Expansion

I had a plan to add a third colony this year. To that end I'd made a nucleus hive to house it in, moved aside some greenery and plonked down one and a half paving slabs and couple of breeze blocks to sit it on. All I needed then was a load of bees to inhabit it. However I wasn't going to be buying more bees.

When people think of what a bee colony makes they generally think of honey and wax, someteimes they'll also think of propolis and royal jelly too but there's something else they make which whilst a little obvious people often overlook. It's bees d'oh! Queen bees take a little bit of planning, work, resources and luck but all being well over the summer a colony should be churning out between 1000-2000 new workers per day. So I figured I'd just make up a third colony from those I had.

There's a few ways to do this. Whilst it's actually pretty simple to move some bees, brood and eggs into another box that will give you a colony with no queen. A queenless colony will die out as existing bees age and die without being replaced by new ones. In fairness the bees will probably knock up an emergency queen from existing eggs in that case but she may not be as good quality a monarch as one selected normally.

My initial idea was to follow a fairly simple plan. Basically add a second brood box to my strongest hive with new frames of foundation for the bees to draw out and the queen to lay more eggs in. At some point I would then place two drawn supers and two queen excluders between the two brood boxes. The bees in the brood box without a queen seperated from the pheromones of the existing queen should then, in theory, make a new queen form one of the many eggs they have to choose from.

I selected Hive2 for this and added one of the brood boxes I'd made last year. I fed them up with syrup as they would need a lot of energy do draw all that comb and eventually gave the queen full run of both broods so she could lay more eggs and raise me more bees to populate the nuc. She certainly managed to make the that. I acquired two queen excluders from an auction, all was going to plan except one thing. The weather was being really unhelpful. We had acold wet Spring so there was no forage for the bees. With no forage the bees weren't going to be drawing supers anytime soon.

Luckily at the last auction I went to I'd picked up a set of 10 cell punches with which I was able to devise a plan B. :)

Cell Punches

A cell punch is a short metal tube about an inch long and sharpened at one end and with a plastic collar at the other. The other part of the punch is a wooden plug. Removing the wooden plug you use the sharp end of the cyclinder to cut out a complete cell with an egg in it from the comb.

Cutting out an egg

You then put the wooden plug bit back in the cylinder in the sharp end to push the cell to the plastic collar. Having done that you then secure the punch complete with wooden plug, cell and egg vertically with the cell opening downwards. The whole assembly then goes into a queenless hive. The idea is that the bees find this vertically oriented call, somehow overlook that it's made of brass and plastic rather than wax and start stocking it with royal jelly and do the necessary wax work themselves. This method is called cell punching. an is meant to be one of the simpler ways to raise queens.

I knocked up a frame for the cell punches using some bits of frame, a wooden lath and some of those nails that have a plastic bit to hold cables.

Frame adapted to hold cell punches

Well that was the plan anyway. I knew the plan. You now know the plan. Perhaps I should've told the bees the plan.

I populated the nuc with 4 frames of brood and food from Hive2. I used seven of the punches to cut seven cells containing eggs from another frame which I returned to Hive2. Why seven? I'd never done this before and didn't want to take too long between removing the eggs and placing them in the nuc. I then put the frame of now populated punches in the centre of the nuc. After this I shook out the bees from two more frames from Hive2 into the nucleus and smoked these down into the nuc brood box before adding a crownboard, feeder and replacing the roof. The reason I added extra bees was because whilst there were bees on the frames I'd just added any flying bees that left the nuc to forage would return to Hive2 -yes bees remember where they live.

I later checked the cell punches expecting to see some nice big queen cells but it was a non starter, the bees hadn't been keen so they'ed pulled out the eggs. I repeated the process and next time found the bees had decided to make one of them into a queen.

