Into the hive they go

After leaving the bees in their nuc for for 3 days, with a contact feeder placed above a hole in the crownboard in an eke I'd knocked together just for the occassion, I decided it was time to pop them into the hive. My plan was simple, just open the nuc and the hive and move the frames from one to the other quickly and with no fuss. So having put one shallow and five deep Commercial frames into the hive I them opened the nuc and started transferring the frames over. There was loads of brood in there and I also spotted two big fat queen cells two thirds of the way up one frame. As every new beekeeper gets told these need to be cut out to prevent swarming so cut them out I did. I closed up the hive and felt fairly pleased with myself for having thwarted the first attempt to swarm.

I hadn't seen the queen or inspected the brood for eggs but felt she was bound to be in there somewhere. Anyway as you may recall I'm using a Commercial brood box, however the bees were on National deep frames. The National frames are a bit smaller so what tends to happen is the bees make a lot burr comb in the space that's left making it difficult to manage the hive. The simple way round this is to attach some wood to the sides of the National frame to pad it out to the size of a Commercial frame. So I made some frames and drilled holes in them so I could quickly cable tie them in place (one tie on each end at the top and one at the bottm in the middle. I then opened up the hive a few days later and installed them -which would have been a lot easier if only I'd had three arms rather than the more traditional two..

The cable ties visible are from my National to Commercial adapters

Whilst adding the frame adapters I had a a good opportunity to look at the comb contents. I could see a lot of capped brood still but no uncapped brood and no queen. Uh oh. I was using a contact feeder on top the hive using one of the National brood bodies as an eke for the first couple of weeks. When I next inspected the hive I still didn't see any queen and no eggs or uncapped brood. Plenty of syrup was being stored though and lots of pollen was being brought in. I decided to stop feeding for a week in case the reason for the lack of eggs was that the bees were filling every cell with syrup but on my next inspection I found this wasn't the case so resumed feeding. I suspect that the queen who was marked according to the documentation had either left the hive in a cast swarm immediately before I purchased it or immediately after I got it home whilst I was at work, however the nuc was still visibly crammed with bees when I opened if so it may have been that they had balled her due to overcrowding. Either way the two supersedure cells I'd cut would have probably been enough to correct the problem when one of the queens was hatched and mated. Shame I'd gone and cut them out then.

Frames. Something's not right.

OK the hive is ready, the frames have been taken apart and scorched, boiled and cleaned with flames, harsh chemicals and elbow grease. I'm pretty certain no germs survived that. Next thing is to get some foundation and reassemble the frames. Whilst Googling for information on foundation I came across this table of foundation sizes courtesy of Paynes Bee Farm. Looking at the table and looking at my frames I began to think something wasn't quite right. My frames looked too big, and the shallows were quite blatantly more than 5" deep.

After a lot of head scratching and little measuring I realised that the hive I'd bought wasn't actually the hive I'd thought. I'd believed I'd purchased a national hive with two shallow supers. But I hadn't. What I had was a Commercial brood box and the two supers were actually National brood boxes. Oops. That's a huge hive. Well I hadn't seen a beehive in real life since the introductory course and re reading the advert for the hive as it was advertised it was pretty clear that the seller knew nothing about beekeeping himself so the advert hadn't been too clear. In the immortal words of everyone's favourite jaundiced everyman Homer Simpson "D'oh!"

Still whilst I have 2 National brood boxes and their frames as well as the Commercial boxes and frames having read a lot about brood and a half and double  brood boxes I've come to the conclusion that a Commercial brood box is probably the way for me to go. When I get bees they'll be in a National nuc. National frames are smaller than Commercial ones, but seriously cable tying some wood to pad out the frames isn't really rocket science is it. Yes, I'm one of those people who's happy to blaze their own trail ignoring the conventions of the nation.

I decided to bin off the Queen excluder I'd got with the hive as although it was a nice wooden framed one I didn't think I had a hope in hell of sterilising it without melting the plastic grille -not with the resources I had to hand anyway. I also needed a couple of new bits of frames to repalce a few that broke during cleaning as  well as the foundation -I also wanted to make up a short frame in the hive to do the sacrificial drone brood varroa control thing, so I decided rather than wait on mail order I'd make a road trip to Thorne to pick up the bits I needed. Postage on anything bee related seems kinda pricey anyway. So off I went to get a plastic queen excluder various bits of Commercial and National frames and foundation for Commercial Deep, Commercial Shallow (for the drones) and National Deep frames.

Thornes shop in Wragby managed to elude my satnav but I found it eventually. It was rather strange actually. It's like a beekeeping supermarket with prettymuch everything in it except customers, and bees. Yep I was the only customer there -well it was a weekday I guess. Anyway I got my gubbins then drove off home to make up the Commercial frames I anticipate needing later.

Incidentally the old comb that I pulled out of the original frames I melted and strained, now I have a half kilo block of beeswax in a plastic bag. I gather I can't let the bees have it in case of disease so at some point I'll hopefully exchange it for foundation.