Hive 2 - a queen bee, marked with a green dot on her/its thorax.
The green dot denotes that queen was born in 2019.
There is an international colour coding system for marking queens. Beekeepers will mark a queen green if she/it is born in a year ending with 4 or 9.
Queen bees born in 2020 should be marked blue.
Why mark the queen bee? The distinctive mark makes it easier to find when doing inspections and the mark also indicates the age of the bee.
Both colonies in the apiary were queenright on 5th April.
One of the most important things to look for when inspecting a hive is that the queen bee is laying eggs. The picture above shows honeycomb with eggs laid in the cells. The eggs are the small white marks in the middle of each hexagon-shaped cell. To the left of the cells with eggs in, there is sealed honeycomb with honey stored in the cells. To the right, there is capped honeycomb with brood in each cell.
After the inspection last week I decided the colony in Hive 2 was building up (increasing in size) very quickly and because there were queen cups in evidence, the colony might have been preparing to swarm. The end of March (UK) is quite early for swarming however I'm told it can happen then - or early in April.
I decided to make Hive 2 'brood and a half' - which means adding a 'super' to the brood section of the hive. That gives more comb for the queen to lay her eggs in and might delay swarming. In the 6 days since adding the super, the queen bee had laid eggs extensively across nearly 4 frames of 'super' comb. The picture above is of a section of that 'super' brood comb.
On the downside, adding a brood super makes for a longer inspection, more chance of harming/losing the queen, more disruption to the colony and disturbance around the apiary. The colonies tend to make more brace comb between the frames and between the super and the brood box. Adding the super is only a delaying measure in the swarm control process.
If swarming is understood as part of a process in which a healthy colony wants to reproduce itself - then it is not a matter of me, as a beekeeper, wanting to stop that happening but more of how I can intervene in ways that allow the process to continue to my advantage and that of the bees. I think I will, in the next 2-3 weeks carry out an artificial swarming procedure with this colony (Hive 2)......
that is if I can continue visiting the allotment, and if I am well enough to do so, given the current and future situation with Covid19.
I live 7 minutes, by bicycle, from the allotment - a few minutes more on the return journey. Once through the gate, I am more isolated/socially distant than I am at home. I'm able to harvest food crops and prepare/cultivate food crops for future harvests. Some official council notices have been posted on the noticeboard stating there are no plans to close allotments so long as gardeners abide by the social distancing rules.
A3b - broccoli / mizuna / mibuna / carrot / radish and other catch crops.
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