Topic: Got my first bees!!

[tonybloke]

collected my first bees yesterday evening, A huge swarm in a blackthorn hedge, they are now in my back garden in their new home.
the queen is marked!! and seen to be strolling up the hill into the hive.
 ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

[betula]

Good luck with them Tony :)

[Melbourne12]

Excellent!  I hope they settle down quickly in their new hive and prosper.  Here's to a great bee summer!  :)

[tonybloke]

here they are, walking up the hill into one of my new hives[attachment=1]
and here is the marked queen ( the one with the green spot)[attachment=2]
(sorry for slightly blurred image)



I also picked up a 'nuc' from P.Metcalf. http://www.norfolkhoney.co.uk/products/index.php
(I'm lucky to have him as one of my college tutors!)

[Twoflower]

I've just spent an enjoyable two hour with my father in law in his bee hives. Then we went round to a new member of the bee club i go to and helped her sort her bees out. There were too many in one hive ( i don't think i've ever seen sooooooooooo many bees!) so we split them and i found the Queen ( Oh iam so chuffed) ok my F.I.L had his back turned but that still don't take the gloss off the fact that i found her and she is unmarked ;D

[tonybloke]

had to convert some frames yesterday. they are the 'nuc' that i recently purchased, which were on National Brood frames. I have got modified commercial brood chambers, so the bees were building a lot of burr comb. I converted 4 of the 5 frames to stop this, but left one for the building of 'drone comb' as part of my I P M of the colony.
all good fun, eh?
 ;)

[Twoflower]

 What's I P M? :-\ is it to do with Varroa?

[Robert_Brenchley]

Everything. The mites have a dreadful habit of becoming resistant to whatever we throw at them, plus all the treatments are harmful to bees. Alternating treatments is just common sense. I don't remove drone comb myself - I actually want lots of drones for my queen raising - but the mites infest drone come preferentially, so you put in a comb of big drone cells, wait till they're capped, then take it out and freeze it. This kills both the drone larvae and the mites. You can eat the larvae.