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
Good luck with them Tony :)
Excellent! I hope they settle down quickly in their new hive and prosper. Here's to a great bee summer! :)
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!)
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
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?
;)
What's I P M? :-\ is it to do with Varroa?
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.