The weather is suddenly autumnal and next door have ploughed the field. I managed to carry out my last big inspection of the bees to get them ready form the Winter season. The big question was, how would the new colony, comprising the home bred queen and her progeny combined with the Nasty Queen's colony, behave?
The theory, as I understand it, is that a colony of bees shares the characteristics of their mum, the Queen, who may have mated with one or more drones. Therefore, unless you can control which drones the Queen mates with, there is a risk that her progeny will inherit their dad's characteristics instead of their mum's. By giving my nucleus eggs from the lovely G Bee Queen from which to develop a new queen, I was doing my best to produce a new Queen with lovely G Bee characteristics but I couldn't control who she would mate with.
Over the Summer, it became evident that the new Queen and the bees that hatched from her eggs are "normal" bees who concentrate on their bee business and take no notice of me unless I disturb them, which I try not to do.
When I united the Nasty Bee colony with the new Queen's colony after the demise of the Nasty Queen herself, I expected the united colony to have 40-50% of bees with Nasty bee characteristics until those Nasty bees gradually die off. At this stage in the season, the colony does diminish in size as the Queen does not lay so many eggs and more bees die off than are hatching.
What I didn't expect was that just a couple of weeks after uniting the colonies, the new colony would be so well behaved. Over the last 2 years I have got used to the Nasty Colony sending out alarm pheromones as soon as I lift the crown board and guard bees pinging my veil at eye level almost immediately after that.
This time, there was none of that. No sticking of little bottoms in the air when I took off the crown board, no angry guards harassing me. It's the result I planned for but I am still surprised that to find such benign behaviour so quickly.
Both colonies now have clean varroa floors, a full-ish super of stores, a clean brood chamber and there is enough room between the crown board and the roof for me to feed them as required over coming weeks and in late Winter.
Their behaviour may now be similar but there is one respect in which the two colonies are completely different. The crown board in the picture on the left came off the G Bees. They don't like ventilation. Crown boards often have a couple of holes in the top which can be fitted with bee escapes (a kind of one way valve) when you want to move bees down from one part of the hive to another, e.g. in order to remove a super of honey.
In the summer, I usually cover the holes with wire mesh so the bees have some ventilation. The lid of the hive stops rain getting in and it also has ventilation holes but the G Bees have completely sealed the metal grills that cover the holes in the crown board with propolis. They have also sealed the edges of the varroa floor with propolis.
The new colony has glued the wire mesh to the crown board with propolis but left the centre clear.
