Episode 76: Thoughts for August

Hi, I’m Stewart Spinks and welcome to Episode 76 of my podcast, Beekeeping Short and Sweet. August has arrived and it’s time to start thinking about jobs that need to be completed in order to prepare the colonies for the colder months ahead.

Another week and it’s been a period of changeable weather, a few more thundery showers mixed in with some bright, warm Summery days, fairly typical for the time of year really. We seem to have moved on from the heatwave and I don’t think we’ll see temperatures of that order again this Summer, never say never of course but the next few weeks look like being “Unsettled” as the weather presenters on tv would say.

The ongoing saga of the newly mated queen that was attacked and recovered to mate and start laying eggs continues. I inspected the nuc a few days ago and found the queen had settled down and was laying, but not as rapidly as I would have hoped and there were a couple of frames that had plenty of space but no eggs. I actually spotted her and watch for some time and she wandered around the frame of empty cells dipping her head into an occasional cell but seemingly unimpressed with it walked on without laying. She did this for several minutes and I didn’t see her lay a single egg. Now, this could be down to several reasons but on the very next frame, I found a partially drawn queen cell with a growing larvae inside and on the next frame a sealed queen cell. Both queen cells were in what would be traditionally viewed as supercedure queen cell positions, about a third down from the top bar roughly central in the frame. It then becomes a guessing game to decide what the bees are up to. Is there a problem with the queen that isn’t visible to me, has she an issue in laying eggs, there were certainly eggs in cells so she hadn’t stopped entirely and they were definitely fertilised eggs producing workers. Sometimes we just have to accept the bees know best and let them get on with it. So I took the decision that indeed the bees know best and that these were in fact a supercedure cells and not swarm cells and left one of them to see what happens. I posted a video of the inspection to my Patreon page so do take a look at it there.

I also discovered a potential problem with some of the other newly emerged virgin queens last week. These were the ones we’ve been holding back in the hair roller cages as part of the Nicot system. It was time to release the queens from the cages and having experienced the attack on the first queen when I used the sugar syrup dunk method I decided to simply plug the end of the cage with fondant and let the bees gradually eat their way through to release the queen. Well, I checked last weekend and to my horror, the cap on the end of the roller cage, which is permanently attached to the cage by a small tab, had managed to curl back round and block the bees from getting to the fondant. This obviously meant the queen couldn’t get out either so I took the decision to release them onto a frame by uncapping them and running them down onto the brood frame. It worked fine, fine in all cases except one. This particular queen was in a super hurry to get out and no sooner than I’d opened the end of the cage, she was out, wings beating furiously, and in a flash, she was gone! She took to the air and disappeared over the blackberry bushes. I did that, desperate, childlike jumping in the air trying to catch her with my hands kind of move but she was too fast and was gone. It must have looked quite comical looking back at it. Oh well, these things happen.

The remaining queens all released without incident so I’m anticipating there will be eggs and young larvae the next time I inspect. Not like the earlier season matings which had been very protracted and in a lot of cases unsuccessful. I’ve mentioned it before but this year has seen a lot of Drone Laying Queens again but predominantly from the Spring matings, the Summer bred queens have all mated successfully