Hive Two - Second Inspection and some plans

Hive two now consists of 2 full depth, one .75 and a queen excluder. Its too big for my small yard now and I now have two young boys running around in the garden so the chances of bees getting squashed by them is increasing. They don't like being stung either...

I still want to try my hand at breeding a quantity of queens but I plan to use the top bar hive for that. The top bar hive still isn't populated. I did have it populated but they died out over winter. More on this in a later post...

There is a community garden just a few blocks away from where I live. They sound keen to have a hive there so I plan to move hive two onto their land. Because it is so close normally I'd have to move the bees twice. Once to a temporary location more than 5km away and then move them to their final location a few weeks later. This is because the bees are extremely good at navigating but forget to check where home is when they leave so if I move the hive a short distance the bees will take off in the morning, recognise the area they are in and so return to the old site.

To overcome this I plan to do the following

1. Breed a new queen in hive two
2. When the queen is almost ready to hatch move the current queen and some workers into the Top Bar Hive. If I do a graft today they should be almost capped next weekend (7.5 days) so next Sunday might be the time to make the move. Taking that into account, I won't do the graft today.
3. At the same time move Hive two aside and place the Top Bar Hive in its place
4. Move Hive two to its new location, about 1km away.

This should mean that any of Hive two's field bees that return to the old location will find their way into the Top Bar Hive, boosting its population. Any new field bees, heading out on their first flight, will orientate themselves based on the new location and return there.

In preparation for this I have located Hive two's queen and isolated her to the bottom box. I've also placed my queen rearing frame into the hive so that the bees can prepare it for a graft.

The hive is brimming with bees, every frame was reasonably well covered in bees, right out to the side walls. I weighed the top box (the .75) as I thought it would be interesting to see how quickly its weight increases. It is currently 16kg. This includes all the bees in the box at the time, 9 frames, a couple of frames of almost capped nectar and the remainder brood.

I've yet to see any significant varroa activity this season. I inserted a drone frame during the last inpection and it is almost all drawn out now. There was some brood in it but its not capped yet. Drone take about 14 days from capping to emerge so I want to remove the frame some time in the next two weeks. I spotted one worker with a mite on its back but otherwise all seems good. I still have put a sticky board in the mesh to see what the mite drop is, I really should get on to that.

Queen Bee Graft Progress

There has been some progress on growing the new queens. Cells 1, 4 and 5 have been accepted by the bees. 2 and 3 have been cleaned out. Initially it appeared the bees had accepted all five, which would have been a record for me. The photo on the right was taken on the 1st of Feburary, one day after the graft.
There are bees clustered around all five cells. The photo on the left was taken on the 3rd, cells 2 and three being ignore. Looking back at the images of each graft I'd guess that #2 was rejected because it was quite dry and probably died while it was out of the hive and #3 was part way up the cell wall. The three that were accepted are all in plenty of royal jelly, something to look out for next time I suppose.

In this image the 4 - 5 day old grub can be seen, well surrounded in royal jelly and quite a lot larger than a worker.

Grafting Queens

As I previously mentioned I'm trying my hand at breeding queens. I'm also aware that the queens in my second apiary are nearing the end of their productive life and I need to replace the queen I sent north, which has arrived and is in good health.

I spoke to the beekeeper I sent the queen and he said they were quite loud when they arrived and to calm them down he wet his finger and let a little water run down the inside of the cage. This calmed them immediately. I hadn't thought about water for them before, but the candy is quite dry. The queen is now in the destination hive so hopefully all is well and the candy has been removed.

Today I grafted 5 grubs into Bozi queen cups. These are plastic cups that make it very easy to transport the queen cells to the nucs or an incubator for hatching. The cups cost about $NZ0.10 each and can be reused. My supplier sells them in bags of 100 so I haven't had to reuse any yet.

This photo shows the top bar of my grafting frame. The white spot marks position #1.

The Bozi cells are secured to the frame by being pressed onto plastic feet. I bought the feet from a plastics supply company and then used short screws to fix them to the frame. Once the cells are capped a gentle twist will remove it from the frame. This also makes it a lot easier to do the graft as the cup can be held in a comfortable position into the grub is place it in.

I use a 'Chinese' grafting tool because that works for me. There are many other tools that people use ranging from a small paintbrush to a flattened bike spoke or coat hanger. It doesn't really matter as long as you can pick up and release the grub. The chinese grating tool has a flexible tounge which is used to pick the grub up and a push button, much like a Bic pen, on its top that is used to push the grub into the cup.

A well fed, healthy hive is much easier to graft from because there will be a large about of royal jelly in the cells with the grubs. This lubricates the pick up and release process so that it becomes a very smooth action. The grubs on the right side of the bee are well fed are ideal for grafting.

Below are photos of each graft I did. Number 3 looks like a bad one but the others seem fine. It will be interesting to see which ones the bees accept.

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