NewGenBees Diary Page for April 2009

The blossom is coming out fast and the nectar flow looks early this April For many months the bees sole priority has been surviving but now they go into overdrive the frames in the centre of my National hives are full of capped brood and thees are frantically cleaning out the cells used last year as well as the ones used to store the honey they needed for the winter. The emphasis now turns to using the ever increasing number of workers to gather more and more nectar and pollen so that if the opportunity arises the colony can split itself by issuing a swarm. It’s this instinct that I hope to capitalise on shortly to create new queens so that I can use them to start new colonies for all the Friends of NewGenBees who have taken up the invitation to help honey bees and asked for one or two hives to be placed in their gardens. At present I have no colonies in Warré hives but hope to rectify that soon. My four National hives have two brood boxes and a super on so there is plenty of room for the bees as they expand and hopefully they’ll not be too quick to make their own queens. On the 20th of April I started the process of Queen rearing, the first stage is to split the National hives so that the bottom brood box with the queen in has plenty of space for the Queen to lay in. Most of the other eggs, larvae and brood are placed in the brood box above and separated by a Queen excluder. After 8 days the eggs above cannot be made into Queens by the bees.

Bees on new wax exposed after opening hive

April is the time for rapid expansion, all those eggs that were laid in early March are now foraging bees. The amount of nectar and pollen arriving in the hive is increasing day by day. The bees must visit about 2 million flowers to make a pound of honey. That involves them flying about 55,000 miles and they’ve been making honey from flowering plants for between 10 and 20 million years. The average worker bee makes 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.