One new Queen Cell

I decided to place that queen in Hive1 in the hope that she would displace the existing queen. I put some tin foil round her for protection -otherwise the bees would sense the developing alien queen and kill her themselves. This still didn't work though. When I later checked to see if she'd hatched I found the workers had managed reach the side of the cell and kill the developing queen. So my first foray into queen rearing by cell punching was something of a failure. I later realised if I'd just left the new queen cell in the nucleus she'd've hatched in there and I could've later replaced the queen of Hive1 with her. I'm pretty sure I've learnt a little there and have no doubt I'll trying again at another point

Whilst contemplating a third attempt at cell punching I found the now somewhat crowded Hive2 had started making queen cells. I selected a frame with 2 supercedure queens cells on it and popped that into the nucleus instead of the cell punch frame. It also had some brood and eggs on to boost the numbers in the nuc which willl have been dwindling  whilst they failed to gain a queen. For good measure I also gave them another frame of capped brood. When I next inspected the hive I found an empty queen cell

Recently vacated queen cell

You can see the flap at the bottom where the queen made her exit. The other queen cell was on the other sde of the frame but I couldn't see any sign of it so I assume the new queen hatched then killed her opponent by stinging her in the cell and the workers tore down the cell. Just had to wait and see if she managed to mate next. Two weeks later I still haven't seen the queen but that's ok as there are single eggs are beng laid in the empty cells and I can see uncapped brood developing so I know there's now a mated queen in there even if I've not seen the little lady. Success. I now have a third colony complete with queen.

Later in the year I'll need to decide whether I want to use her to replace the queen of Hive1 or see if the whole colony can survive the winter in the nuc, or I may just unite this colony with whichever is weakest going into winter. Whether or not I replace the queen of Hive1 is largely going to depend upon whether or not I ever see the elusive little madam. I'd like to replace her because the bees of Hive2 are calmer than hers and also I've recently noticed Hive2 is filling the super faster than Hive1. When you replace a queen what as the existing bees age and die off naturally the new queen's offspriing are hatching and maturing to replace them. Given life expectancy of a summer worker bee it takes about 6 weeks to replace the whole colony. By changing the queen you can replace aggressive bees with more placid ones of the same breed or if you really want to you can completely change the race of your colony.

We Need Space

This year part of my plan is for my two hives to become two hives and a nucleus, a smaller 5 frame hive, which I hope to house a small colony in so I can have a spare queen for emergencies -emergencies of an "Oh Sandra Bullocks I've squashed the bloody Queen" nature. It's also handy to have a decent spare queen in reserve for just in case one of the colonies becomes aggressive or the incumbent Queen decides to start laying nothing but drones or something.

A commercial nuc is a fairly pricey proposition, Thorne do a rather well made and aesthetically pleasing one for just shy of £150 assembled, a couple of firms do a plywood Commercial Nuc for £42. I wasn't about to pay for Thornes offering and figured I could probably make something a little better for forty beertokens so I popped to the local woodshop and got some planks of 22mm, an offcut of thick ply for the roof and some thinner ones for crownboards and made myself a brand spanking new one. My effort is complete with a mesh floor, sliding correx board for underneath, a crownboard with a closeable hole for feeding, a second insulated crownboard for the winter, a cut down queen excluder and two supers. You don't normally use a queen excluder or supers on a nuc but my thinking was I'll need something to hold the roof up whilst I feed them anyway and it'll give me some room for the colony to expand over the summer. Assuming that goes to plan when I remove the supers from the nuc I'll just unite the excess bees with one of the other colonies, and possibly even reap a little more honey. Good plan Batman.

Here's one I made earlier

Being a relatively tall narrow construction with both supers in place there may be a danger of things toppling over. Wouldn't want that. Bees everywhere. No thanks. So to avoid that I gave the floor two wide feet for stablity and put a couple of screw down sash window locks in place to secure the brood box to it. The supers have right angled brackets on the corners to keep them from moving. I've also got the option of weighting or strapping down the feet if I feel the need. The brood box and one of the supers has mortise tennon joints on all the corners as well as 3" nails and wood glue holding them together, possibly a little overkill there, the other super is just screwed and glued together which in hindsight would've been adequate for the other components really ...ah well this thing is probably bombproof now. Like the hives I've put a little cover over the entrance to direct water away and reduce nighttime light pollution.

