Ready, Steady...

March 26, 2025 / The Beekeeper

The flowering current is flowering, springtime is a-springing, and the bees are bringing home basketloads of pollen. Which means it’s time to set up the bait hive. I have a new location for it this year:

It’s on top of a water butt that stands against the south(ish)-facing back wall of our house. This sunny, elevated position should make it attractive to swarms.

The hive volume is smaller than it looks - only the brood box is accessible from the entrance. There’s a solid crownboard on the brood box, then supers above, then the roof. This is my one Smith hive, and its boxes are slightly narrower than those of all my other hives (Nationals), so I generally keep it all stacked together.

I put some frames in the brood box ready for the swarm to build comb. They are empty frames rather than old combs of wax. The latter would perhaps be better because swarms are drawn to the scent of old comb, and empty frames invite the bees to build comb in freeform shapes…but empty frames are still better than no frames at all. I know from previous experience that it’s really quite inconvenient when bees hang their combs directly from the crownboard.

I’ve put this bait hive out simply to see if bees will show interest in it. It will be exciting if a swarm does move in, but the idea is more about monitoring when/whether bees are scouting for homes. If it attracts scout bees, it will be a sign that bees in the area are thinking of swarming…maybe my bees, who will therefore need to be kept an extra close eye on. Because although it would be wonderfully convenient if they would swarm into an empty hive that I set up for them, they’d probably instead fly off into the blue and set up home somewhere out of my knowledge or reach, so I’ll be aiming to prevent them swarming at all.

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categories / Spring
tags / bait hive

Death in Midwinter

January 29, 2025 / The Beekeeper

We have lost a colony. Our dear Queen Elizabeth and her bees. I noticed that they were not flying, unlike bees from the other hives, who were coming and going in the mild winter sunshine.

Their hive entrance had become restricted in size, as the cork jacket had slipped down, leaving only a small gap for bees to enter and leave. It’s possible that they were trapped inside, but I don’t think so - and actually they might have survived if they had been fully trapped. What I think happened is that bees were able to leave, and did fly out, but on returning they went into the wider and more visible door of the immediately adjacent hive of Queen Hope, rather than back into their own doorway, which was also overshadowed by a flowering branch of shrub honeysuckle. As the number of bees within Queen Elizabeth’s hive then became depleted over time, the colony shrank beyond the minimum viable size to retain warmth. They may then have perished on one of the very cold nights we had in mid-January. But this is only conjecture.

Most bees had fallen to the floor, forming a layer. How many would you estimate are there? 1000?

Queen Elizabeth’s body was immediately visible on the top. She must have been one of the last to fall.

A small number of bees remained on the frames, some with their bodies head-down in the cells.

There were still abundant stores of honey and pollen - not immediately where the bees were on the frames, but close by. There was also a small patch of sealed brood.

I transferred a couple of frames of the honeycomb into an eke on the top of Queen Flora’s hive, as that colony were highly active and I thought they might need the extra stores.

The four remaining colonies (Queen Flora, Queen Hope, Queen Kew and Queen Lily) are all alive and, as far as I can tell, well. The apiary has shrub honeysuckle and snowdrop in flower, and the bees are flying on mild days.

I wish I had noticed sooner that Queen Elizabeth’s hive doorway was compromised, and realised the significance of it. I am not sure when it happened. They were flying on Christmas Eve - but the doorway was reduced even then, as is visible from the picture in the Christmas Eve post.

More learning, the hard way.