Low Intervention.
Vasilios and Maria leave the bees alone to get on with things. Meanwhile they learn as much as they can about beekeeping and attend a bee health study day at Birnie apiary run by Moray Beekeeper’s Association. We move the bees into their smart new hive on August 13th.
Colony Assessment.
The bees are only covering a few frames with a couple frames of brood and have not built up as quickly as I would have hoped. The queen is currently laying but the bees are planning to replace her soon as there is one ripe queen cell on a frame. This is a supercedure cell and not a swarm cell. The end of the cell is purple/brown which means that the bees have been chewing the wax in preparation for the new queen emerging any day now.
Swarms Usually Have Older Queens.
It is not a surprise to find a supercedure queen cell. We assume that the queen is old but we have no history to go on. Hopefully there will be time for the new queen to get mated well and start laying before the autumn. Often colonies do not survive winter because they are too small to collect enough stores for winter, or the queen is old and runs out of semen. She might then become a drone layer over winter and the colony would die out for lack of fertilised eggs and new worker bees
Clean Floor.
The old hive had a solid floor which was clean with hardly any debris and no varroa mites. The new hive has an open mesh floor to collect mites that fall down onto the floor and cannot get back up onto the bees.
Food Stores.
This small colony is collecting nectar and making honey stores but it only has enough to last a couple of weeks so Vasilios will feed them a syrup solution. This enables the bees to draw out a few more frames of foundation and lay down some winter stores. At the moment there are 5 frames and a dummy board. A new frame with foundation will be added as soon as the last one has been drawn out.
Next Door Neighbours.
Dark Bees.
Dark wild bees have occupied a nest within the house, whose gardens Vasilios tends, for several years and if you look closely at the picture (with a very good imagination) you might see some. They were busy on the day their neighbours were flitting.
Thank you for this update on the swarm captured near this house. The new housing for the bees looks first rate. I also applaud your plan of giving this colony food assistance, given that its growth will be hampered by the changeover of queens and thus a break in the egg laying in the colony.
But maybe you (and the bees) will be lucky and mother and daughter (queens) will work side by side until the elder dies a gentle death. Seems you perhaps will have an excellent opportunity to watch what happens in this special situation of a dual-queen colony. Seems, too, that it would be highly adaptive for the colony to create this special situation.
Thank you for taking the time to think about, and comment on, this post, Tom. It is a tricky situation with them overwintering as such a small colony.