FULL HIVE INSPECTION

Once again we were blessed with good weather… let’s hope that soon this is a matter of course rather than wonder! Naturally I was at the apiary like a shot and going through my hives. All is still well in all the hives and the bees seem to be expanding really well and even beginning to fill the supers - I gave them last week - with honey.

Just to clarify… the super is a box, half the size of the brood box, which sits on top of the brood box to to give more space to the bees and storage space for the honey. A queen excluder is placed in between the brood box and super to prevent the queen from going up and laying eggs in the honey stores. It also stops the drones from wandering up, (they are bigger than the workers), and idling away their time eating all the precious stores. You can, in fact, use a brood box if you like. The name super really refers to the position it holds i.e., it’s sits on the top of the hive! It derives from the Latin “supra” meaning “above, beyond”. Most beekeepers, well hobbyist ones anyway, use the shallower boxes because of their weight when full of honey. Each super, (for a National Hive), has eleven frames. Each frame, when filled with honey and capped, weighs approx 21b - 1kg. Lifting them off, when they are full, is quite a job as it weighs about 22lb - (9.9kg). So a brood box would weigh 44lb… not a weight I would like to carry around any way! The supers soon stack up during a good harvest and it’s a big job taking them off and transporting them to wherever it is that you spin your honey!

During the inspection I decided to remove the super from Hive No. 3. Not much laying had been going on in the brood box and there were quite a few bees in the super milling around doing very little, as in no sign of any stores. The reasoning behind this was to get them back down in to the brood box and concentrate on their queen!

When I put it on I thought it might have been a bit previous as they were only over 6 frames and you would normally wait for them to be covering at least 7. It could be that the queen isn’t very prolific and they were bored! A touch of anthropomorphism going on there me thinks. 😬 Anyway, I will be interested to see if they’ve made any progress next week.

Other than the above all the hives are doing well. No’s 2 and 4 seem to be the strongest. No.4, being the strongest of them all. A very prolific queen. So much so that I’m now worrying that they may swarm. Next week, weather permitting of course, I think I might split that hive. What do I mean by splitting a hive? Well, it means exactly as it sounds. You take a strong colony and divide it in to two. There are many reasons for doing this and a couple are… It’s a great way of raising a new queen without having to buy one and swarm prevention. But it’s not as easy as it sounds as there are a few ways of splitting a hive. I’m not going to go into this now as I need to think about, if I do it, how will I do it, and when and if I decide to do it I’ll video it and you will see!

Meanwhile, as promised last week or the week before, the video below is of me doing a full hive inspection. Of course I’ve edited it down to 12 minutes or you would get bored… not if you’re doing it but watching it on a video! I have yet to find the queen so I can mark her. Having said that… pay attention to the last frame I pull out… I think that cheeky queen made an appearance while I was busy chatting to camera! Take a good look… she’s black, which is why she’s hard to find! At least now I know what I’m looking for I’ll find and mark her next week. All going well I’ll video the process so you can see exactly how I do it.

As usual I will leave you with a quote… I know…I love good quotes and this one rang a bell. Because just as the sun never asks for gratitude neither do the bees and yet they give us so much.

“Even after all this time, the Sun never says to the Earth… ‘You owe me. Look what happens with a love like that - it lights the whole sky -”

Have a wonderful week..