Budding Cottage

Hive 2

I am strangely fond of this hive of bees.  It faces the gate as I come into the apiary and they always seem busy, catching the sunlight early.

In May I found the queen and popped her into the brood box (after overwintering on a brood and a half).  I then left them to it with a super above.  Now they are building up stores nicely. I added a super to keep them busy but didn’t go too deep into the hive.  I know that maybe I should have, but they were low on drones, high on stores and didn’t “feel” like they were going to swarm.  There were a good number of bees present and they were all busy.  I expect they’ll prove me wrong, but hey ho.

Actually, I’ve just been analysing that last statement and trying to think back as to why I didn’t persist going into the hive (other than because I’d already been working bees for 4 hours by this point and was tired).  I seem to recall seeing more stores than brood.  As such it is possible that there had already been a supercedure/small swarm from this hive.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2014 at 8:19 pm and is filed under Hive B (Swarm bees from Malvern). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.