Archive for category: Apiary

Weather: temperatures have been between 20°C – 22°C. Bees very busy, but the forecast is for much more changeable weather with quite a few showers. Temperatures set to go down into the late teens.

Forage: Buddleia, Privet just starting, Ragwort, RoseBay Willowherb, bramble looks to be finishing.

Most of the colonies seem to be bringing in plenty of stores . New Buckfast queens arrived on 2nd July and so some of the colonies were manipulated to potentially accommodate being re-queened. I couldn’t find a queen in the Indigo colony and so decided to leave alone. This meant that I changed plan and removed the queen from Flax and banked her before introducing one of the new Buckfast queens. If indigo doesn’t have a queen I’ll put the old queen (now banked) back.

Bees at home are very aggressive at the moment and starting to come at me even when not close to the hives. Hopefully this behaviour settles down otherwise I’ll remove colonies to the river Mole apiary.

Weather: same as last week with temperatures between 15ºC – 18ºC

Forage: Bramble just b starting, elderflower, pyracantha – appear to be in June gap

Found lots of dead bees in front of 3 of the hives when I cleared the weeds. Not sure what’s happened,m could be poisoning as I checked for signs of disease didn’t see anything untoward. Some of the colonies appear to be shrinking in size – again not sure why.

Denim look to have DLW or DLQ – so united with Cyan on 5th June

6th June – captured swarm in bait hive – probably not prime judging by number of bees