Back for another visit. Introduced a new Queen after upgrading the Nuc into a full hive. Assessed the state of readiness of nectar that has been stored so far, which is not quite ready.
I was trying to name Gwenyn Gruffydd, the Welsh Beekeeper with a great youtube channel. Sorry for misremembering his name.
00:04
Welcome back to a beekeepers diary podcast. We're now on the 9th of May. It's Saturday afternoon, about four o'clock ish. I just had quite a pleasant beekeeping session.
00:22
So where am I at now? We're two weeks into Queen's being released in the main hive. I could go and check. I could have gone through the hive and checked exactly what's going on but...
00:41
I'm going leave it to next week and see what they're up to. Hopefully I should have one laying queen by then and all the carnage should have settled down that have sorted themselves out. So I've just left the main brood alone in my main hive and I've got four supers, the honey collecting boxes on top and I've brought with me my bee escapes, the things you put between the honey boxes you want to remove.
01:11
and the rest of the hive to try and filter off some bees. It's like a one-way valve in theory. It doesn't always work out that way. And so I've gone through the oldest boxes, the oldest supers to see what the state of readiness of the honey is. Normally by this time of year.
01:36
I would have probably taken some honey off, especially if there's oil seed rape. But there isn't any in this area that I've noticed and I'm not getting oil seed rape vibes off the honey or the colour of the state of the bees coming back to the hive. em So even the oldest, the longest serving super there is only half capped off with wax. em
02:05
So I've done a shake test on it as well where you hold the frame horizontally and give it a shake to see if any nectar splashes out, which if you've got all seed rape, even if the frames aren't capped.
02:20
you can give it a shake test and that nectar is not coming out of the frames and you're safe to extract it before leaving it too long and it gets set solid in the frames but I don't think this is oil seed rape and I've given them the shake test and they're still a little bit drippy so I'm going to leave it for next week and let the bees do what they're doing let them cap them off as if this is normal summer honey I think
02:48
my tactic this year, may regret it but that's what I'm going to go with, go with my gut, it should be okay. And then my nuke which had the old queen in, a few events there as I've been saying I'm not happy with the temperament of the bees there they're very
03:14
I'm very followy and will follow a good distance which I don't really want as the where I return to is where other people are and I don't want to bring a load of angry bees with me back to the good people that let me keep the bees in the hive in their land so I feel a responsibility to keep those bees.
03:38
whereas if it was my land or a bit further away I'd have let them be. So I've ordered a new queen from Becky's Bees, um which is very good service in that I selected this week, it's been the week I wanted to be delivered and I could select the day I wanted to receive the bee as well. So I elected for Friday postage to arrive on Saturday.
04:06
sure enough and the postman was knocking on my door before 1pm with an unblemished package so he'd obviously taken good care of this queen this guy's delivered bees to me before so I think he knows the score but yeah it was in pristine condition so thanks to Royal Mail as well for not battering the parcel so I've brought the bee out to the nuke
04:36
I've also the nuke as well was packed out and needed moving on to the main hive. So I'd already brought some equipment down so I replaced a full-size hive on the spot where the nuke was and I transferred all the frames over to a full-sized hive. They were near enough all brewed with one frame of stores so they're getting ready to really get going. So I filled all the gaps in with foundation.
05:05
and found the old queen, dispatched her quickly and placed her locally to compost the land and I've placed the new queen in the queen cage into the hive and I'm using a method I saw from Griff, he's a Welsh beekeeper called Griff, he's got quite a popular
05:34
Griff, Gwinnin Griff, Griffith, Gwinnin Griffith or Griffith Gwinnin. He's got a good YouTube channel, he's a bee farmer and he introduced me to this method of when you could buy queens they come in a plastic cage, we've just got plastic tabs on it, so you snap the tabs off and then that exposes fondant as plugs and the idea being is the bees eat their way through the fondant, it allows time for the... um
06:04
bees to accept the queen and accept her pheromones and not kill her and by eating their way through the fondant obviously it's food to feed and slows down the release of the queen into the colony. What he has learned from other people and does himself is you snap the tabs off, put some masking tape, you know as if you're doing some painting around those tabs where the tabs were.
06:31
poke a little hole in each side just to start the bees off and then that just delays the release as they eat through the paper then they go through the fondant and then release the queen so it just slows down the process and apparently has a nice introduction rate doing that so I've tried that this time I've done various methods before I've put a queen in there left the tabs on come back a few days later and snap the tabs off just to delay the process
07:01
I've introduced the queen into a queen-less nuke and then introduced the nuke to a hive. That's my favourite method but it's time consuming and resource consuming. So let's try this one, see what happens. um Yeah, so fingers crossed the bees were all having a look at her and...
07:29
They... could be...
07:34
you know, my imagination, but it seems the bees' temperament settle down almost, you know, quite quickly. It's quite strange um because I'm sitting here now and I'm not being harassed at all by the bees. whereas previously they were quite antsy, so who knows? I mean, that seems miraculously quick, but I'm not currently getting harassed. So this is good. Hopefully she's accepted and we're going to.
08:03
make a lovely colony. I'll assess my main hive's queen bees temperament once she's out but normally the progeny of grumpy bees are even grumpier so that one's got a question mark beside it but we shall see. So yeah sitting in the field I can hear the sky larks, the swallows are back.
08:25
Pigeons, I think I heard Lynnets flying over earlier. I wasn't quick enough with my bird ID.
08:34
Yeah, hope you're all well. Thank you to all the new listeners. Ever-expanding list of cities that people listen from. I think it was 230 now. is madness. And I hadn't been notified. I had some comments on Spotify which I hadn't been notified about, but now I've seen them so I've replied to people that have commented. So thank you. Yeah, always nice to receive messages. As long as I notice them, I'll reply.
09:01
obviously I've got my Instagram as well, Beekeepers Daru podcast on Instagram so I'll be posting a few videos and pictures on there if you're interested. Right, humbles and upwards, hope you have a nice week and I'll catch you next time.