The bad news is we now have no colonies at home; the good news is the out apiary is flourishing!
Beekeeping by Torchlight
A couple of weeks ago,
P and I engaged in some beekeeping by torchlight. Bob at the bee shop tells me this is a normal part of beekeeping.
The bees in the home apiary were under
constant pressure from wasps. We had
moved them onto a solid floor to stop the smaller wasps from accessing the hive
through the mesh varroa floor; the entrance was reduced to one bee space but
the wasps hadn’t given up. Then we noticed a
change in bee behaviour: they weren’t
flying as much and I began to wonder whether they still had a queen so we felt
compelled to adopt emergency measures to spare our diminishing colony from this
torment. We daren’t inspect the bees
during the day for fear of marauding wasps.
We were at a party nearby
but we left just before dusk, donned our protective gear and grabbed our pre-prepared equipment so that
we could inspect each frame in the brood chamber by torchlight and put wasp
free frames into a clean brood chamber which was sitting on a solid board. We covered the brood chamber with a clean tea towel and
queen excluder, tied the whole thing together with ratchet straps and
transported it to the out apiary at the farm.
By now it was really dark.
We took the roof off of the Sue Bee colony (the swarm collected in June), laid a couple of
sheets of newspaper over the super and put a queen excluder over that, partly
to hold down the newspaper but partly to ensure that if there was still a
queen in the top colony, she wouldn’t get mixed up with Queen Sue
below. We made a few slits in the newspaper and then put our brood chamber on
the top and replaced the roof. The idea
is that the bees eat through the newspaper from both sides and by the time
they’ve done that, their scents are co-mingled and they don’t fight each other.
Then we stripped our protective gear off and returned to the party!
The next day we
cleared out the home apiary ensuring that all the equipment was properly
cleaned and stored for the next season.
This leaves us with a sad empty apiary and the whole garden feels
different.
Life at the Out Apiary
After a week, we
inspected the conjoined colony at the out apiary but the bees hadn’t moved down
from the top brood chamber in the way we expected. Dad surmised that there was still a Queen in
that colony and her nurse bees were staying with her.
We decided there were enough of them to set
them up in a nucleus alongside the Sue Bees.
So, we separated them again, putting the frames with brood and a couple
of frames of drawn comb in the nucleus.
Evidently while they were fending off the wasps and during the week post
unification, the bees in the colony from the home apiary had been living off their stores and they
had little left. Therefore we gave the
nucleus a syrup feed to keep them going until the number of foragers builds up
again.
Now the nucleus and
the Sue Bees are side by side and both colonies appear to be working
happily. The odd wasp is spotted but the
out apiary isn’t plagued with wasps in the same way as the home apiary.
The pictures show Mrs Goose and the old chickens and a Gloucester old spot pig who are also resident at the out apiary.
