I'll start with the easy bit - the Brown Nucleus. This is doing well - the bees were in a nice mood, there is plenty of brood and also stores. The queen is a good size and seems to be performing nicely. This is my "low maintenance" colony, a happy family of bees just getting on with things. Local wildlife buff Stew was on hand with his camera and managed to get a picture of the new queen - here she is:
On to hive #1. This is Miriam's old hive, and the bees are currently in the process of raising a new queen. Last week, I found two queen cells, decided everything was proceeding as planned, and left them to it. My quick calculations told me that by this weekend the queen cells would be around 14-15 days old, and so the plan for Saturday would be to remove all but the biggest queen cell, leaving the bees with one new queen ready to emerge on day 16, and no reason to swarm.
Well, my maths was a bit off. After checking through the new frames (no wax drawn yet), I got to the first frame with queen cells. The bees had got there first - I could see a large hole in the top end of the first cell, and the bees were busy dismantling it. I've seen this behaviour before - it's actually pretty neat. When a hive has no queen, but capped queen cells, and the bees know that they don't want to swarm, they will actually remove all but one queen cell themselves. The ones to discard are opened up at the top of the cell (the tail end, from the perspective of the queen larva), the larva is stung to death and then dragged out through the hole. Over the next few days, the bees will dismantle the rest of the cell.
Yes, you read that right - the bees pick the queen they want to keep, and murder the other princesses in their sleep. They can be brutally decisive, can bees. The interesting thing is - how do they decide which queen cell to keep? I must admit I'm a little hazy on how this works, but I think it's to do with "piping" (which I covered a couple of weeks ago). The first queen to "wake up" will start piping while still in her cell - a sound which beekeepers refer to as "quacking" (the sound is modified due to coming from inside the cell). As with piping, quacking is part of the process of establishing that the hive has a new queen. So, I think what happens is the worker bees detect the "quacking" vibrations and identify which queen cell they are coming from. They take this as a cue to check each cell in turn - and any cell that isn't quacking gets torn down. It's a nice, simple and efficient process, and also saves me a job!
So, carrying on through the frames, I found an average of 2 queen cells per frame, each empty with a large hole in the top. And then I found the next thing I was looking for - another open queen cell, but this time open at the bottom. This was the one - the queen had already emerged. It may well be that she had murdered her sisters herself - it is believed that the first queen to emerge will nibble a hole in any rival queen cells and sting her younger sisters through the hole.
So, good news - the hive has a queen! Now, where to find her? The problem with trying to locate her was that there are just so many bees in that hive. I had a good look, and I think I spotted her. One bee had her wings folded over her back, in a way that is distinctive of queens and noticeably different from worker bees. But she was among a large cluster of bees and it wasn't easy to get a clear look. If it was her, then I may have a problem - she looked small, a runt. This happens with queen bees sometimes - if the bees have had to construct the queen cells in a hurry, as this colony did (after I removed Miriam without warning) the queen larvae can be under-nourished. This leads to them having smaller abdomens, which can lead to reduced fertility and make it harder for them to reach the bottom of the cells to lay. However, I have previously seen small queens who have got a lot bigger after mating - the process of mating stimulates their ovaries to swell, lengthening the abdomen to full size. So, it's possible I am worrying unnecessarily. As it happens, it is perfect mating weather this week, so by next weekend she may well be a full-sized, healthy queen.
There was one more important job on Saturday, and that was to check on the health of the Blue Nuc. Regular readers will know this is Miriam's "retirement home", and that last week I spotted some dead brood. This week's job was to check if things had improved, and take action if not.
Well, the first thing to say was that there were more bees this week. This, at least, was a good sign - it means that the capped brood are successfully pupating and emerging. And I haven't noticed any problems with capped brood at all (often with foulbrood the capped larvae will be infected and the cappings become discoloured or distorted). The second thing was quite disgusting - slugs! During the recent heavy rain, seven large slugs had taken up residence in the hive and started to lay eggs. Yuk. I scooped them out with my hive tool and carried on checking the frames.
The third thing I noticed, was there are a number of bees with bald abdomens. All the hairs from the abdomens are missing, and the abdomen is almost completely black, and shiny. This is a typical symptom of Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus (CBPV) which is spread by varroa. CBPV may well explain the state of the dead brood, too - not discoloured, nor mummified, but just lying dead in the cells. I'm fairly certain that I've allowed the number of varroa in the colony to get too high, and that they are spreading CBPV around the bees and brood. Something needed to be done immediately.
The answer was to change the combs. This is something I do once a year in the hives, as it prevents viruses and fungal spores from building up in the wax. However, I'm not so good at doing it with the nucleus colonies. There is a reason for this - changing the combs puts a lot of stress on the bees, and they need to have sufficient numbers to be able to re-build new comb quickly, otherwise there will be no space for the queen to lay and nowhere to store nectar. I couldn't have done it last week - there weren't enough bees. But this week, with the new reinforcements having arrived, I decided there were just about enough. So, I went for it.
The process is reasonably straightforward. Firstly, isolate the frame with the queen and move it out temporarily. Then, shake all the bees off each frame in turn, remove the frame and insert a new empty frame with wax foundation. There are 5 frames in a nucleus, so I swapped four frames for fresh, leaving just the frame with the queen. I then had a choice - either move her into the nuc and insert a 5th frame of fresh comb, or put her back with the last frame of old comb. One of the things you have to be careful of, when doing a comb change, is the bees can find it so disruptive that they simply abscond from the hive. I was reading last week about a beekeeper who, when changing combs in a nucleus, always leaves one old frame of brood. The reason is that the pheremones from the brood will encourage the bees to stay and look after the larvae. This sounded like good advice to me, so I put the old frame, with the queen, back in the middle of the nucleus. I can swap it out once the queen has started laying on at least one of the new frames.
Now that the bees had lost most of their old comb, they will need to make some more - and this is quite energy intensive. Apparently it can take the equivalent of 10 ounces of honey to make one ounce of wax. I decided to give them a helping hand and feed them some sugar syrup, which they will be able to convert into wax:
So, what to do with the old frames? Well, there is a contamination risk if, as I suspect, there is CBPV in the brood. So I need to destroy them in a way that is completely sterile. The answer - burn them! Stew has a mini-burner that is perfect for the purpose, so I put some paper, kindling and one frame in, lit a match and stood well back:
In case you were in any doubt - beeswax is very, very flammable! The other three frames went up a treat, too.
So, that was Saturday. Stay tuned for Sunday's action, including a blast from the past, and one very unwelcome guest...
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