Wednesday 25 May 2010
All seems to be OK - plenty of flying bees going into both hives. In one hive the queen cells are empty and eggs are present so we assume that is where the queen is. In the other hive there are capped queen cells and we couldn't see any eggs. Hopefully a princess will emerge (very soon!) and take over the hive as the new queen - fingers crossed!
Monday 17 May 2010
Opened the hive yesterday and there were a least four open queen cells with larvae visible in them. As the weather forecast is hot and dry for at least the next 4 or 5 days we decided that we would split the hive into two. So far we haven't been able to mark the queen so we ensured that there were queen cells in each of the new hives. The original super was ¾ full of honey so we split that so the bees would have plenty of food (there is quite a bit of honey in the brood frames as well).
When we finished we moved the two hives so they where about 2 feet from where the original hive had been. It was interesting to watch the bees come back to where they thought the hive was and then flying around trying to deciding which hive to go in. As far as we could see roughly half went in one and half in the other. In the evening we turned one of the hives slightly away from the other so the entrances were not in the same direction.
Monday 10 May 2010
The weather warmed up again at the beginning of last week so we were able to look in the hive again. Removing the brood frames caused some of the drone cells built on the bottoms of the frames to break open and expose the larvae. On close examination there appeared to be one or two varroa in a number of the cells. Also the number of varroa on the insert under the mesh floor seemed higher than usual. We emailed the bee inspector for some advice and he kindly came and had a look a few days later. He thought the hive was OK and healthy (one bee with mis-shaped wings was found) but suggested treatment with one level teaspoon of thymol on a bit of sacking on top of the brood frames. We did this and it caused a considerable drop of varroa and no observable harm to the bees.
Today we put out two bait hives - one is an empty hive with frames in it, the other a box made from a design off the Internet which you hang in a tree in a sunny place. We have put a swarm lure in each box. We'll see what happens, if anything!