^ The apiary as it was!
We went to visit a couple of hives we have in our new apiary. Dad had already seen them and one of them he knew was doing really well. They filled a national broodbox, 2 OSB's and a super (and no queen excluder - don't need to use one when you're using OSB's). We were checking on our honey harvest when we spotted a maturing queen cell. We went through the whole hive, and found 27 queen cells in it, with around 14 on one frame alone. 27 in one hive!!
^ A queen cell
They were clearly on the brink of swarming, and with that number of cells could have swarmed in casts, and we don't want to lose most of our bees and honey, so we had to act quickly! Some cells were already emerged... We tried breaking one or two cells to kill the developing queens, but instead it turned out that the queens were pretty much ready to hatch and were fully formed and wriggly! We caught them in cages, luckily, while we decided what to do.
We began splitting the hive off, effectively doing an artificial swarm on a big scale. But we didn't have all the equipment with us, so Dad drove off to go and pick some up.
Meanwhile, I was enjoying the sunshine when the buzzing got louder. I looked behind me and there was a cloud of bees - they were swarming right before my eyes! They drifted slowly down the length of the hedge, 2 - 3 metres in the air. I was running frantically after them - I had no equipment and there wasn't much I could do anyway, but I was trying to make sure I knew where they went so we could catch them when Dad came back. It was an amazing experience, as several times I was right in the heart of the swarm! Unfortunately though they flew over the hedge and away after a while, and despite my graceful attempt at crawling through the hedge, we had to abandon that one.
However, when we got back to the hive the population size was still huge! We carried on with our splits, giving birth to a couple of other queens, and eventually we had everyone split off and with a few queen cells each and some stores. We went from having 2 hives in that apiary to having 9 there in one afternoon (including a little mating hive)! And they're all fairly decent sized!
We thought we'd done alright - pretty much averted disaster. But there was one nuc that was concerning - the one with 14 cells on one frame. We couldn't take out a few queens because we'd run out of cages. So Dad went back today with Pabi Bach to make a queen bank (the cells in little springy cages used for queen rearing and breeding) and to capture a few of the queens to put in further mating nucs. So fortunately, that nuc now has fewer queens, and we have lots of queens developing/getting ready to mate. We have offered them out to other beekeepers, to give them away. They're virgins but they clearly come from a hard-working, vigorous (and fairly docile) bloodline!
^ Frames of stores and some caged queens waiting for new homes to arrive!
It's been very exciting this weekend, and despite the fact that the last time I went beekeeping I ended up throwing up and unable to stand or breathe I'm no longer afraid. I didn't get stung but I was surrounded by clouds of bees with my veil unzipped...yes, I am reckless, but you only live once, and I do love my bees!
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