NewGenBees Diary for August 2008

August 2008, the main season coming to an end

Now I had somewhere to move my hives to I decided to keep only one colony in the garden. But as the new Queen from the first split was growing her colony very rapidly I decided to create more nucs with eggs and young brood so that I could see how the bees requeened themselves. All through this process I was very much aware of how limited my knowledge was but I found that I was regularly reading and re-reading my Practical Beekeeping by Clive De Bruyn. and was gradually getting my head round the basics of splitting colonies. Some of my nucs were progressing ok but others seemed to stall around the time their new queen should have started laying. In the end I came to the conclusion that the young queens must have never made it back from thair mating flights. So one queenless nuc was merged back with a queenrite one. The original queen, which started so well, and was now in a nuc was only laying very slowly was merged with the other queenless nuc and suddenly I had no bees in my garden. After three months of very intensive beekeeping and trying to grasp the basics of colony development suddenly the garden was empty. The nuc from my beekeeping course was doing well and had grown big enough to be in a full size National brood box. Just to be safe I put an extra brood box on before going on holiday again, this would give them plenty of room for expansion.

Diary pages can be accessed from here by clicking the links below: 2008 Archive Winter 2008 Spring 2009 March 2009 April 2009