Top left: The Veronicastrum virginicum in our garden seems to be very popular right now.

Top right: Yet another queen cell on the go in our B-hive.

Middle left: At long last, after a 5 week wait, the A-hive has produced an egg-laying queen which we immediately marked.

Middle right: Thomas standing behind the brood boxes of A-hive (from which we split the hive now in the middle 5 weeks ago. The middle C-hive contains our original, hardworking, queen). The A-hive’s honey supers are to the right.

Bottom left: Half of the drone frame from the C-hive cut out to remove mites – these are the tiny brown spots visible in the middle of the photo lying on the drone larvae. We remove these combs once every 10 days or so, if they contain enough capped drone brood. This is a varroa mite control method which seems to work well. For now.

Bottom right: All hives assembled again after the weekly inspection.

20 July 2015

I missed last week’s inspection because I was in Holland, so I was doubly keen to see what our hives were up to yesterday.

The weather continues to be very instable. A couple of hours of nice sunshine, followed by plenty of rain and wind and the kind of temperatures for which no respectable bee gets up. A lot of beekeepers in the Stockholm area are experiencing problems with their hives. Very little honey and plenty of queenless hives or colonies with unmated princesses.

B-hive – 2 broodboxes only

We weren’t really surprised when the B-hive, which has been queenless since we bought it in early April, still appeared to be without a queen. They had a queen cell on the go, which we hope might do the trick. If not, we will simply combine the surviving frames in this hive with the other colonies. This hive has had the occasional frame of uncapped brood from the C-hive in the hope they will raise a queen and on one occasion they did. But the weather was too cold for her to mate. At some point we introduced a mated queen into the hive but they rejected her – possibly because they had an unmated queen which we didn’t spot. You live and learn. The bees in this hive did seem to be very docile, so perhaps there was an unmated princess lurking in there somewhere.

C-hive – 2 broodboxes and 1 honey super

The C-hive was split from the A-hive in June to prevent swarming. Our hardworking queen lives in this hive. She is incredibly productive: we keep taking frames of brood from this hive to keep the other queenless hives ticking over. During the inspection, we spotted her on the drone frame so we had to brush her down into the hive – we wanted to remove that part of the drone frame which contained capped brood. The varroa mites love the drone larvae as it mirrors their own life cycle so removing the combs with drone brood is an effective pest control method. (The local magpies feast on the larvae.) We tried to find her afterwards .. but she’s very good at hiding, in spite of being marked. Better luck next time. She is laying plenty of new brood and there was honey in the super as well.

A-hive – 2 broodboxes and 1 full height plus 2 half height honey supers

We first examined the honey supers … in spite of the rubbish weather, plenty of honey on the go. Our bees do have the luxury of a very short commute to all the perennials in our garden and plenty of good nectar and pollen in surrounding gardens as well.

We soon discovered capped brood in the top brood box. Amazing! Not only had this colony raised a queen at long last (they were split from the C-hive in the beginning of June), she had been out and about to mate and was laying eggs – we found three frames of capped brood! And then we spotted her. Thomas did his magic: he captured her in the special box we bought to mark queens and gave her a small blob of nail varnish. After we released her, we saw the worker bees trying to clean her and then she disappeared into the hive. We didn’t see her again but look forward to spotting her next week. It will be interesting to see if her brood is as easy to work with as our bees have been so far. She’s related to the other queen, but we don’t know what drones she’s been playing with.

Needless to say, we are incredibly relieved to have two hives out of three with an egg-laying queen. I look forward to spotting both of them next week.