First inspection of the new bees. Transferred the bees to a Poly Hive, marked the Queen and made a Nuc as they had started making queen cells. In with a bang!
00:04
Welcome back to Beekeepers Diary podcast. We are at the beginning of April now. It's the bank holiday Monday and it's a glorious spring day. It's the day I've been waiting for. I've been sitting on my hands waiting for the weather to get warm enough to be able to do an inspection of my new hive.
00:34
And today was the day. Got up to 14, 15 degrees. I'm in Hertfordshire. It's a glorious day. As you might remember, I was someone locally was giving up beekeeping and had a hive to move on which I've inherited. So it was going to be my first chance to see what I'm dealing with.
01:04
So on approach to the hive I could see lots of young bees doing orientation flights in nice warm sunshine which was nice to see. um
01:17
and I had all my kit prepared with my all freshly painted, freshly cleaned poly hive kit. As these bees were in wooden hive, a commercial brood box with a national super on top. No queen excluder, so I was interested to see what was going on. So I opened the first super.
01:47
absolutely jam-packed with bees which is nice to see. Obviously I was a little bit expecting to see some brood up in the top super which sure enough there was alongside one or two charged but not capped queen cells which was what I was needing to check for really because it's been
02:16
been cooped up for so long and it's been this did look like a big colony. em So I was thinking they might be having thoughts about swarming, sure enough, charged queen cells. So I transferred that whole super into my poly super, then I went through the breed box and no queen cells.
02:43
on actual brood frames as such but when you've got that sort of one and a half configuration they like to make the queen cells in the gaps that gap between the super and the brood box so that was makes it a little bit easier to find them sometimes. um Saw signs of eggs there so I knew the queen was still been there in the last three days. um The eggs were laid over on their side a little bit so it looked like
03:12
you know, two, three day eggs. um So I figured the queen was in there somewhere. So I transferred all my brood frames into my poly hive and put my whole new floor back in situ where I wanted them to be. Obviously the bees get all discombobulated because there's a different colour box, different smell shape box. So.
03:41
you end up with a big queue of bees trying to work out what's going on in the air. Which is quite noisy. They're quite well behaved though. So I went back through the super and found the queen, scuttling about and there quite a little itty-bitty queen unmarked. So I grabbed her, marked her with, I don't really do the colours of queens, I'm not selling.
04:09
Queens as you know you can have a different colour for each year. I've just got a white marker so I used that. And I made a nuke with the old queen, some food, a little bit of brood, some bees and some foundation and some drawn comb which I had from last season. Put that to one side with my nuke, bank that queen there.
04:39
and made a note of where the queen cells were in the original hive and I'll go back next week and see what we've got and knock it down to one or two and then we'll be preparing to hopefully get up to two hives quite quickly. em So that was in straight away.
05:09
thought it was just going to be a messy relocation of the bees into a fresh hive. But to do that and have to go find the queen and do my chosen method of swarm prevention all at once was quite time consuming. It's quite hot as well, quite sweaty. But it was all good fun. Straight in at 100 miles an hour. Bees are bringing in nectar as well. There was...
05:38
They're not backfilling the brood nest yet. There's a little bit of nectar in the brood on the edges of the whole nest and some in the super up top. So I've put a queen excluder on and put a super, an empty super ahead. A wet super really from last year. Just spun it out, wrap it up and I can use it straight away this year. Take it out there.
06:08
cell phone wrapper I leave it in to keep the wax moth out and bang it on the top. Then I was going to record this episode in situ. I had maybe four or five bees following me making a nuisance of themselves so I decided to record it a bit later on locally in some countryside near me where you can't hear bees zooming around.
06:39
eh Yeah, wasn't feeling so brave to...
06:45
see how grumpy they would be.
06:49
find that out, find that out over the season I'm sure but fingers crossed they were just riled up from all the disturbance that I did today so hopefully that'll be the most disturbing day for a while and we can settle down and just get into a rhythm together and collect some of this spring honey. I've not seen any ore seed rape in my journeys to and from the Apuree, I don't know if...
07:18
farmers are growing it locally or not. You can either bring neck parakeets there or a racket.
07:26
I'm looking at this huge oak tree in front of me and the British Trust for All Anthologies put some owl boxes and a kestrel box in this tree where there previously was a kestrel box but two thirds of the way up the tree but it fell down. It rotted away the other year and they've replaced it but it's very low down. not convinced it's safe.
07:52
Eggers coming and stealing the eggs or from predators, but we shall see. Yeah, first spring chiff chaffs, probably flown over and migrated recently until tits flying ahead. Yeah, chiff chaff. You do get Chetis warblers down here as well, which are quite loud when they go off. But yeah, first inspection done and no stings, into a fresh box.
08:21
got a Queen right hive booming with bees and yeah we're in a good place so I'm going have start as always to leave my prep too late I'll have to start knocking some frames together for when this nuke develops into a full hive I'll need a load more frames and always good to have a nuke with frames in it in the boot of the car for unexpected eventualities as well so I'll probably make up
08:52
some frames there as well. Welcome to you all, thanks for listening again. I was looking at the locations people have listened to this podcast from, I'm up to 176 different cities now so it's always expanding. Nice to have new listeners, thank you for tuning in. Don't take it for granted. Yeah, hope everyone's good, hope your seasons...
09:21
If you've got bees, go into plan and you haven't stumbled into early swarm cells. Yeah. Hope you're all good and I shall catch you next time.