![]() ![]() ![]() Queen rearingįor about the last 15 years I’ve mainly reared queens using one of two methods involving a queenright hive the Ben Harden system or a Cloake board. The other thing notable about the honey harvest this season was that only one frame ‘exploded’ in the extractor 5 … noisy, messy and very wobbly □. Pretty consistently ~68% by weight of the full super was honey, yielding ~10.8 kg of honey per super. I determined what each hive produced by labelling and weighing every super before and after extraction. If my maths were better I could determine the median, the standard deviation etc, but suffice to say most produced close to the average, with a few outliers yielding above 40 kg or below 10 kg. The average was just over 28 kg per hive, with the best managing a bit over 45 kg 4. I have fewer honey production hives this year, but the overall harvest was within a few kilograms of the record crop last year.įor the first time I measured the honey produced per hive, rather than simply pooling weights per apiary. The honey was harvested in two batches in successive weeks in early/mid June. However, although the cold start delayed things, everything pretty much caught up in the good weather from the second week of May. These colonies were booming and were the first to need supers, the first to have brood harvested for a cell raiser (see below) and the first to need swarm control … and – whisper it – the first to swarm □. Here’s one from mid-April in the bee shed. The colonies were certainly strong enough: Not because I was short of bees but because it was too cold to forage. The cold, late start to Spring had me concerned I was going to miss the oil seed rape nectar flow completely. ![]() If you’re a beekeeper and haven’t been busy with these three things over the last few weeks then either something has gone awry with your season … or you live in New Zealand. I can’t promise something for everyone, or even anyone, and inevitably the focus will be on the trilogy of queen rearing, swarm control and the honey harvest. Rather than write an in depth (well researched 2 ) post on an esoteric aspect of the coxa and trochanter of Apis mellifera scutellata or virus replication in drones (though I’d strongly recommend readers check out our latest paper on this topic, published today) I thought I’d write a few notes on three practical beekeeping topics that have been entertaining me recently. I am, as the saying goes, ”running around like a headless chicken”. ![]() It’s lucky the days are so long as this is the busiest time of the year for beekeeping … at least for my beekeeping. Some might even stay overnight, though perhaps these are scouts ‘lost’ from a swarm that had decided to occupy a different nest site 1. In my experience, some of the earliest to start are the scout bees that appear at bait hives before foragers are really busy. With the good weather we’ve had for the last 2-3 weeks the bees have been out well before I’m drinking my morning coffee and don’t stop until after my evening glass of Barolo. In my part of Scotland it’s light enough to work outside from about 3:30 am until 11:30 pm which means you can get a lot done … if you have the energy and distant, deaf or understanding neighbours. I started writing this post at sunset on the longest day of the year. And, if that wasn’t enough, a bonus discussion on keeping virgin queens in an incubator. Synopsis : Three short(ish) related topics the spring honey harvest, queen rearing without grafting (the Hopkins method) and a brief mention of swarm control. ![]()
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