When the idea of keeping bees first came to me I'd envisioned having a single beehive merrily buzzing away in the corner of my garden. I cleared a little space, dropped some pavers and breezeblocks in place and happily plonked a beehive on top. Excellent. It soon became apparent that one hive was a risky proposition and I should really have two. Luckily after cutting back a tree there was enough room for two to sit together in the corner. Unfortunately there wasn't room for the nuc to go with the existing hives and placing it anywhere else would've meant garden users (and by garden users I mean me) being in the flightpath of the bees. My only option was to make some space next to the existing hives, this meant moving a bush that was growing there but I thought it'd be fairly easy to prune it, dig it up, move it two feet to the right and replant it.

Move a plant 2 feet to the right? How big a job could that be?

Out comes the trusty machette , chop chop chop, in a couple of minutes I'd pruned the plant to just the right size and shape for it's new location. Then I grabbed the spade and got digging. Unfortunately the shrubby bush thing's trunk was right next to Hive1 and the back was against the wall so I couldn't get to two sides to dig it, also it'd been planted about 12 or 13 years ago and it's root system was pretty extensive. I decided to dig a small trench in front of it then undermine it and pull it out, with minimum fuss and minimum attention from the bees. It didn't go as easily as I'd envisioned -very little ever does. Having dug out two sides and underneath I was unable to move the thing. I waterlogged the soil to soften the ground and tried chopping roots on the other two sides as best I could with the spade. At one point an angry bee came whizzing out at me so I smartly stepped away and decided to give it a few minutes before resuming work. After a green tea I put my gloves back on and promptly flung off the left one. There was a bee in it. I removed the bee and carried on digging till it got dark at which point I decided to call it a night and went out to see Southport and Whizzwood play a charity gig. It was Whizzwood's first gig in ten years and it went a lot smoother than my efforts to move the bloody plant.

Next day when the fuzz of the previous evening had cleared and it'd cooled so the bees weren't flying much I resumed my gardening venture. After another hour of chopping at roots and riving the plant I managed to haul it out using a strap secured round the trunk. Progress, woohoo!

Victory is a muddy garden

Dug a new hole, hitting clay about 18 inches down and got the thing replanted, watered it in and refilled in the hole I'd left in it's original position. No doubt it'll take a while to recover having lost so many roots but I suspect it'll pull through. I'll probably sling it some vermicompost at some point.

I then went to the shed to find my spare paving slabs, there should've been five. They weren't there. I forgot I'd turned most of them into rubble during an afternoon of tameshiwari a couple of summers ago (yes, I do have other interests in case you were wondering), the remainder was what I'd placed under the existing hives. Well I still had half of one left over which was going to be fairly useful as I was needed one and a half pavers to go under the hive anyway. Following a trip to B&Q the next day to get the other one I finally got the nuc in place. It's empty at the moment, and probably will be for a while yet so I blocked the entrance with some kitchen sponge so it didn't turn into a home for slugs and other unwelcomes. With the mesh floor open and crownboard feed hole open too I think it'll be ventilated enough that damp won't present a problem whilst Hive2 builds up numbers and eventually makes me a new queen to go in there. The new paver looks a lot brighter than the rest but that'll fade with time and I doubt the bees will notice.

Poor relation over on the right.

If the hive's hadn't already been in place it would've actually been pretty simple to dig out the plant before paving the area instead of trying to work from one corner. I would suggest anyone planning to install a bee hive in the corner of the garden, allotment or wherever avoid the messing about later and start out budgeting for space for two hives and a nuc. If you don't add a nucleus later you'll just have a little more space to work with.