Starting at 6 pm we hope to tidy up two colonies after uniting, feed several colonies, apply apiguard to some hives and put fresh apiguard in the colonies in middle of treatment.
All members welcome.
Apiary Session 1st September
September 1, 2010 by seanbeesApiary this evening 25th June
August 25, 2010 by seanbeesLooking at the weather forecast the rain is set to continue throughout the rest of the evening making hive activities impossible.
We will quickly feed a couple of hives and that will be it.
Let’s hope the weather improves for next week.
Extraction Day
August 13, 2010 by seanbeesOn Wednesday we harvested the Association Apiary honey, we took off a total of 6 supers from 5 hives and produced 130 lb of honey.
Starting at 16:00 with the removal of the supers we were able to course filter all the honey in to tubs for storage and complete the process through to putting honey into jars for 13 lb. The first public sale of our honey will be this weekend at the Aston Clinton Horticulture show.
13 new beekeepers helped with the process which nearly completes the practical sessions at the apiary. Today we are returning the wet supers to the hives for the bees to complete the extraction process.
Next week on the19th we will be applying Apiguard to each hive in the Apiary as we start to prepare for the winter, this will be the final formal practical session of the season. Thereafter we will post here when we will be down at the Apiary if anyone would like to come along and help out.
Swarm Collection
July 5, 2010 by seanbeesIn my own Apiary a week ago I noticed queen cells but could not find the queen, assumed she had gone and left the colony to sort itself out. Today it did by swarming in the top of the closest Hazel tree. Apart from having to climb the tree in the first place the collection went reasonably smoothly and we were able to prune the tree at the same time.
Week of 28th June
July 5, 2010 by seanbeesThe week started very early Monday morning with the collection of an aggressive colony from a members apiary, on arrival at the Association Apiary the colony was split in two and located in two hives away the main area. The idea of splitting the colony was to reduce the number of bees and to get them to concentrate on sorting themselves out rather than bothering visitors to the apiary. On Thursday we checked the colonies; the queenright colony had calmed down and was well established with all stages of brood, again the queenless colony was calmer and was busy creating queen cells, next week we will tear down the excess cells.
The apiary training session the previous week had resulted in an Artificial Swarm on Hive 2 and the splitting of Hive 4 in two as there were several frames with sealed queen cells. The principle objective of this week’s practical session was to ensure that we had 5 queenright colonies for the BBKA Basic Examination on Saturday. Our banker Hive 2 had swarmed and thus become queenless, Hive 6 looks to be diseased and Hive 5 had not been examined for three weeks due to there being a queen cell.
The new queen in Hive 8 has settled in well and made a good queenright colony, Hives 7 and 3 continue to be stable and good colonies, luckily Hive 1 which was a the old colony from Hive 2 in its original Artificial Swarm now has a producing queen and the colony is stable with all stages of brood. So a bit depressed we ended up with only 4 queenright colonies.
To cut a long story short, on Friday in the drizzle we quickly checked colony 5 saw the queen and all stages of brood, which meant that we had the 5 colonies for the exam on Saturday. By all accounts the examination went smoothly and all colonies were on best behaviour.
So to summarise at the apiary we now have 12 association hives 7 queenright (one of which is poorly), 5 with various stages of new queens and 4 members hives, let’s hope this week is a bit quieter!
