Dealing with a swarming colony when you can’t find the queen

Posted on April 18, 2024 by james

As I wrote in my previous post, it appears that one of my colonies may be about to swarm. It’s so stuffed with bees that there’s no chance of finding the queen easily, so I really need to deal with the situation without doing so.

At the moment I’m thinking that I’ll move the existing box a little to one side, put a new floor and brood box in its place and then transfer one of the frames of brood into it, backfilling with either foundation or drawn comb. That one frame left on the original site should have no queen cells on. I’ll then move the original box to the other end of the apiary.

The flying bees in the original box should gradually shift back to their original site where brood will emerge over the next week. Younger bees will stay put and orientate to the new position of the hive as they leave. Whichever doesn’t have a queen will produce queen cells. The other should contain eggs and probably won’t have queen cells any more, if it ever did. I think I just need to tear down all but one of the queen cells and leave them for a while to get on with things.

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Time to move home

Posted on April 18, 2024 by james

Well, not “move” so much perhaps, as to get a new one.

It was a very pleasant morning this morning when the wind wasn’t blowing, so I decided to swap three colonies of bees from the boxes they were in to poly hives. After the chaos of last Spring, not all the bees were in the boxes I wanted them in, so having taken advantage of that fact to get a few repairs done and repainting I thought that this afternoon I might as well get them moved.

The first colony was very calm and building up nicely, no bother to move the brood box to one side, put a new one in its place and transfer the frames across. I didn’t even need to use the smoker.

The second was an entirely different hovercraft of eels. It was bursting at the seams and most dischuffed at the disruption to their living space. As I was moving frames into the new box I noticed a charged queen cell on the bottom of one frame. I wasn’t expecting that! I estimate that it was probably around four days old, so I have a few days before they consider swarming. Time to close them up and go away to have a think about what to do next.

The third was somewhere between the two. They didn’t seem too distressed about what was going on, but it was harder to tell because of the fall-out from the previous hive.

So, all done, relatively little fuss and one “problem” to resolve over the next couple of days.

Early this evening I went out to tidy up the hive parts I’d left out, put straps back on the hives and mow the grass in front of them. All the bees had returned to their hives and everything was quiet, so that looks like a success to me.

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BT are utterly bloody useless, part 4

Posted on April 17, 2024 by james

At last today I’ve been able to get access to my account details once again. Possibly I could have done earlier, but no-one has actually bothered to inform me of the fact. I just had to try it after the three working days that they wanted to be able to fix the problem were up.

And having seen my last bill it appears the reason that it is so out of whack with previous bills is that they have applied a load of refunds because of a change in their billing. I’d have thought that someone could have actually told me that when I said that I didn’t understand why the amount was so inconsistent with previous bills. It’s not as though they actually took the time to explain any changes to me when the billing was changed, after all.

This has all been such an unimpressive episode. I know they’ve paused the project to replace copper lines with fibre because of the issues for people who need a phone to work when they have no power (which they were told would be a problem years ago), but come the time when most people have high-bandwidth internet connections to the property, making wifi calling for multiple phones feasible for just about everyone and meaning that they can transfer their land line numbers to other VoIP providers, I can see BT losing a lot of customers.

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Memory Lane, 21st December 2022: Winter solstice

Posted on April 17, 2024 by james

So what on earth are these dandelions up to?

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Spears at lunchtime

Posted on April 17, 2024 by james

It’s been two and a half years in the making, but this morning my wife persuaded me to cut these so we could have them with lunch.

After such a long wait it was quite exciting to finally get to taste something, grilled with hollandaise sauce. And very nice they were too. Hopefully we’ll be picking more a couple of times a week, at least until the start of June.

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More beehive repairs

Posted on April 17, 2024 by james

I’m not entirely sure where the time went today, but a fair bit of it was spent working on more beehive parts. I filled a few dents in some poly brood boxes and repainted them (and in a poly roof), oiled the “vaping rim” that I added to a UFE and finished converting the four section boxes into two bait hives (mostly by gluing one on top of another and then gluing in a rail to support frames). I’ve completely ignored bee space issues with the latter on the grounds that they won’t be in the box long enough for it to become a problem. As the boxes are very old, I also oiled them to help keep the water out.

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Memory Lane, 21st December 2022: Winter salads

Posted on April 17, 2024 by james

Winter salads in the melon house and polytunnel, looking pretty healthy. With a bit of luck these should keep us going until Spring when we have salads growing out in the main plot once again.

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Didn’t see that coming over the Horizon

Posted on April 16, 2024 by james

One of the most odd things about the recent days of the inquiry into the Post Office Horizon scandal has been the apparent ignorance of the senior staff involved. We’re frequently told that such people have to be paid frankly obscene amounts of money to obtain the most talented individuals for their jobs. It very much appears that one of their necessary talents is not asking questions about important aspects of the business, and in fact almost dismissing them as “beneath their consideration”. I’d have thought that taking so many sub-postmasters to court for having their hands in the till really ought to have rung alarm bells very high up. It’s an awful lot of staff to believe are up to something seriously illegal in one business.

Or is the real talent actually the ability to create plausible deniability and develop a sudden case of amnesia so that they can claim when challenged that it was nothing to do with them?

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Personal freedom? What “personal freedom”?

Posted on April 16, 2024 by james

Presumably Liz Truss must have turned off her irony meter when addressing parliament today to oppose Richy Sunak’s bill that imposes a cut-off for the age at which people are allowed to buy cigarettes. It would limit personal freedom, she claimed. Well, yes, it would, though I’d suggest that’s a very poor argument when personal freedoms are limited in many other ways just to make society work.

The real irony however is that when she was Prime Monster (Remember that? Perhaps not. Blink and you missed it, though perhaps not the resulting financial fall-out) her government refused to allow Bermuda (a British colony) to implement cannabis reform. Quite how that jibes with her opposition to limiting personal freedom I’m really not sure.

To pour more petrol on the fire, she allegedly supported the idea of cannabis reform when she was a Lib Dem, presumably before she realised that total nutcases were more welcome in the Conservatives.

I’m reminded of the quote often attributed to Groucho Marx: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them, well, I have others”.

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Memory Lane, 9th December 2022: Progress on the compost toilet

Posted on April 16, 2024 by james

After getting the front and back sorted, I decided that actually the back wasn’t sufficiently high, so I made the sides a little higher and I’ll add an “extension” to the back to match them afterwards.

After extending the back I added the timbers for the roof and wrapped everything in breathable membrane. To make it mostly watertight (there’s no door yet) I found some scraps clear roofing and fixed them down. They’re really in no condition to use as a permanent roof though. I just need to work out what I’m going to make the final roof from.

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