1st June 2014 Apiary 1 Hive 5
Hive 5
When the LAN group visited, hive 3 had been about to swarm; so we took several frames of brood and stores from it, including two nice queen cells; and then created hive 5.
Today on inspection the bees were building up nicely from the nuc of bees taken from hive 3 before it swarmed. They were working on stores and seemed to cover a similar number of combs to originally; so I closed them down and left them too it. My main thought had been to check if they had sufficient stores – which seemed to be the case (since I hadn’t fed them since the artificial swarm).
Of settling in a new colony…..
in the last couple of years my main bad experiences with small clusters of bees, was when I had several small casts. During a time of poor weather, I rehoused these but didn’t feed them, and had a couple fail to establish and dwindle away. Anyway, it was a hard and horrible lesson to learn, finding quiet and starving bees on a comb.
Since then I have tried to ensure that they either have stores going in (like the artificial swarm, to keep them going until they get more foragers); or they are fed at least a litre of feed to establish them. This year I have not fed a swarm just the once, but it was a strong colony and was in an orchard in bloom, so they have built up without that prompt.
June 1st, 2014
Topic: Hive E Artificial swarm from Hive C Tags: None
