In today's inspection, the name of the game was to find and mark as many of our three queens as we could and also treat all the colonies for Varroa properly, using Apiguard.
Today we thought we'd mix it up a bit, by going into Laura first:
Laura
Strong strength
Calm temperament
1.5 brood box - 11 + 11 frames
20 frames of bees
13 frames of brood (all stages)
5 frames of stores
4 foundation frames in the super (some beginning to be drawn)
Actions Taken: We found Laura quite easily (Greg is pleased with how he is becoming a dab hand at spotting her!) and re-marked her as her original coloured spot was beginning to wear off - those workers are taking really good care of her! Then, we treated the colony using the Apiguard (see below).
Apiguard is a gel that the bees don't like in their hive. They take it into their mouths to deposit outside of the hive but as they're doing this the gel gets stuck in the hairs on their body and is distributed around the brood box. The gel essentially blocks the pores of the Varroa and suffocates them so that they drop off the bees.
The last thing we did in Laura was to move the super underneath the brood box again, as the super was full and the brood box still had some frames that needed to be drawn and filled.
As we've said before, the bees tend to hang out at the top of the hive as that's where it's warmest so we're playing with under-supering again to see how that helps.
Next, we inspected Kate. Unfortunately, I hadn't realised that the feeder we were taking off had a leak and spilt the sugar syrup all over the top of the hive!
This complicated the inspection somewhat as the bees were really busy clearing the sugar syrup off; it meant we had to use rather more smoke than we normally would in order to safely inspect the frames and avoid crushing any of the bees.
Kate
Moderate strength
Calm temperament
1 brood box - 11 frames
11 frames of bees
5 frames of brood (all stages)
2 frames of stores
4 foundation frames
Actions Taken: We removed the feeder, saw Kate again and re-marked her too. We kept her out of the hive for a good couple of minutes while we finished the inspection so hopefully the mark has fully dried this time. We also treated this hive for Varroa with Apiguard too.
Next came FeeBee (formally known as 'The Nuc'):
FeeBee
Weak strength
Quiet temperament
1 brood box - 6 frames
4 frames of bees
3 frames of brood (eggs only)
2 frames of stores
1 foundation frames
Actions Taken: We tried looking for the queen really carefully. Greg pointed out that we'd seen both queens in Kate and Laura, which are more than double the size but we still couldn't see her. (Perhaps she is just really small at the moment?)
We are also concerned that for the past two weeks we have only seen eggs and some uncapped brood. While this is good as it points to the queen laying successfully, we expected to see at least some capped brood by now. We're not sure what this means but Greg is going to do some research and we'll get back to you.
What is more, there were two queen cups in FeeBee, as yet uncapped, but both had royal jelly in. This suggests that they are supersedure queen cells and means that the bees may be trying to replace the queen but not wanting to swarm as they're such a small colony. It's strange as normally this happens to old or ill queens, perhaps hinting that there is something wrong with FeeBee herself. We will have to keep a close eye on this colony over the next couple of weeks. Despite all this, we still treated FeeBee for Varroa with Apiguard but only used half a sachet due to the colony's small size.*
In other news, we have also noticed quite an influx of wasps in the area. At this time of year the worker wasps are kicked out of their hive and so are currently trying to scavenge food from our bees. In order to help the bees defend their stores, Greg has placed some wasp traps near the hives. These wasp traps are filled with Cola and vinegar. The Cola attracts both wasps and bees but the vinegar ensures that only wasps are trapped as the bees don't like the smell of the vinegar, whereas the wasps are unable to smell it.
Before After
Overall, both Kate and Laura are doing well and going from strength to strength but we are still a little concerned about FeeBee but we'll keep you updated next week!
*Greg has done his research and found out that as the colony is so small some of the bees may still think they're queenless. This is because the queen's pheromone is passed physically from bee to bee and Greg had foolishly placed a foundation frame in the centre to encourage it to be drawn out (the best-laid plans as they say). This essentially split the hive into two, one side thought they were queenless and the other had accepted their queen. This also accounts for the number of dead bees we found on the floor of the nuc as the two sides may have thought they were facing a rival colony and attacked them. This may also be why the colony is so small. You live, you learn. We have unintentionally fixed this by removing the foundation frame from the centre and moved it back to the outside. This should mean that all the bees should be reunited ... we'll let you know.
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