Green Queens

Wednesday 24th June

A fabulously hot day today – I closed the shop a bit early today so I could nip back home and see how the bees are because we didn’t have time at the weekend.

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First Hive:

Loads of gummy propolis all over the place today and now this second super is about a third full of honey – at this rate I expect there may be several pounds of surplus honey to harvest this year, but I can’t guess how much until the end of July. I’ll estimate what they have in total at the end of the honey flow and then calculate just what each colony will require to overwinter successfully. Anything surplus to their requirements would not be used by them until the following year, by which time the new honey flow will be on and the ‘old’ honey would be wasted.

Propolis all over the brood chamber frames too and the bees seemed a bit bad tempered with us as well, for no good reason as far as we could tell.

We spotted the queen here fairly quickly (she’s in the bottom left corner) and, fairly predictably I suppose, has barely a trace of green paint left on her, only ten days after being marked!

We didn’t bother trying to mark her again this time - we need expert advice on this, I think! Everything else looked good in the hive so we closed up and moved on to the next one.

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Second Hive:

Once we’d opened up this hive we noticed that the bees were much calmer. The guard bees from the first hive soon gave up bothering us and these ones seemed far more placid.

Lots of propolis gumming everything up here as well and we saw some bees with lumps of it on their legs having recently harvested it.

We found the queen quite easily again (in the centre, near the bottom) and of course...

...she had just a few traces of green left. ‘Bee paint’, they call it? I think it might just be poster paint in a fancy pot!