Trophies to be won

Iliffe Cup. Awarded to the member with most points in all classes.

Wantage Challenge cup. Awarded to the member with the most points in classes 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Peggy Mein Cookery cup. Awarded to the winner of class 5 & 7

Harmsworth Trophy. Awarded to the member with the most points in the beeswax classes (classes 8, 9 and 10)

Valentine Trophy. Awarded to the member with the most points in the DIY and creative arts classes (classes 11,12 and 13)

Mattingley Novice Cup. Awarded to the winner of class 14.

Peter Dawson Beginners’ Cup Awarded to the winner of class 15

Download Full Details:

Notes

No need to pre-book, just bring your entries along on the day! All entries in the Honey Show are FREE but must be exhibited by 15.30 at the latest.
Points shall be calculated 1st = 3 points; 2nd = 2 points; 3rd = 1 point.
You may enter 2 items per class, but only the highest will count should you have both items placed1st, 2nd or 3rd.
Entries are welcomed from Vale and Downland, and Newbury members, but note that only members of Vale and Downland
Beekeepers Association can be awarded cups or trophies.
Classes 1, 2, 3, 14 and 15 – honey to be shown without labels other than exhibit label.
1. A novice is defined as a person who has not yet won a first prize at any honey show.
2. A beginner is defined as a person who is in their first twelve months of keeping bees.

I had begun to worry about the quantity of food my bees were consuming and how much they had in store. I am unable to get a good sense of stores bees may have by hefting the hives, I do not trust myself to guess this accurately. Most of the colonies have consumed the additional 2.5kg of fondant that they were given over the Christmas period when I also treated them with oxalic acid.

It is a little early, however Sunday was a beautiful day, to remove woodpecker and mouse guards, change hive floors and swap brood and supers back round putting them either above a queen excluder or the crown board. All my hives had plenty of stores, in most cases 7 or 8 frames full and 1 or 2 frames of brood, the queens have just started to lay. I clearly had no need to worry about lack of food, they were all looking healthy and well. So far I have not had any losses this winter, it is of course a very critical time now as brood will continue to expand and the need for stores will increase.

Until this weekend that is, I am so pleased with what what i saw as i had set this weekend to be the last possible date to see the queens laying from the cells left in the colonies in May, it is over 1 month after they would have hatched.

Colony after colony was opened and found to be queen right, I really was expecting the worse. I now have laying queens in seven colonies and another that is barely larger than a worker that is not laying. I have added frames of eggs into two colonies to confirm that they are without queens, if confirmed next week I will either reunite them, buy a couple of queens or leave a good sized queen cell in each if the bees provide me with this option.

The length of time the colonies have been without brood has left them reduced in strength and so unlikely to be able to produce any honey if the weather improves. However, a great benefit could b that without brood in the colony for nearly five weeks there was nowhere for varroa to breed.

I hope now the colonies will build up fast and be able to make the most of any late summer nectar and build up food supplies and strength to raise healthy bees to get them through winter.

1 Main flow – enough supers on hives?

2 Reduce entrances on nuclei/weak hives

3 Monitor varroa population/mite drop

4 Open mesh floors

Writing these notes in the second week of June, it is quite difficult to predict when plants and trees will begin flowering – for many years now everything has flowered very early, up to a month early in some cases. We had a hot spell of weather at the end of May, and the oilseed rape yielded very well – I have just finished extracting 260 pounds honey from my 2 hives in the garden, and the honey in the final two supers was definitely becoming very viscous (another week and it would probably have become solid). I, and I’m sure other beekeepers, am always getting caught in the perennial problem of  ‘if I don’t get it off within a week it may start to crystallise in the comb, but if I take it too early it will not have less than 20% water content and so will not be saleable’. Perhaps they could genetically modify the plant so that it produced a nectar that was lower in glucose and higher in fructose, then rapidly crystallising honey would not be a problem.

