Beekeeper's Assessment Exam. - QB sat it today!

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2 Sorts of Nucs.

Red Hive has a V.V. good queen.  Bred in Alnwick Apiary in 2015, marked blue, she is the best Q I have ever lived with. Her colony is well-behaved, calm, not at all stingey!  They did produce a q. cell which I put in a Polnuc.
I added some capped brood and some pollen and honey with 3 undrawn foundation. Last week no sign of a new Q. (daughter of V.V.Q.)
So I gave the bees some eggs from Bl/Ye who wouldn't miss them. Today  the bees hadn't started to build a new Q. from the gifted eggs BUT I found eggs and small larvae. So, Red Q. daughter has started a new colony. (Hope
she's as good as her mother!).Depends on the drone quality she met in the
sky.
Silver Nuc. -moved blue Q (2015) into polynuc on 2 July as her colony had
built 2 excellent Q cells and threatened to swarm.However, blue Q has disappeared. BUT, the bees have made 2 very nice Q cells in the nuc.
Nucs must be fed with sugar syrup to help them build new comb for their young Q. to lay her eggs in.

At dusk, feeding Rednuc. Sugar:water 1:1.
In the photo above  you can see the feeder with bees clamouring for food. They have no foraging bees to collect nectar, until a new Q starts laying.

Full Apiary inspection: Part 2

WBC hives in my apiary - vary in height depending on number of honey supers.
The 3 tallest have 4 supers each and are called Red, Y/B, and Silver (ident. by coloured stones in front). These are my strongest colonies and may be planning to swarm.  Red and Silver have 3 year-old queens (marked blue for 2015). B/Y has a white marked Q (emerged 2016). Gets complicated doesn't it? Anyway, on 2nd July inspection this is what I found and did.
Red:  expected swarm preps. Found queen after going through 2x. Plenty of
eggs, larvae and capped brood. Plenty of laying space and pollen stores.
The bees were polite and nice, so I decided to leave them alone.
Y/B: Expected swarm prep. No sign. No queen cups or q.cells. Saw Q. laying - nice even combs. I gave them a super of Manley frames (self-spacing) 2 weeks ago (as an experiment) but they are not storing any nectar
in them - yet? Left them alone!
Silver: expected this colony to be OK.  BUT - found  about 8 nice Q cells, some with larvae, some capped. Set up an artificial swarm by moving Q., now very slim, into a poly-nuc.  This exciting saga.........to be continued.
Will Queen Bee manage to stop Blue Queen swarming with Silver workers?

Full apiary inspection- part 1

6 hives and 1 nucleus. Quite a task! As a taster here's a comb from YellowH
colony. More tomorrow, when Queen Bee has got her head around several tricky situations. 7 colonies, 7 completely different. I Loooove this lot!

Wall to wall capped brood.
A few empty cells: why?

Bees and Roses

Great name for a pop group!  Anyway the rambling rose over our front door is the best it's ever been - and the honey bees seem to agree.  This morning
every flower had a little bee bum sticking out of it!  The perfume and the humming were just what an English summer day should be like.