In the Apiary - July & August |
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Week Ending August 25th 2001 Back from our holidays and time for the final honey extraction. I will always remember Clive de Bruyn (Essex's last CBI) saying that even if you think all the nectar flows are over, put a super on each hive before you go on holiday just in case there is another little flow which you may miss. This year it paid off and every hive had at least a half a super of honey; some almost a full super. I extracted it yesterday and it was a lovely golden colour and very runny. Anyone got any suggestions as to what it is? This is definitely the end of the harvest for 2001; so now begins the big clean up and sort out. All the wet supers will be placed on the hives above a board with a small hole. The bees will go up and lick them clean and bone dry so they can be stored for the winter. The only exception is the odd frame which contains crystallised rape honey which the bees can't ingest. What I do with this is to spray the combs with clean water each day and this gives sufficient moisture to enable the bees to take it down into the brood box as winter stores. |
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Week Ending July 28th All my new queens are now mated thanks to the change to brilliant weather. The three in the nucleus hives have all been clipped and marked white. The bulk of the nectar flow is now over but all the hives have one or two supers left on them. The bees are finding something to forage but I'm not sure what it is. The last two years we have had fields of borage right on our doorstep and this gave a really good end-of-season boost to the harvest. Not so this year unfortunately. What they have got is far from ripe and just pours from the frames when they are tipped up. It would be nice to get it extracted early in August then I can think of culling queens and uniting the young nuclei queens with their new families. |
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Week Ending July 7th I had a small setback in that I must have missed a queen cell in hive 8. On inspection I found no eggs and only larvae and sealed brood. All the empty cells had been polished which indicated that the workers were getting them ready for laying. I shook them through and found one sealed queen cell and what could have been a hatched cell torn down. I took out the sealed cell and with some workers from the supers, made up a 'holding' nucleus. The frame I had removed was replaced with a test-frame of eggs from another hive. If they don't draw out an emergency queen cell then I shall know that there is a virgin queen in there. If they do start to draw emergencies then I can return the good queen cell. Fortunately the old queen had had her wings clipped so I had lost none of my bees or the harvest. The next inspection will be interesting. The small colony I removed from the garden in Saffron Walden has turned out to be a little less friendly that I first assumed. The queen will be culled and the colony united with either hive 9 or 10. The result can then be combined with hive 6 which has also shown signs of deterioration. I have now done a further honey extraction and should get another one done next week.
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