At the last beginners meeting at the association apiary we all saw how easy it was to accidently kill a queen bee; a hive was being dismantled prior to inspection and on trying to lift the final super it was found that the plastic excluder was still stuck to the underside even though the hive tool had been inserted all the way round to try and free it. The super was lowered back down and the excluder fully freed, but on removal of the super we found the queen jammed with her thorax firmly wedged in one of the slots – dead of course! The lesson to be learned is that you MUST make sure the excluder is fully free before lifting the final super, and the top bars are clear of bees before replacing it after the inspection. Needless to say this is not a problem with framed wire excluders, which I prefer to use.

It is noticeable that over the years the so-called ‘June gap’ just doesn’t seem to happen anymore, and we are more likely to have a late July/August gap.

From about the second or third week of June to the middle of July, limes, blackberry, sweet chestnut, summer flowering (spring-sown) oilseed rape, white clover and a huge variety of cultivated and wild flowers will bloom. If the weather is hot, and there has been enough rainfall in the preceeding weeks/months, (and there certainly has this year!), you can expect a good, steady flow.  Bees will be fully occupied, with a constant stream of foragers coming and going from the hives, and they can be handled with the minimum of fuss. However, more often than not, the weather is changeable and the bees become frustrated by being couped up in the hive unable to forage freely, with a consequent falling off in their good behaviour.

Advice this month is to make sure they have enough supers for the incoming nectar. As we get towards the middle of July, I would refrain from adding any more as the nectar flow will usually slow and finally stop altogether, and you don’t want a number of half-full supers to extract, but be prepared to be flexible.

Once the flows have all but stopped, the bees will turn their attention to defending their hoard, and for up to a week, can be unapproachable. If there is no good reason for disturbing them, then I would leave them alone to get on with ripening and sealing the honey. With little income, bees will now be on the look-out for free sweets, so it will pay you to make sure that all hive parts fit together well without any gaps through which bees can gain entry – it is amazing how quickly robbing bees can clear a hive out of all its honey. By the same token, ensure that bees gain no access to cleared (or clearing) supers, even for only a few minutes, by covering all supers until they can be removed to a bee-tight building. The excitement caused by allowing bees access to honey at this time of the year will make sure you don’t do it again!

Any hive that is low on numbers of bees, and all nuclei, should have their entrances reduced so that they can keep robbing bees (and wasps) out. If you become aware of robbing in progress (a lot of activity around a couple of hives when all others are quiet), then try to ascertain who is the robber and who is doing the robbing, close up the hive being robbed (with ventilation – leave the varroa tray out, with just the mesh in place, for instance) trapping as many of the robbers inside as possible, then temporarily move the hive to another apiary or site at least 3 miles away. The trapped bees doing the robbing will now treat this hive as their own. Now go back to the original apiary and temporarily reduce ALL the entrances – they can, if desired, be opened again after a few days. The removed hive can be returned after a few weeks or so, by which time the robbing bees should have forgotten their old site.

Monitor the varroa situation very carefully this month – if your uncapped drone brood indicates that the mite population may be getting out of hand (it is the percentage of infected drone cells rather than the number of mites that you need to ascertain), or occasional bees are seen falling from the hive entrances with deformed wings,

then you must treat as soon as possible; if there is still honey on the hive, then check the literature to see whether your preferred treatment has a withdrawal period for honey.

At the end of July/beginning of August, some colonies may slow or stop their queen from laying, so if you check a colony and find only sealed brood and no queen, eggs or larvae, do not jump to the conclusion that they are queenless. Nearly all of the queenless hives that I have examined have shown bees clustering thickly over the brood combs, such that it is difficult to see the comb underneath (bees do not normally cluster in large numbers in the broodnest unless preparing to swarm or it is cold). If the bees look and behave normally, then they are probably fine.

