Our site's been down for a couple of months as we'd planned a big revamp, in the end we simply haven't had time to make the planned alterations so we'll probably do so gradually over the coming winter months.
Today we've had a couple of trial runs with a few of the Christmas candle moulds just as a break from cleaning up the season's surplus wax; but if we don't get going soon we'll never catch up by December. Yet again we have a scratch-built comb with the cell walls orientated opposite to the 'text book' position. This is a comb from a mating nuc which we ran without frames as a trial; it may represent a change of approach for us in future years as it presents a lovely option for growing the colony on into a larger hive.... By using top-bars we're able to transfer the mating nuc combs into empty frames, the bees then follow the existing comb and fill out the frame. At a later point these unwired combs can be replaced but initially they present an opportunity to create new colonies very cheaply
Following on from our last post, things are progressing nicely; cell opened and queen at large. She'll be left well alone for a couple of weeks now -there's not a lot we can do but wait.
The weather has been such that we're seeing queens laying well within a couple of weeks of emerging so hopefully all will go well for these too. Most of this batch are the same colouration although I've spotted one with much stronger orange although she has the same striping. Spent some time transferring queen cells into their mating nucs today, this batch will hopefully mate as successfully as the previous ones; such great weather for getting queens mated.
You'll notice that we don't use the plastic cell cups which are so popular these days; nothing against them but I can make wax cups as quickly as I can clean the plastic ones and I get a lot more enjoyment out of making them than I ever did when I had to clean the plastic ones. Also, I'm guaranteed to loose the plastic cups the moment that I put them down somewhere! It may seem that all of our queens are of an orange variety, giving rise to the usual mixed appearance of the workers that we become so used to seeing but occasionally we find a throwback to a more uniform appearance, in this case the entire colony has a dark look about it, very 'carnica' like.
Below is a photo of the frames that they're on at present; a very basic construction put together out of cheap timber using our frame assembly jig which we blogged about last year. We over wintered them on five of these half size frames (approx area equal to two and a half langstroth combs) in an OSB box. At present they're being used to build more mating nuc combs for use in July. Back in the spring we did a short post about some small mating nucs which we'd built entirely from scrap wood; small off-cuts which were far too small for anything else we could think of at the time. We're now seeing the first of them finally put into use... Always lovely to see a new queen laying.
Total cost in financial terms? A few pence for the nails and a tiny amount of syrup just to give them a foothold when they were initially made up. We are presently preparing a few photo how-to blogs covering our way of doing a few basic bee things. we hope that the first will be ready to upload by the weekend. There will also be a photo diary of our queen rearing method starting from making our own wax cell cups right through to the 'finished product'; the mated, laying queen. The photo above shows one of our 13 frame brood chambers which measure 20" X 18.5" externally. These boxes allow us to use British Standard frames with modified dadant floors/supers/roofs etc. Fantastic boxes which we really enjoy working with. This one was actually a md brood that has been cut down (perhaps the bottom was damaged) and had extra internal walls added on the long sides to accommodate the BS lugs. You can still see the original md frame rebates in the end walls. We made a twitter post a while back about the cell orientation in a natural comb in one of our hives; we don't as a rule use foundation anymore, in fact it must be the best part of eight years since we last bought any. There is a cost of course, in the energy and resources that need to be tied up to produce a box full of scratch built comb but the learning curve is quite absorbing. The tricks which are employed to get good, straight combs where WE want them certainly add another facet to our beekeeping. Back to the cell orientation, our twitter post was about the comb shown at the bottom of this page, with it's cells built with the flat sides at top and bottom. Today we noticed another such comb (our header photo) in another, unrelated, colony. This has started us thinking, how often do bees build comb in this manner and why do they do it? We'll be keeping a closer eye on the cell positioning from now on. I can't remember a spring when there have been so many queen wasps lurking around the hives. Earlier today I was lucky enough to catch this photo of two queens in the apiary. Much as I come to hate the wasps every year once we reach late Summer, I can't help admiring them throughout the rest of the year. |
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