Disc Hive goes to the Farm

The Disc Hive bees have been having big adventures this year.

Headed by Queen Honey, they surged into growth this spring, and I only just split them in time to stop a mid-April swarm. After that, I split the top colony again, by transferring Queen Honey and half the brood into a nucleus box, leaving the remainder to raise a new queen. But despite my interventions, they swarmed. I think I left too many queen cells in the lower colony, so they produced more than one new queen, and had enough flying bees for one of those queens to leave with a swarm.

Sadly, despite marching theatrically into a new hive as you can see in the Gallery video, that swarm has ended up being queenless. Perhaps the swarm queen and her swarm parted ways. Perhaps she didn't mate successfully. Perhaps she was injured during my inexpert swarm collecting. Whatever, the swarm are unhappily living out the rest of their days as laying workers.

Meanwhile, back in the Disc Hive, Queen Irene has ascended to the throne. I discovered her presence by surprise, when I was preparing to re-introduce Queen Honey to that hive after the Bee Inspector had reported it to be queenless. Queen Irene is the daughter of Queen Honey, and probably a younger sister or half-sister of the queen who left with the swarm. Although perhaps there's an outside chance she actually is the queen who left with the swarm, who somehow sneaked back home again!

Anyway, I do hope Queen Irene is a brave but gentle queen, because at this tender young age she has already gone on a big adventure. Yesterday, in the early morning, we took the Disc Hive to a new home in the Cambridgeshire countryside. A local farmer has welcomed the bees on to his land, where hopefully they will make themselves useful pollinating field beans. I'm not sure yet whether I worry more about them now they are there (are they ok? has the hive been knocked over by wildebeest? when can I visit?) or when they were here (are they causing a nuisance? is there a bee caught in my hair again?). But, at any rate, it's a big move - we now have apiary number two!

Uniting

Beekeeping here over the past few weeks has been complicated and labour-intensive. Taking hives apart, dividing colonies, lifting heavy boxes, climbing on chairs, opening and closing different sequences of doors like on a magician's box, poring over notebooks with a furrowed brow, re-assembling hives and then wondering whether things are the right way round. Beekeeper and bees alike are a little frayed.

But swarm numbers are significantly down on last year, despite having more beehives this spring than last, so we can say all this effort has been at least moderately successful on that front.

At present the apiary is full of "high rise" beehives that have an upstairs and a downstairs colony under one roof - the result of performing the vertical splits.

But as I don't want to double my number of colonies, and want each hive to have one queen and one queen only, I now have to unite the upstairs and downstairs bees back together again.

I use the newspaper method. A single sheet of newspaper is laid between the uppermost box of the downstairs colony and the lowermost box of the upstairs colony. The newspaper separates the two groups of bees so that they do not immediately meet, preventing a mass fight breaking out. Over time the bees chew through the newspaper and gradually meet each other. Previously the upstairs and downstairs colonies were separated by the Snelgrove board and its central mesh (now removed for the uniting), so these bees were not complete strangers to each other anyway, but the newspaper method apparently works even when they are.

On Thursday I laid a sheet of newspaper over the queen excluder on the Copper Hive brood box (which I hope still contains Queen Dawn, although I haven't seen her recently) and on top of that I put the upper brood box containing the bees and brood that I had previously split from Queen Dawn's colony. This upper colony had not managed to produce a new laying queen. I don't know why that is (no wicked witches were involved!), and it's rather a shame that they didn't because I'd hoped to raise a new queen from this hive, but having no second queen made it straightforward to re-unite them with the lower colony. Today, 3 days after adding the newspaper, I picked up the upper brood box and found the bees had already eaten the whole sheet. Only the periphery, protruding from the hive, remained uneaten:

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So the bees of the Copper Hive are now one colony again. I rebuilt the hive, combining the frames of brood from the two brood boxes into one. What's to stop them swarming now? Nothing, if Queen Dawn is alive and well in the brood box. I will need to re-divide them, re-setting them to the position of a month ago with queen and flying bees in the bottom box and brood and house bees in the top box. And so this cycle will continue, rather exhaustingly, until the end of the swarm season.

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Cedar Hive colonies re-uniting across the Cambridge News & Crier