The cold wet weather has meant that I haven’t been able to inspect our hives in Hendon until today. As soon as I opened the hive that I artificially swarmed a couple of weeks ago I could hear a virgin queen “piping”. Some people call it quacking, but whatever you call it, it sounds like high pitched morse code!

She was there, on the first brood frame I lifted out. The workers had removed a flap of wax at the end of the queen cell and she was just peeping out.

Within in a few seconds she marched out – isn’t she beautiful?!

I’m now hoping for a calm, warm day over the next week so she can safely take her mating flight. We will know if she has made it successfully if we see eggs being laid in the comb in a few weeks.

For all you lovely, patent people who have been in touch wanting to know when we’ll have some honey available – here is the news:

The bees are working very hard bringing in nectar – you can see it glistening in the comb. Once the honey has the right water content so that it won’t ferment,the bees cap it with wax – you can see that they have started to cap this frame already. It is difficult to judge exactly how long it will be before there is enough to extract, because it is so weather dependent, but the day is coming closer!

Swarm season is upon us. Typically people say that colonies swarm between May and July, but our colonies have other ideas. Bees swarm to create a new colony. It is an entirely natural process and actually rather fascinating. Most beekeepers attempt to prevent swarming because once a colony has swarmed you have lost a good deal of your workforce.

We have one very strong hive at home and one at Hendon, a couple of weeks ago I noticed that they each had started making queen cups, which are special cells in the comb to grow a new queen bee in. Last week I saw that the queen had laid eggs in these which means that the colony is preparing to swarm. I decided to artificially swarm both of these hives, which involves splitting the colony into two hives. Thank goodness I had spare hives ready! In one I put all the brood (along with the queen cells, that will turn into new queens) and in the other I put the queen and all the flying bees. This is supposed to convince the bees that they have already swarmed. So far so good…

Two days later we were having lunch, A looked out of the window and remarked that there were rather a lot of bees out – my heart sunk – we had a swarm. We raced up to the roof to see bees pouring out of the hive that I’d put the queen and the flying bees into. Luckily they clustered in a tree on the edge of our garden and I was able to retrieve them easily.

Here they are clustered in the tree

And here they are going into my nuc box (a mini hive)

We’ve had some old frames lying about in the garage for a while. I have wanted to extract the wax out of them, but hadn’t done anything about it as I wasn’t sure of the best way to do it. Anyway, this morning we discovered that they fitted perfectly into and old recycling box – so we decided to experiment…

We made a little wooden frame to tilt the box and we cut a hole in the back to take the hose from a wallpaper stripper.

The steam melted the wax, and it gushed out of a hole at the front of the box.

The wax will need filtering before we can make use of it, but I’m really happy with this simple set up. All made from things that we already had.

These are the frames after about half an hour…

This time of the year makes me nervous. It is still too chilly to get a proper look inside our roof top hives, yet I know that soon it is possible that the colonies will have built up quickly and could be making preparations to swarm. It is also difficult to know if the colonies still have enough of their winter stores left if we have a sudden cold snap. I normally heft the hives to get an idea of the weight and to guess how much honey is left, but by now there should be brood in the hive which is heavy, so it is difficult to assess…

To keep my worries at bay I’ve been busy preparing our spare hives. Building up the cedar hive, painting the poly hive and building lots and lots of frames.

This year I need to change the brood frames in a couple of our hives – it is recommended every few years to help reduce the chance of any disease build up. Each of the hives needs 11 new frames, and each frame needs 11 nails tapped into it. Plus I always like to have some spare frames made up in case they are suddenly needed to house a swarm or something.