For a few years I ran my hives on open-mesh floors, only replacing the collecting trays when treating with Apiguard. Leaving the collecting tray out means that all the hive debris falls clear of the hive, along with any live mites (up to 20% mites drop off or are knocked or brushed off the bees – they can’t return if they fall through an open mesh floor).  Leaving the collecting trays out also reduces the incidence of wax moth to almost nil. I did not detect any detrimental effect on colony behaviour or temper – if anything they were slightly better behaved. In hot weather they don’t cluster all up the hive front and nectar is ripened more quickly; top ventilation is not required at any time of year.  Unfortunately, they have no effect on the swarming urge of the bees! However, I have gone back to leaving the collecting trays in all year, cleaning them at least once a week. I nearly lost my bees during the winter of 2010/2011, and the weather just doesn’t seem warm enough during the greater part of the summer to warrant leaving the bees unprotected below. I also found that combs were never fully drawn to the bottom bar if the collecting tray was left out.

If you keep your bees in an out-apiary then rearing your own queens is a very good idea. You don’t need to do grafting – de-queen a colony that you can afford to produce less honey, destroy any queen cells they make themselves, then add a frame of eggs/very young larvae from your best colony. They will make queen cells on this frame, and once they are sealed you can carefully cut them out and put them in Apideas with a small number of workers.  Once the queens have emerged, mated and are laying they can be introduced to small nuclei and left to build up slowly. A judgement can then be made on their relative docility (don’t use smoke), and any that fall short of your expectations can be culled. The others can be used to re-queen your hives in the autumn, and any left over can be kept in nuclei over the winter in case of losses; any surplus nuclei can be sold in the spring.

If, like me, you only have a couple of hives in your back garden then you will probably feel it is safer to get your queens from a reliable bee breeder to guarantee docility. I would personally recommend Buckfast queens from Ged Marshall as they also have the advantage of very low swarming and high productivity along with the aforementioned docility.

• Extract any later rape honey
• Keep checking for queen cells
• Swarm collection
• Add more supers to hives if necessary

Well, no sooner did Thames Water announce an official drought, complete with hosepipe ban and threats of worse to come, than we have the wettest April since records began. The hosepipe ban is still in force, but we are now no longer in an official drought! All the water has ensured a very heavy flow from the rape, albeit a little intermittent due to the weather. The net effect is that an awful lot of colonies have started swarm preparations, including my largest hive – in fact their queen completely disappeared after maintaining a 10 frame broodnest for several weeks, and she didn’t leave with a swarm! I did what I always do on first finding queen cells – go through and destroy all of them so long as there are cells containing eggs or 1-2 day larvae. A week later I checked again – no open brood and lots of various size queen cells, so I selected one large sealed cell on the bottom of a comb and destroyed all the others (a bit risky as there is no way of telling if it is viable or not – better to leave an unsealed cell, but this time there wasn’t one). I will check again in a fortnight to see that all is well.

You should have finished extracting any early rape honey by the time you read these notes, but if there is no nearby source of income for the bees after the rape, then you need to keep checking them to make sure they don’t starve – just because the weather is nice and it is June does not mean they will be alright if left for a couple of weeks. Feed any colonies that feel light, especially if the weather is not good. Bees kept near gardens will usually manage alright, but those on farmland need watching. A better idea is to keep a super above the excluder that is never extracted – it saves the worry of starvation and the bees seem to forage much more freely if they already have a good store of honey.

Keep up your inspections for queen cells, as also brood diseases, and monitor the varroa situation.

During the course of the season, you may be asked to remove a swarm from someone’s garden. The call may be to a genuine swarm, or a bumblebees or wasps nest. If the ‘swarm’ is found to be a bumblebees nest, then I would try and persuade the person to leave them where they are, emphasising that they do not swarm, and unless the nest is disturbed, are very unlikely to sting anyone. (this is not true of the recently introduced tree bumblebee which will attack without provocation!). Most bumblebee nests die off naturally by the middle of August (they peak around mid-July). If the nest is wasps, I would again try to leave them alone, but if they are close to the house or public footpath, then they can be destroyed at dusk by pouring a jar of petrol down the entrance hole. This is assuming the nest is in the ground – anywhere else and I would leave them to the pest control people.

If there really is a swarm, then they can be shaken into a suitable receptacle (skep or cardboard box), left to finish flying for the day, and collected at dusk. Swarms should always be hived on foundation, as they make such a good job of drawing it into comb, but if you are unsure of the source of the swarm then I would keep them away from your other hives – they may be carrying disease, and often seem to be bad-tempered or followy.

