The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Bees & Beekeeping => Topic started by: Sudanpan on June 12, 2012, 10:40:13 pm
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Yay
We've been waiting and waiting to get started with beekeeping but the weather has been throwing curve balls so we have only just got our starter colony ;D ;D
The nucleus comes from an apiary about 8 miles away - we collected them this evening and they have been put in place at the other end of the filed. They are all shut in right now and I've been told to open up the door tomorrow morning.
I've been doing the part 1 beekeeping course run here at the Duchy of Cornwall so hopefully I have learnt enough not to kill them - our local bekeeper assoc are really helpful as well.
:fc: :fc:
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That is exciting :thumbsup:
We loved the thought of keeping our own bees as every year we have bees nesting in hole around the allotment and fond them very fascinating.
After looking into it we were quite taken back about how much was involved.
Chickened out pretty quickly :-\
Good luck with your new arrivals :thumbsup: it will be interesting to know how you get on. :)
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Congratulations!
I love my bees and can waste hours just watching them come and go (been quite a lot of going recently what with a couple of swarms!).
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That is exciting :thumbsup:
We loved the thought of keeping our own bees as every year we have bees nesting in hole around the allotment and fond them very fascinating.
After looking into it we were quite taken back about how much was involved.
Chickened out pretty quickly :-\
Good luck with your new arrivals :thumbsup: it will be interesting to know how you get on. :)
Keeping bees is easy, until something goes wrong then it's rocket science.
That's what keeps it interesting.
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Hi
Good luck with your new bees. As long as you've got a good support network around you and a reliable mentor you'll be fine.
Just look forward to the honey.
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:thumbsup:
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So - our bee nucleus arrived on Tuesday evening and since then it has been PEEING down and blowing a hooley :(
I asked the beekeeper from whom I got the nucleus whether I should provide any supplementary feed and she said no as they had some stores on the frames. When she had the nuc she had them in a nuc box. She transferred them into my brood box (3 frames worth) and she put dividers on either side of the 'working' frames, with the rest of the brood box filled with foundation only frames.
It looks like the weather is going to be such that I won't get a chance to check on them until at least Sunday :(
Is there anything else I can do to help them out?
Thanks
Tish
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That's a shame! This darned weather >:(
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OH checked our 4 colonies yesterday and found no eggs in any of them. She reckons the workers are inhibiting the queen because of the lousy weather
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Feeling very depressed right now :'( :'(
I haven't opened the hive but looking through the door I can see quite few dead bees lying on the mesh floor and others hanging off and through the queen excluder (we put this below the brood box just as a deterrent to the colony taking a dislike to their new surroundings) - very lethargic and very quiet :'( :'( No activity to speak off around the hive (but then again the wind is very bad right now)
I had some sugar syrup and gave a few drops to the couple of bees that were on the outside of the hive- they lapped it up. Should I put a feeder on for the rest?? This would inevitably mean opening the hive in this crappy weather but I really don't know if its a lack of food that is the reason for the lethargy or just that the colony was not big enough to:
a) survive the move
b) survive the weather
:'( :'( :'(
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If there is just 3 frames of brood and no stores then I would feed them in this weather. My 2 nucs were made up with 3 frames of brood and 2 of stores and I thought that was the standard set up for a nut although I am pretty new at this.
How far away is the person who gave you the nuc? If it is within 3 miles then all the flying bees (even in this weather) will have headed home and you will just have the nurse bees etc and brood and they will rapidly eat any stores on the brood frames.
I would definitely feed them. If you have a contact feeder you could just put that over the hole in the crown board for the time being so that you don't have to fully open up the hive but then at least you would be fairly confident that they aren't starving.
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Sorry, just noticed you said 8 miles. Would still feed them.
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I agree with feeding the bees, they need to draw out the new comb in your hive, I am assuming you have new frames with just foundation.
By the way, do you really mean dividers? Surely they are follower boards, i.e. frame sized boards, not hive size dividers, as you still want to allow the bees to draw out the other frames. Personally, in warm weather, I just put the frames from the Nuc in the centre of the hive brood box and then the new frames of foundation either side. But. then I do put a rapid feeder on top, (even if there is a field of OSR next door) until the new frames are drawn.
Enjoy you bees, I hope they bring you hours of fun!
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Thanks for the info :)
I've put some syrup in a feeder on the top of the crown board.
Yes the dividers are just frame dividers - the beekeeper we got the nucleus from asked us to bring them along with our brood box etc for when she transferred the frames from her nuc box for journey to us.
When I properly inspect (fingers crossed this will be Sunday depending on the weather) I was going to see if everything was ok and then take the dividers out. I'll make sure the feeder remains topped up while they draw out the foundation frames.
I soooo hope they make it through this rough period - the vision of all the bees littering the mesh floor was really heartbreaking for a newbie like me :fc: :fc:
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Keep feeding them - even if the weather does improve: they've a lot of work to do.
Don't worry too much about the dead bees, you're nuc will have workers of all ages and summer workers don't live very long. Could you see if the dead bees were workers or drones? If they're drones it may well be that the colony's booting them out if supplies are a bit low and the weather's crap.
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Well - with much trepidation I opened up the hive this morning because:
The wind calmed down
and the sun came out!
So - I found about 2 handfuls of dead bees - half on the varroa mesh floor and half on/in the queen excluder (under the brood box) When I say 'in' I mean they seemed to be stuck in the excluder which I found very puzzling ??? ??? I know drones are too big to get through but these were def workers so I have no idea what was going on - the excluder was one supplied (new) from Fragile Planet with our 'beginner hive' package - can you get queen excluders that are too small for workers??
Anyway - I did find some live bees :) :) :) Ok, so the colony is very very small - as in there were approximately large palm sized areas of clustering bees on 4 sides of 3 frames. I didn't want to muck about them about too much given all the upheaval and weather crap so didn't have a close inspection as to what was going on on each of these frames - I was just overjoyed to find some live bees. :thumbsup:
What I did was remove the dividers and put them on the outside - but I now wonder if I should have left them where they were and create an equivalent nucleus space so that the small number of bees that there are don't have to keep a whole brood box volume warm..... ??? I also checked that the feeder had syrup (it does) and put a sheet under the mesh floor to try and stop any excessive draught going through the brood box given that there are only a few bees.
There were some flying bees out and about, but not many so I think it is going to be a case of fingers crossed :fc: :fc: to see if this colony can build up enough to take it through the winter to hit the ground running next year.
I'll leave it a week now and do a more thorough inspection next week.
Thanks for the supportive comments - it really does help ;D ;D
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can you get queen excluders that are too small for workers??
Thornes had a problem last year with orange plastic queen excluders that were too small and recalled them as I remember so it much happen.
Good luck, I hope they make it.
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Best of luck with the new bees. We were in the same position last year and managed to get ours through the winter OK. This year has been a right old game the bees got ahead of us in the good weather in March/April with swarms and I seem to have spent the early summer making hives (started with 2 nucs now got 5 full hives ) Just waiting to take off the honey crop I guess around 50KGs. Very interesting hobby and you do meet very helpful people. Many thanks to the local club for help with the swarms
Good luck John
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It's going to be a rubbish year for honey here. The bees spent spring just surviving and we've had very little so far
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Ditto with me.
One of my colonies almost filled a super but have now had to eat it all! Just glad I haven't had to feed them (yet!).