Today we made a start on smartening the apiary up for our ‘Birds and
Bees’ event on Sunday 12th July.
Then we checked all our hives. What a change having gone from one
hive to three (not to mention Jenny’s two)! We call
them the ‘queenright’ (our second top bar hive to which we moved the queen and
a few frames from our first top bar hive), ‘queenless’ (our first top bar hive - the removal of the
queen would force the bees to rear a new one) and ‘national’ (the traditional
square hive we built as a new home for the swarm we caught in the bait box).
News from the queenless hive: it needs a new name as it's no longer queenless – someone has been
laying. But we found several queen cells (the nose-like protuberances in the photo below) so more queens are on the way!
We considered splitting the hive. This would also be an opportunity to better manage the hive by moving the cross comb, so we broke the bars off (look at all
that honey!). The cross comb isn't straight - it curves and overlaps across more than one bar so it isn't possible to move each one on its own and inspect it visually to see what's happening in the hive and detect any problems.
But we had a change of heart: what if there is a problem with the
queen? Maybe they need a new one, hence the extra queen cells? So we left them
in the end, rather than split the hive. Jenny wondered whether we might have
what are called ‘caste swarms’, where a queen leaves with part of the colony
but not all. So we wait and see.
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