I am often asked what hive I use and if I would ever change to a different one based on my experience with it. The hive I use is a modified commercial broodbox with national supers above, and the only other hive I might be tempted with is a standard national; I still maintain that a single national broodbox is just too small for a lot of the queens in use today, and so I would need to use a double broodbox (which of course is too big!). I can’t see any major disadvantages with the system I first started with, as it is so easy, if necessary, to reduce the space in the large brood box by the use of a dummy frame(or even two as I use in my commercial boxes), but impossible to increase the available space in a standard national broodbox without adding another box on top, so necessitating a 22 comb inspection if the queen needs to be found; for a beginner to have to contemplate this defies all reason (it is reassuring for beginners to see the queen at each inspection, helping to build confidence for when it becomes necessary).

I will also put my head on the block and say that I would never contemplate using a zinc queen excluder (although I know a number of experienced beekeepers who will use nothing else). My own preference is to use a framed wire excluder, but just make sure you get one from one of the big bee equipment manufacturers – I have seen quite a few really bad ones in my time where there is more than a bee space on one side, or a bee space that is divided equally between both sides! The result is always masses of brace comb and a less than removable excluder. There should be a bee space on one side with the wire flush with the other.

HONEYBEE DEFENCE – part of an abstract from a scientific paper – seems that drones play the more crucial role in the inheritance of bad temper; all the more reason to requeen aggressive colonies BEFORE they produce drones!

‘Honey bee nest defence involves guard bees that specialize in olfaction-based nestmate recognition and alarm-pheromone-mediated recruitment of nestmates to sting. Stinging is influenced by visual, tactile and olfactory stimuli. Both quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping and behavioural studies point to guarding behaviour as a key factor in colony stinging response (I think most of us already knew that!).

Results of reciprocal F1 crosses show that paternally inherited genes have a greater influence on colony stinging response than maternally inherited genes. The most active alarm pheromone component, iso-amyl acetate (IAA) causes increased respiration and may induce stress analgesia in bees. IAA primes worker bees for ‘fight or flight’.

But this lovely hot spell has seen the bees inundated with a fabulous flow of nectar; the hives are all full of stores and the honey supers have been filling rapidly. This is particularly so in the Burcot hive, which is a ridiculously strong colony since the swarm which left it went back to re-join the others. Not only do the bees here benefit from the village gardens, they are only about 200 metres from the River Thames and all the lovely trees and wild flowers along its banks. There is also farmland surrounding the village with fields of oilseed rape also just a couple of hundred metres away which is still in flower.

Yesterday I took off the first super full of big fat frames of Burcot honey!

Lovely fat frames

The honey is a lovely pale colour with a delicate taste. I am assuming it contains a high proportion of oilseed rape nectar which is prone to crystallising quickly and solidly so we put it in buckets to allow the natural crystallisation to take place before we process it to make it more palatable – I think this involves gentle heating and “creaming” which is pretty much mashing/mixing until you get a soft-set type of honey.

Uncapping the honey enabling it to spin out

Liquid gold!

I did jar up a couple of samples – including one for a boy at the school where I work who is suffering horribly with hayfever. He lives in Burcot and I’ve read that consuming unheated, coarsely filtered honey containing pollen grains daily can desensitise hayfever suffers to the effects of the pollen (see this article from The Telegraph). I think you should ideally begin using it before the hayfever season starts to build up resistance. I’m not sure there’s any firm evidence for this, but it certainly won’t hurt (plus my honey is DELICIOUS!)

In the past few weeks my colonies have been frantically making preparations to swarm. Most have had 2 or 3 good sized queen cells and numerous smaller ones in the hive at each weekly inspection. Being meticulous, making sure these are all removed along with even the smallest of queen cups is a slow but important task to make sure the bees do not have the opportunity to swarm. So far this is working to prevent swarming. However now we are having better weather and the bees are able to make use of the nectar flow I am thinking of changing the plan to control swarming.

