from purple hive too.
Red and white poly (RWP) as well as Blue poly (BP) will be for honey and have flow supers on. Once the swarm is settled in the light blue wooden hive (LBW) and grown to be big enough for a super, there is a flow super awaiting, but lets see.
Purple hive will either create a new queen from the eggs that I have provided or I will have to take some other action. There is a possibility that the eggs will be made into a load of queen cells in which case i will bring the Queen rearing part forwards and use these queen cells for the repopulation of the other hives and nucs.
4/6/23 – No queen cells in the Purple hive so ONWARDS to the Queen rearing proces.