New Bees and Newbies

It’s summer already, although I don’t know why this surprises me as every year I exclaim at how quickly time passes. The winter months seem interminable but as soon as spring is here it’s practically summer! I recently read a piece about how, in countries in south and south-east Asia, the New Year is celebrated in mid-April instead of January. This makes sense to me as January is a difficult month with limited hours of daylight and miserable weather; far better to celebrate new beginnings when everything is springing to life, the sun is shining and we can hope that things will turn out well.

Things do all seem to happen at once; the period of waiting until we can open the hives and carry out inspections is over, and we are now very pleased that we made all our preparations while we had the time. Our swarm management procedures worked a treat and none of our colonies have swarmed so far, regardless of what type of hive they live in.  This year, we used modified versions of a well-known process called the Demarée method. This entails separating the queen and a few frames containing some brood (young bees in all stages) and nurse bees to look after them, from the majority of the other foraging bees. They are placed into different brood boxes in the same ‘tower’ with a smaller ‘super’ box and a queen excluder in between them so that the whole colony can still sense the queen’s positive pheromones but she can’t move between the boxes. All the foraging bees who would perhaps have sensed the colony was running out of space and made the decision to swarm are ‘tricked’ into thinking they are already in a new space as they have enough room and, if there are eggs in the box with them, they may (not always) decide to raise a new queen themselves which means that after three weeks, you may have two colonies in your tower.

We have been able to raise new colonies with strong queens like this as well as by splitting some of our hives that already showed signs that they wanted to swarm and had made queen cells so that they could leave a new, unhatched virgin queen in the original hive before flying off to pastures new. And we’ve even re-homed a few swarms from trees this Spring too, our favourite so far being a small but very calm swarm we were called to which was at waist height so no ladders needed!

While colonies are in the process of becoming established, it’s a good time to mark the queens as they are (a bit) easier to find when there are only 40,000 bees in the hive instead of 80,000 at the height of the season. We mark our queens for two reasons, (a) to be able to find them during an inspection and (b) to age them, as each colour denotes the year that the queen was hatched. This year the colour is blue so, once we are sure the new queen in a colony is mated and successfully laying eggs, we can mark her. We have also been marking the queens that we acquire in swarms, and as bees swarm with their existing queen, we hedge our bets and mark her with last year’s colour (green for 2024). Recently we captured a swarm and set about marking the queen. She was a large Buckfast bee, easy to spot and catch in the queen-marking cage….along with several other worker bees! While we daubed her with a spot of green bee-friendly paint we had to chuckle at the other bees who were trying to escape through the gaps in the cage, nosey so-and-sos…

Along with the pleasure derived from seeing new queens and renewing our acquaintance with last year’s colonies, is that of welcoming new students on our courses. From people who come along on our taster sessions to see what it’s like inside a hive, to those who want to learn how to keep bees and gain the confidence to do so, it’s wonderful for us to share our passion and experience. Please do get in touch if you’d like to venture into this fascinating world!