Oh well....

We had a busy weekend this bank holiday what with family and friends over so it took longer than i had hoped to check the hives. As the last time we had seen any activity with the hives was on friday, nothing else was noticed to make us think anything was wrong. A friend and his partner had come to visit and steves partner Kym was very interested in the bee's so we lent her Kims suit so she could look at the hives with me. Hive 1 had drawn out supers some with stores but nothing capped, when we checked the brood box there was a lot of stores but also capped and uncapped brood as well as eggs. Though the hive was small it showed lots of activity with all the right signs of being ok for the winter (though i will have to keep feeding them as well).
Hive 2 which was the hive that had the dry swarms was ok or so it seemed, capped and uncapped stores in the supers but when we got to the brood box it was just stores....no eggs and no brood...capped or uncapped this of course is a massive worry as it means that the queen has left the hive that either she left with some of the workers or we had another swarm that we missed. If there is another queen she was not seen as we wanted to check for  brood mainly, this obviously means we need to check to ensure the hive will be ok b4 the winter sets in.

and again...

They swarmed again on Friday....theres me painting (still..) when at 12:33 i hear the bee's getting louder when i looked there at it again swarming above the hive, at 12:46 they all disappeared yet i still have flying bee's going in and out of the hive still so it looks as though we had another dry swarm again? may have to ring one of our mentors to find out whats going on, will check  on the hives Sunday to see how every thing is and let you know whats going on then :)

I think i have a headache.....

This bee's ness with the bee's (grin) is getting confusing lol...well since the last inspection of the hives i have been pottering around the garden, we still have a wasp problem so i decided to empty and refill some of the wasp traps when i got to one of them i saw two of the bigest wasps i have ever seen. 'Are they hornets' says Kim 'naa' says me. They were both alive so i decided to put them in a sealed container then take their picture in the morning once they had died to show how big they were. Well when i opened the container the next morning 2 enormous and very angry hornets (yes they were hornets) shot out and flew around the garden dive bombing me into the bargain b4 flying off, i didn't get any pictures but the traps are still up so who knows :) We checked the hive with the queen cells in on monday evening and by the 4th frame i suddenly saw a queen (not marked) shoot down to the bottom of the frame, luckily Kim saw it as well which showed that the queen from the queen cell i had put back was definetly alive.....after checking the rest of the frames definetly no other queen but 3 queen cells found which i destroyed. We put syrup feeders in and closed the hive back up it looked as though a new queen was taking up residence.
Then today happened :) just before i went to pick Kim up from work there was a lot of activity around the hives....and i mean a lot of activity lol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR1ywS1y5sE i have given up trying to put video clips on here so you guys can see this on youtube from now on.

Well as you can see the hive has swarmed and disappeared off....except when i checked the hive tonight theres still the same amount of bee's present as there was yesterday??? so have they all come back? it may be a dry swarm meaning they all swarmed expecting a queen to come with them but she didn't, it could be a practise which i doubt...so as you can imagine its very confusing whats going on in this hive....i quickly checked hive no.1 and they seem to be ok, theres capped and uncapped brood but not much...lots of stores though so i put a super on to see if that will help oh and i did find a queen cell (grrr) which i got rid of and thats where we are at the moment. So i will keep an eye on them tomorrow to see if they swarm again though this recent swarm only took around 15 mins so i may miss them...at least i got it on video lol anyway until the next time l8rs :)

Never runs smoothly lol

Well it just goes to show if you dont keep on top of things, something is bound to happen.....last weekend we checked both hives and everything seemed to be ok plenty of activity in both hives though number one hive still not producing lots of stores to warrent a super yet so i am still feeding them a sugar solution to kick start them off. Hive number 2 has had no problems in fact the super we put on has slowly filled with honey and lots of the frames are starting to be capped, we therefore put a second super on but as of yesterday there was no sign of drawn comb yet. At the back of my mind i was aware that we had not checked hive two for over a week and also i noted that the front of the hive was not as busy as usual. Then when we checked we found over half a dozen capped queen cells......not a good sign usually means the hive is about to swarm, we demolished some of the cells but kim said leave the others as we still had not come across the queen yet....in fact we checked all the frames twice and still no sign of her. Kim wanted the last cople of queen cells left and i brought 2 whole ones indoors to photo.....except one of the cells was moving in my hand and buzzing lol....we could see that a queen was starting to break out of her cell!! I rang one of our mentors who said we could put her back in the hive or destroy her...kim wanted her put back, which i did as she had already taken the cap off by that time.
We obviously have a problem here because a number of scenarios put themselves foward
1. The old queen has died somehow and new queens have been made to compensate
2. The hive has already swarmed and the old queen has gone
3. We missed the old queen, she is still there and may kill the other queens
4. The hive is going to swarm again......
Reading up, its not unusual for hives to swarm in august due to weather and nectar flow....which judging by the weather the last few weeks may explain why the hive is doing this, i am upset as she is a young queen so should have no reason to do this plus we got her for the low tendancy to swarm....but she is a woman and you cannot always know what there thinking (boy am i going to get a clout for that comment lol) a possible awnser would be to do an artificial swarm but we dont have the equipment or experience for that. Until i can get my head around this and until we check the hive on saturday we may just have to let the bee's get on with it :( i have ordered some more feeders to see if that helps. The books say that one way to stop this happening is to provide an artificial swarm which means minipulating the hive to seperate itself without flying off. In the book it seems simple but i need to make sure the old queen is still alive first and as i said we need spare equipment as well. I may need to ring one of our mentors first and see what they suggest. Anyway enough of our dilema until the weekend i will talk to all later :)

Still no video clips but.....

More pictures!! :)
well its been a week since our last visit to the hives hive 1 still very busy and hive 2...well...its ok :) went down and checked on them around 6:45 Opened hive 2 first...all sugar syrup finished so made another batch up and put that aside ready for them. The first thing we noticed was that there is still not much production going on where the brood box is concerned, there is brood evident but also lots of stores

the next picture does not really show it that well (even though i took a few pictures) was when we saw a bee breaking out of its cell...1st the bee made  a tiny hole which got bigger and bigger as she chewed the cap before she pulled herself through (left hand top 4 down 7 across...under a bee)

the next picture shows lots of stores and honey

finally we came across some uncapped brood (top right)

we found 1 queen cell which we got rid of then i saw this on the right hand side of the another frame its whats called a queen cup (looks like an acorn cup) its the bee's practising but we will keep an eye on it for next week incase they take it further

Kim was like a whippet after a rabbit with the next hive as she had already opened it and was checking the supers before i had even got the roof on the 1st hive lol

the good thing though is that already over half the frames have been filled with honey...so my job tomorrow evening is to put a second super on for the bee's to start working on :) The next picture sows a frame with lots of capped brood on...

The last picture shows a mix of brrood and stores but also the odd drone cell dotted about...you cant miss them as they have slightly raised white caps..

we didn't go through all the frames ,so did not look for the queen as it was fairly obvious they are both prodcing brood , monday i will put a second super into hive 1 and i will also check the bottom trays for mite....which i will explain about on the next blog :) so again thanks for reading and until the next time l8rs