Budding Cottage

Before I went over to check the new hives on Thursday morning, I checked my apiary.  After Dave Sutton’s visit on Tuesday I had carried out a Wednesday morning Pagden on my Gloucester bees (the 6 frame nuc that I got in early May) because they had built about 6 queen cells (more cobbling together hive parts that I had only just bought second hand).  On Thursday morning I was somewhat surprised to find that my original queen had decided to go for a walk across the apiary and that the whole colony of forage bees that I had left her were going nuts.  Luckily I had a queen cage in my pocket, I grabbed her, and after a few phone calls for ideas, stuffed her back onto her comb in her hive, but popped a queen excluder on the bottom until she settled back down again.  Clearly she hasn’t read the same bee manuals that I have read.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 13th, 2011 at 8:48 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.