So today we first went to where our newly christened Steph and the Nuc reside. We wanted to check if they'd moved up into our top brood box so that we could return the borrowed hives to their owner. Sadly, they have not however there was new brood, in all stages, in both the Nuc and Staph which means that the queen is in there even if we didn't see her. Here's Steph below with the pollen patty we gave her to help her on her way to full strength and more honey!
Steph
Weak strength
Quiet temperament
3+4 seams of bees
5 frames of stores - a good increase
3 frames of partial brood (all stages) - no change
2 foundation frames
No signs of varroa
Didn't see the queen
Fed sugar syrup & gave a pollen patty
Nuc
Weak strength
Disturbed temperament
1+ 4 seams of bees
2 frames of stores - no change
3 frames of partial brood (all stages)- no change
6 foundation frames
No signs of varroa
Didn't see the queen
Fed sugar syrup & gave a pollen patty
When we arrived at the second apiary we went into Kate first. It's interesting that both Kate and the Nuc seem to be in very similar places in terms of their development.
Bees 'bridging' Brace-comb under Kate's roof Looking into Kate.
Kate
Weak strength
Disturbed temperament
11 frames
4 seams of bees
2 frames of stores
3 frames of partial brood (all stages)
6 foundation frames
No signs of varroa
Saw and tried to mark Kate (unsuccessful)
Fed sugar syrup & gave a pollen patty
Once inside, Kat spotted Kate with great glee and Kate seemed to be much bigger than last time. We tried to mark her but due to Greg's butterfingers she escaped ... we just hope she wasn't damaged in the process. We're going to go back this weekend to check on her and see if there are any signs that the colony wants to supersede - due to her being damaged. Supersedure is when the bees believe that their queen is no longer able to serve the hive as well as she should and therefore try to make a new queen by forming queen cells. Next weekend, if we spot Kate again, we'll then make a decision as to whether to continue trying to mark her or not.
Queen marking can be tricky but it does make it so much easier to spot them ... we're wondering if it's really worth the risk of damaging them though? Perhaps we just need more practice.
Very frustrated, we turned to Laura.
Laura
Strong strength
Quiet temperament
22 frames
6+9 seams of bees
1+6 frames of stores
5+4 frames of brood (all stages
5+1 foundation frames
No signs of varroa
Saw the queen and tried to mark her (we'll have to see if this is successful long term)
Fed sugar syrup & gave a pollen patty
She is doing really well with lots and lots of brood in all stages which made us very happy. Better yet, she's not showing any signs of wanting to swarm and although she's big she does have more room to expand. Judging from the huge amounts of brood we saw in her today we'll just have to keep a close eye on this over the coming weeks. Greg is very excited as it's looking like he'll be able to put his big plans of queen rearing into place within the next month!
Greg spotted Laura quite quickly when we got in and this time we successfully managed to mark her! (See below left; She doesn't seem very happy and as you can see from the pen smears, didn't want to hold still for me!) Due to Greg's flinching, we may have also got some pen on her eye ... we hope that this won't affect her in any way and that she'll be ok (see centre picture) We'll probably check on her this weekend too just to make sure. As we were so nervous though, we didn't let the mark dry again so perhaps this might be cleaned off as before (You can already see in the picture on the left that some of the mark had been removed in the moments between the two pictures - they really do take good care of her!)
2 Days Later - update on Kate & Laura: Both queens appear to be laying well and there are no queen cups to be seen so they don't seem to be injured in any way. We didn't see either of them though.
Kate had no sugar syrup left in her after 2 days but also hadn't really improved in terms of her store's content so we're not sure where that's gone ... We decided to give her some of Laura's pollen, stores and capped brood to help her along a bit as she should be doing better than she is currently.
Laura, on the other hand, is nearly full. She only has 5 frames left to draw before we decide whether to put another super on her or to use her excess brood to help boost the other colonies and also for queen rearing purposes.
Finally, here are some satisfying videos of us making sugar syrup this week!
Enjoy 🐝🐝🙋🏽♂️👫🙋🏽♀️🐝🐝
P.S Greg got stung again - Greg: 8, Kat:1 😋
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