Mostly the absence has been because of technology issues and not being bothered to sort them out, but now hopefully they may be resolved and I'm going to give it another go!
Bee news- over the last 3 years I have been desensitised to bee stings and we started keeping bees again in the autumn of 2014, in a lovely new apiary at Cordwood thanks to the generosity of Jill, Rob, Judith and Roger. We had a good year in 2015 with no swarms and collected some lovely, welcome honey.
This winter we successfully got 3 colonies through the winter, having sold one, we had 2 good colonies to start this year with.
Now, in June, we have artificially swarmed these and should have 2 colonies with last year's (blue) queens and 2 making new queens (white).
However, as usual the bees don't always do what they should and in one of the blue queen's hive we found this.....
This new frame has all drone brood - as well as being a real mess!
The only way this happens is if the queen becomes a drone layer- which means she cannot fertilise her eggs any more so they are all male (drones) or if for some reason the queen fails completely and the workers begin to develop their ovaries and lay eggs. If this happens the worker eggs are all unfertilised as well so will be drones!
It's a bit complicated and disappointing to find as it usually means the hive is not going to survive1
If the brood is still orderly and neat then the queen is usually to blame but in this case the brood is random and as one beekeeper friend commented a bit like "the craters of the moon". The culprit here is in all probability laying workers. As if to confirm it we also found brood in the supers (where the queen would not be) and multiple eggs in each cell.
Not very clear but some of these cells have 2 or more eggs!
The solution sounds a bit barbaric but otherwise the hive will just slowly die out.
The advice is to smoke the bees well, take the hive some distance away and having removed all trace of the origin hive on it's site, shake all the bees out.
Smoking the bees encourages them to fill up with honey, so when they fly back the bees in the nearest hive will let them as they are bearing gifts! Apparently laying workers can not fly because of their developed ovaries!
Well the bees were duly shaken out and let in the nearest hive with no fighting- this hive is very full now, so we shall see how it develops from now through the summer!