Ideally I would like to keep a few colonies together using the the demaree method, after i successfully used it a few years ago, artificial swarm some into new boxes with foundation to replace old foundation when they are united again and try again to rear queens using my best colony to replace those that head up the colonies that need to be improved.

In addition the past few weeks weather has been more favourable and it looks like there may be the opportunity to take some supers off and extract some honey next week. 3 colonies now have 2 or more supers that are full and capped over, this seems crazy as only last week i was feeding 2 others. I need to be careful and make sure if I take honey off any split colonies are left with enough in the supers to provide food if required.

The distraction therapy appears to have worked, it feels as if in no time i am back in Goring with a few words to share with you after the sort drive home for the last part of my journey.

At one point in March with the short spell of warm weather, it looked as if it could be repeat of last year. With oil seed rape beginning to flower in March, supers at the ready, in fact 4 of my hives had supers that were being filled and i had expectations that swarming may begin by the first week in April.

Then it all changed, the wettest April in more than 100 years has put colonies at risk of starvation. My colonies all came through the winter looking strong and in late March food stores filling 2 or 3 frames in the brood box along with the honey in supers. I managed to visit and check stores later in April and begin feeding 3 colonies that had depleted these stores, but i was too late, the size of the brood nest had reduced dramatically in these colonies as a result of lack of forage, the result is so frustrating, the richest nectar flow we have in the year is sitting in the fields inaccessible due to cold and wet weather and has been for the last 4 weeks! I noticed today that this is now going over and i am sure will be gone in the week or two.

Still the bad weather has allowed time in doors to build hive stands and other equipment. Let’s hope the weather changes very soon.

1 Regular check for queen cells/swarm control/clipped queens

2 Check for brood disease, esp. EFB

3 Add supers ahead of requirement

4 Clear/extract/replace supers after oilseed rape flow

5 Monitor varroa situation

We are having another wonderful spring again, and the bees are building up quickly, foraging on cherries, plum and increasingly oilseed rape. One of my 2 hives occupies a brood and 4 supers at present (first cross Buckfast) so they will need frequent checking for queen cells – the other hive is about where I would expect them to be for the time of year..

This month, you should be checking your hives at weekly (if you have an unclipped queen) or 10 day intervals (if she is clipped) to spot the first signs that the bees are preparing to swarm (bees will not normally swarm until they have drones on the wing, so you probably don’t need to check hives that haven’t produced any yet). Remember, it only takes 8 days from the queen laying in a queen-cell to the time it is sealed, and on that day, or the first fine sunny day thereafter if it happens to be dull and wet, the old queen will usually leave the hive with between a third and a half of the workers. They will cluster for a while (anything from a few hours to one or two days) quite close to the hive whilst scout bees search for a suitable new home, and if not captured by the beekeeper, will leave for an unknown destination. This is the scenario if the queen’s wings have not been clipped. If, however, the queen’s wings have been clipped, then when the swarm emerges, either the queen will drop onto the grass and be lost, in which case the swarm will return and await the first virgin to emerge before they can swarm, or the bees will find the queen and cluster around her very close to the hive. You can see by this that clipping a queen’s wings might buy you up to 5 or 6 extra days before the bees can swarm again, but you need to be vigilant. Also, do keep well ahead of the bees when supering so that you do not force them to swarm in the first place.

On finding occupied queen cells, you need to make an artificial swarm (see April’s notes) unless you can visit your apiary daily and so pick up any swarms that emerge. For ease of manipulation, allowing the bees to swarm, collecting them in a container and hiving them in the evening cannot be bettered, but it isn’t always possible or desirable if neighbours might get involved or the bees are in a distant, infrequently visited out-apiary.

