The Colonies are allowed to mingle

This evening there was thankfully a break in the atrocious rain for Hannah & Gil to return to the hives.  In fact the bad weather has meant that the small hive haven't actually lost much chance of foraging while they've been shut inside - as we weren't able to make any fondant to feed them.

We were totally unsure as to whether the small colony would have survived their latest trauma.

However - when we removed the cover and lifted out the 'holy follower board' - sure enough there were bees climbing out of the hive from both sides. We had been told of other beekeepers attempts at merging colonies resulting in pairs of bees attacking each other in midair, but there seemed to be no animosity between any bees at all.

Fingers crossed, we do seem to have managed it - of course the only way we will really know is by finding dead bees in and around the hive next visit, but we think that's unlikely.

Our next adventure will be making some sugar fondant to feed them through the winter (or Autumn if this rain continues much longer)

Poor Pudsey Bees

Merging the Colonies (now on film)

This week we attempted to merge the two colonies - as the smaller colony is not going to survive for much longer on its own without a queen or new bees being created.

The problem is that a colony will defend their hive against bees from another hive - they can tell them apart by smell. Their queens scent is detectable - so we needed to allow the bees to mix for a while without them reaching and attacking each other.

Steve, Hannah and Gil met on Saturday afternoon (after the PuLSE Urban Harvest - see our facebook page for details) to discuss tactics, and then convened at the hives on Sunday morning - tools at the ready. First of all we used our swarm box to put the small hive into - and wrapped them in cloth.

We decided on using a follower board from the now empty hive to separate the two colonies within the main hive. We drilled holes in the board to allow the smells to mix and the bees to see each other, but blocked the gaps around the board so they wouldn't be able to get through.

The small colony was then lifted into the back of the main hive along with their comb, and they were sealed completely inside - with no egress - for three days. . .

Bradford Beekeepers Evening Meeting

I wrote a piece last week about how I visited the Bradford Beekeepers meeting but it didn't save on the blog and I have slept since then.

The main gist of my post was that the event was educational, supportive and welcoming so we should join in with more of their events.

There are still a few chances to visit the Knowles Park apiary before the hives are closed for winter, so that's a chance to talk bees some more.

We should make the most of this resource.

Brian helps us out

We were lucky enough to have an experienced top-bar beekeeper come along to our hives early on Sunday morning.  Brian had visited the co-op in the early days to talk about beekeeping and was a wealth of information and enthusiasm.

We had a lot of questions but Brian was happy to dive straight in and inspect both hives. We started with Hive 1 - the bees were extremely lively and poured out of the Hive much more than we had seen before - poor Gil's hood/suit zip had broken, so he was relegated to watching from the sidelines - as we'd never seen them this reactive before.

We managed to get through about two-thirds of the combs before deciding that they were getting a bit too lively. We didn't find the Queen, but Brian was satisfied that there were definitely young brood present.

Hive 2 was totally different - there had obviously been no building activity at all since they were first returned. Brian & Steve managed to lift the whole clump of combs out, and all we could see was honeycomb. Brian was definitely of the opinion that they are Queen-less and have been for some time.

The level of cross-comb is clearly visible here - as is the small number of bees compared to hive 1. Brian left us with a number of the "prepared" top-bars that he uses to give the bees a start.

We then sealed up the hives, with the intention of increasing their level of insulation (with the weed membrane and kingspan). Brian then gave us a range of things we could do with the small hive - including ways of integrating them into the larger hive. Brian even gave us a very nice brand-new smoker !

Finally we took away some of the broken comb, and the comb they had built onto the feeder (which we also removed). So here's a picture of our very first "cut-comb"