66 Looking for a queen

One hive was split in three. In one of the splits was the queen. Then the two new hives were exchanged with splits from the hives in Belfarset. That left me with three hives. The hives might harbour a queen in every one of them or no queen at all. In the hives without a queen the worker bees had to get busy choosing a larvae to raise as a queen. This larvae then got fed on Royal Jelly to form her into the new queen. To be on the save side the worker bees would feed more than one larvae the Royal Jelly. And Timothy was counting on that when he called again after a week. If there was more than one queen pod in the same hive but on different frames he could split the hive again. In The Secret Garden he had been lucky. He got three splits from four hives. In our apiary the first hive he opened had no queen but several queen pods on one frame only. No possible split there. As soon as the first Virgin Queen would come out of her pod, she would go to check for others. When found she would knock on the pod and if there was a response she would open the pod and kill the rival queen. Then after a couple of days in which she established her position as queen, she would fly out to mate. The second hive Timothy opened had already a queen. He saw that on the first frame he took out. Not the queen herself but as he showed me there were tiny little rice like forms in the combs eggs that had just been laid. He did not want to take a split from this hive, because the split could be too week. On the third and last hive he struck lucky. There were queen pods on different frames. He transferred the frame to a prepared Styrofoam starter hive. Good luck to them! (66 Looking for a queen 03-06-16)

65 Checking on the split hives

Timothy the beekeeper was back. This time he came to check on the hives he split last week. This time he had done the Achill run the other way around. He had first gone to Bull’s Mouth and The Secret Garden. The back of his van was loaded with starter hives. Three of them had colonies in them that he had split from the split hives of last week. They all came from The Secret Garden. In Bull’s Mouth the hives are not doing as well. Maybe it is the wind that is forever changing there. The channel works like a trough. Timothy had brought his bee suit for special occasions with him for me to wear. It was a beautiful clean white suit without any patch up, rents or dirt. I felt privileged! I took a chair and settled at the side of the apiary where I had a good view of the proceedings. And I wanted to catch his face in the sketch. I’m getting used to work in a suit. Even with latex gloves on it doesn’t present any problems. To get the stage set he first had to prop up a fuchsia branch heavy with enormous red flowers that hung over one of the hives and blocked part of my view. I offered that he could cut it, but he said it was lovely and it wasn’t interfering with the bees. Timothy works very fast and I didn’t get much time to do anything else but register the bare essentials. Still I got two sketches done. On this sketch he is about to lift the top of the middle hive to check if this one has a queen, or at least has queen pods ready to produce a queen. Very important: that the colony is strong and growing in size to be able to produce honey for harvesting later on. (65 checking the split hives 04-06-16)

Queen Cups

The worker bees had been busy with the succession to the hive’s crown. Apart from the queen cell we also discovered several queen cups. The incumbent queen didn’t lay any eggs in these. A friend told me this morning that her mother, Mrs Feldbrugge from Zuidhorn in Holland, had six beehives in the back of her garden. A beekeeper put them in for her, just like Timothy Stevens did for the Polranny Pirates. But after a while she got very interested, followed a course in beekeeping and from then on took care of them herself. I’m sure I won’t go that far… Unlike Timothy she wasn’t keen on swarming. Too much trouble with the neighbours in the village when they were visited by an unwelcome swarm. She destroyed any queen cup and cell she found on a frame.