If you have an aggressive hive that you dread inspecting, a simple method of re-queening it without finding the queen is to cut out a good queen cell from one of your more amenable hives that is preparing to swarm, place this carefully in a queen cell protector (available from the bee equipment manufacturers), then make an indentation in a brood frame in the aggressive hive and press the queen cell in its protector into the gap you created. You will need to have gone through this stock and removed any of its own queen cells first.  Close the hive and don’t go near the broodnest for a month, after which you can check and see if you have a new queen – in a surprising number of cases a virgin queen will emerge and kill your resident queen and after mating should settle down to lay, although nothing is 100% certain with bees. Moving the hive across the apiary so that it loses most of its flying bees will ensure it doesn’t swarm and I am sure other beekeepers can think of more variations on this theme.

Fields of oilseed rape will have been in flower for 3 weeks or more, and supers should have been added well in advance of them being needed. From the middle of this month, you will hopefully have full supers to extract – so long as the combs are at least 2/3 sealed, and no drops fly out if you gently shake the frame horizontally over the hive, then it should be ok to clear the bees and remove the super/s.  Clearing bees can be achieved using porter escapes or one of the more rapid methods based on the canadian clearer boards; I have had a lot of success using a Thorne’s fume board impregnated with ‘Bee Quick’, but it does need warm weather to be totally effective; if the sun isn’t shining then the board can be warmed using a blow torch. I have also read that you can impregnate a cloth with Bee Quick and put the cloth into a smoker (unlit of course) – by operating the bellows you will vapourise the solution and clear the bees from the super. Whichever method you use, you should aim to remove and extract the supers as quickly as possible if the bees have been foraging on oilseed rape– if the supers being cleared are left unoccupied for long, and especially if the nights are cold, then the honey can become very viscous and difficult to extract. After a week, you will probably find them well on the way to becoming totally granulated.

Whilst you are inspecting your hives, do carry out a disease check of the brood, especially looking at three or four frames containing larvae after shaking off most of the bees, to check for European foul brood, for at this time of the year it is much easier to spot.

Lastly, don’t forget to keep monitoring the varroa levels in your hives, and if the counts indicate that the mite population in your hives is reaching a critical level, then you need to do something to lower the population. Making a shook swarm in a fresh broodbox and then treating the displaced bees and brood in the original broodbox with Apiguard will control the mite population.  Using mesh floors on all your colonies may keep mite numbers at a reduced level, but you must clean the collecting tray at least weekly if problems with wax moth are to be avoided or perhaps leave the collecting tray out altogether.

1         Carry out thorough inspection of colonies

2         Check for queen cells – swarm control/supersedure

3         Monitor varroa population – mite drop

4         Keep a look out for Small Hive Beetle

The pussy willows have just started flowering here (12^th March) and the bees have started foraging a little more freely. This has certainly been one of the mildest winters I can remember, and one of the driest.

April heralds the start of the beekeeping year insofar as regular inspections/manipulations are concerned. There should be days this month that are warm enough to carry out your first full inspections of the hives; if the bees are active and you feel comfortable in a T-shirt, then it should be alright.  For beginners, it is an excellent time of year to familiarise yourselves with the internal workings of the hive, as bees should behave quite placidly, being far too busy to react to what you are doing. Indeed, I would view any hive that was troublesome at this time of year as not worth keeping, and requeen it immediately – bees that are unmanageable in April will be ten times worse in July!

Make sure you have the smoker going well and gently open the first hive.

As you work through the broodnest you should be trying to answer five basic questions:

