Thursday 24 June 2010

Another Nuc



Made another split tonight, 3 frames with brood on, two QC, two frames of stores and space. Left my original colony with 8 frames and QC.
Shown is my first analysis of my original colony, 30 wings.

Monday 21 June 2010

Morphometre

There were open QC on 2 frames on Saturday so need to make up the nucs no later than next Saturday, don't know wether to do 2 or 3 yet.. Every time I touch the queenless colony the bees race out, very lively! Collected around 30 bees from it tonight to anylise their wings, they were very noisy as they entered the freezer.

Wednesday 16 June 2010

Fighting

Opened my new nuc tonight as I wont be able to tomorrow. Shook out the last failed nuc and all the bees tryed to enter the new nuc, and they fought! Need to find a better way to empty a failed nuc, hope my original queen is OK.

Tuesday 15 June 2010

Try Again

Took my original queen (white) from my main hive with 2 frames with brood, 2 frames with stores and pollen, 1 empty comb. Will seal for 2 days and then place where my last failed nuc is (position 4), where it can pick up returning bees. Bees were robbing empty hives tonight, should have been more careful! The original hive is strong and will now make a emergency queen, if there are spare cells I may try another nuc from the other hive. There should be a queen cell capped in 5/7 days and an emerging queen in 12/14 days.

Sunday 13 June 2010

bad news

Checked the nucs today, they all seem to have failed. One QC has died and in the other nuc brood is hatching small, black and wet looking, I think the flying bees have returned to their original colony and the brood has chilled. Back to the drawing board.

Sunday 6 June 2010

New Splits

Checked the 3 QC on one frame today, one had emerged. So created 2 nucs with a frame of mainly sealed brood, 2 frames with pollen and stores and a QC. The emerged queen may have been on the remaining frames, so left in the brood box and placed in the following pattern on the QC raising colony.
Original colony in brood box,
Queen excluder
2 supers.
Queen excluder.
crown board with side opening and bee proof mesh over holes
Queen cell raising brood box.
This would allow the new queen to mate and start laying in the top brood box and making a 2 queen colony.
I'm sure the nuc created two weeks ago is queenless, so if I get the chance I will place a queen cell with it, also because I don't know if the emerged queen is still with the top box I would give another QC.