I had a look at the bees straight after lunch. It was warm enough to open the hives without damaging the larvae by chilling them, although a little windy. Deciding when to open a beehive is quite complex. You need to check what's going inside the hive while there's a possibility of swarming not less frequently than every ten days, since give them longer than that and they can go from showing no signs of leaving to having left without you having an inkling. You need reasonably warm weather to open them, and if you're planning to be out all day it may be too cold, too dark or you may be too tired by the time you get home, so the routine of inspections has to be fitted in around the actual weather, the forecast for the next few days, and your work and social commitments. Plus you need to think what you'll be doing in a week to ten days' time, since it may pay to push out the current inspection by a day or two if you can, to make sure the next one doesn't fall due at a point where you won't be free to get to the bees.
My next inspection was due by 10th June, which is Monday, and since I'll be at work then, and am supposed to be going out with a friend on Tuesday, I needed to look at the bees at some point over the weekend. Today was forecast to be warmer than tomorrow, so I went today.
One colony has been busy. Looking at my spreadsheet with notes of previous inspections, I see that I gave them their first super (an extra box above the one containing brood where they can store nectar and honey) on 22nd May, and their second on 31st May. Today they were using both, and I decided to give them a third. If bees have plenty of room in their hive it can help deter them from swarming, while an over-crowded hive acts as a trigger for them to prepare a replacement queen, and half the workforce to leave with the existing one in search of new accommodation. These bees arrived two years ago as a small, late swarm. I didn't expect them to make it through the winter, but they did, and were just starting to look useful last year when once again they swarmed late in the season. Again I did not expect the depleted rump of the colony to over-winter successfully, but they surprised me for a second time. They are very dark little bees, buzzy but not aggressive, and with an apparently powerful will both to survive and to swarm, so I'm not counting my honey crop just yet. I didn't think they were preparing to swarm today, then on the very last brood frame found the beginnings of just one early queen cell. It was stocked with royal jelly, showing that they had started to raise a queen.
A second colony has made some progress given the warmer weather, since my notes tell me that at the end of May they didn't have much in the way of stored honey in their brood chamber, and weren't really using their super, while today the super was perhaps half full, and the brood box better provisioned. If the weather hadn't taken a turn for the better in the past week I'd have needed to feed them. This colony has a proportion of golden yellow bees, and is pretty, and gentle to handle, but doesn't seem as hard working as its small, dark, buzzy neighbour. They are playing at swarming, having built numerous little wax cells like acorn cups, none of which contained an egg. I could see eggs in the main brood comb, so I knew the queen was present and laying.
Two other colonies are each at half strength, the results of a failed attempt at swarm control. They were the first hive to show signs of swarming, and I tried to do an artificial swarm, when you move the queen to a new box filled with empty frames put in the same place as the old hive, so that she is joined by all the flying bees. They are tricked into thinking they have swarmed, since they now have no brood, and you put the brood with the house bees and queen cells in another box somewhere else, where they will form a second colony with the new queen, when she hatches, and assuming she mates and manages to return to the hive successfully. Unfortunately I couldn't find the queen, so my attempt failed. I split the brood among two boxes anyway, since the sudden loss in numbers sometimes changes their mind about swarming, but I'm fairly sure the ones with the old queen swarmed, so I now have two under-strength colonies, and am waiting to see if they will emerge with successfully mated queens. Neither will produce a honey crop this year.
I need to learn to see my queens more reliably, and I need to buy a queen marker pen, find them and mark them to help me see them when I need them. It would help if the springs were warmer, to give me more time to find queens early in the season. This year I only managed to open them once before May, because through most of April it simply wasn't warm enough to do an inspection.
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