1. Is the queen present and laying? If you don’t see the queen, but have seen eggs, one per cell, then all is well. If you do spot the queen, then now is a very good time to mark her – this year’s official colour is yellow.  If you like to clip your queens as part of swarm control, you should do this as well; clipping a queen’s wings will not prevent the bees from swarming, but it will buy you valuable time; just remove about a third of each of the big wings. I have personally only ever clipped a queen’s wings once in the whole time I have kept bees, and they promptly superseded her. However, a good number of beekeepers regularly clip their queens without incurring any problems.
2. Is the colony building up well, or as fast as other colonies in the apiary? When you examine the bees you will probably find a few very advanced colonies, one or two weak ones, but by far the majority somewhere in the middle.  The more advanced colonies may well have one or more supers on already (and will be quick to make swarming preparations once conditions are right) – the medium-sized ones will probably be ready for their first (it is in this group that those bees with a less pronounced tendency to swarm will be found), but it is the weak colonies that demand careful scrutiny to ascertain what is holding them back.  Scattered brood would indicate a poor queen, and a large amount of drone brood mixed in with worker brood would point to an old queen who has run out of sperm, or an imperfectly mated queen from the previous year.  If the colony occupies at least 2/3 of the brood chamber then it is probably worth saving it, and I would either a) buy in a queen (that would have to be an imported queen) and introduce her using an introduction cage, after first removing the old queen (recent research has indicated that there is no need to remove the attendant workers for successful introduction), b) unite them to another colony, so long as both are healthy, killing the failing queen or c) transfer a frame of eggs from one of your best colonies and let them rear their own queen.
3. Are there any signs of brood disease or other abnormality? The advice here is to become familiar with the appearance of normal brood, then anything abnormal should be obvious. Shaking most of the bees from a frame or two will enable you to see the brood more clearly – just make sure the queen is not on the frame.  Most good bee books give a description of brood diseases. If you think you may have a problem, please do ask a more experienced association member or your seasonal bee inspector.
4. Has the colony sufficient room? If the colony occupies nearly all of the available space, then put a super on (above an excluder if it is the first) when you have finished the inspection; bees should not be using all the space available to them in the spring – putting a super on too early is better than putting one on too late.
5. Has the colony sufficient stores to see it through to the next inspection? If in doubt, feed a gallon of syrup.

Swarm control. Towards the end of the month, some of the colonies may start swarming preparations, especially if the queen is in her second full season ( Thorne’s stock a device that can be fitted to a hive to trap the queen if she tries to leave with a swarm – might be worth a try if you are not around for a while and want to ensure you don’t lose a swarm). If you see several occupied queen cells, then you must make some sort of division or the bees will do it for you in a few days’ time.  You can do this by taking the frame with the queen, minus queen cells, and putting her into a fresh broodbox with drawn comb (preferable) or foundation on the original site, moving the old box with queen cells to one side; leave any supers with the old box. However, after several years, I have found that it is more successful to just put the queen alone into the new box, so long as it has some drawn comb and the bees are flying well; a frame of young bees can be shaken in with advantage. Temporarily pinning a strip of queen excluder over the entrance or placing a queen excluder under the broodbox for 24 hours will stop them absconding. These bees should be fed to enable them to draw out the foundation quickly and to prevent starvation should the weather turn bad.  If brood is provided, all the colonies I have dealt with have continued to rear more cells on any young brood, and their ‘swarm fever’ continue unabated.

At the end of a further week, the old box is moved to the other side of the new broodbox, whereupon all those bees that have learnt to fly will return to their old hive position, and thence to the new hive; the supers can now be placed on the new box. You can, at this point, either remove all but one queen cell in the old box, or divide the box into nuclei so that some form of selection can be made from the resulting queens.

Another option when finding queen cells, and my preferred method as it requires far less equipment, is to remove the queen on the frame she is on, minus any queen cells, and put this into a nucleus hive with another frame of sealed brood and two or three empty combs; this lot must be fed if there was not a lot of food on the transferred combs. In this case, the original box is left to rear its own queen, removing all but one queen cell a week later (in this case the bees should go on storing honey). Before removing the surplus queen cells, a nucleus could be made up from a couple of frames with a second queen cell, as an insurance against mishaps.

If, however, you see only one or two occupied queen cells, and these are on the face of the comb rather than on the edge, it is probable that the bees are arranging to supersede their queen. In this instance, I would leave them to get on with the job, but just keep an eye on them in case they change their minds and go the swarming route instead.

Varroa. Keep monitoring the varroa situation, and by far the most accurate way of doing this is by uncapping a patch or two of drone brood with an uncapping fork and looking for mites on the pupae. Counting natural mite fall over a week or two can lull you into a false sense of security and lead you to believe that your bees are fine (see BBKA newsletter for October 2007 – article on use of open mesh floors).  Also, do keep a wary eye out for Small Hive Beetle.