Top Bar hives and Swarm Control: Bee News...

With the warm weather and abundance of flowers planted by Jan our horticluture technician, the bees are in full swing producing honey at a fantastic rate. Our friends at Cardona and Sons came to check on one of their hives and found it so full they had to split the colony to stop it swarming...

Fully suited and with a prepared brood box Andre first inspected the large colony...

One by one Andre removed the frames and checked the health of the bees, their stocks and reserves and their brood. Some of the frames showed sign of queen cell formation. When the bees are preparing to swarm they produce a special brood cell in which the juvenile queens will develop.

The large Queen cup is clearly visible

All but one Queen Cup must be removed and destroyed, the surviving Queen Cup (Usually the largest) and its frame are placed in a new sterile brood box along with several frames of unhatched worker bees. The Queen Cups are destroyed by scraping them off the frames with your hive tool. The bees still flying will serve their original hive and queen, the newly emerged bees will serve the new queen in the new hive...

The other good news is that we have raised £390 to buy the equipment and 4 hives for our Kenyan orphan project. The equipment will be winging it's way to Kenya on the 23rd June and the hives will be in place by mid July. Plus to get into the theme of our project we have invested in a top bar hive. These hives are used across the developed world and instead of being split into mulitple chambers like the national hives they are one long colony.  The bees produce their own combs and the hive is said to be more 'natural'. If nothing else it will be an interesting side project.