It's now necessary for us continue with the varroa treatment plan we started several weeks ago. It is not recommended to disturb colonies with virgin queens but this is an ideal opportunity for varroa treatment with them being in a broodless state. It means that all the varroa mites present (and there has been a sizeable infestation here, especially in N1 and N2) are currently only surviving on adult bees, just waiting for some suitable bee brood to infest.
If we insert some bait frames now, every varroa mite in the colony will enter them to breed. Destroying these bait frames before they hatch out should eradicate the entire infestation without using any chemicals at all.
This does of course mean sacrificing some frames of otherwise perfectly healthy bee brood, but with varroa mites being such a devastating parasite it is a sacrifice well worth making.
.
Beatrix: 1 mite drop in a week
We have already successfully used the bait comb treatment on this colony - it now only shows one single mite drop in a week, a phenomenal reduction from the original infestation. We are now using it to provide the bait combs for the two original nucs.
We selected two suitable frames, one for each nuc. They need to be full of eggs and larvae. This one is ideal - a small amount of pollen stored around the edges and the rest of it full on both sides with freshly laid eggs. These stand up on one end and look like minuscule grains of rice.
We have selected young eggs on purpose, rather than developed larvae, so that the nucleus colonies can actually use some eggs to raise a new queen, just in case the single queen cells I left in each one have not yet produced a queen. If they don't need to raise a queen they will just assume these eggs are hers and treat them as their own.
This other frame is in an identical state, with plenty of fresh eggs and a small quantity of developed larvae.
I carefully brushed every single bee off these two frames and carried them over to the two nucs.
N1 first. There was no sign of a queen or any brood at all so we removed one frame of stored honey and placed the bait frame in the centre, where you would normally expect to find brood developing.
N2 next. This is in an identical state - no sign of a queen and no brood at all.
Having brushed off every bee from the two frames of stores we swapped them over to Bea's colony. We closed these three colonies up and continued with the next ones..
Charlotte: zero mite drop in a week.
This colony has also had successful bait comb treatment and will provide the bait comb for the new hive.
As we scanned through the brood frames looking for suitable ones to remove we saw a right mess on this one - a wax moth larva [see here] has been eating a load of the brood cappings! As soon as I took the photo above my wife shrieked - there was an inch-long wiggly thing waving at us out of the brood! It is actually just visible in the photo above, on the far left side, caught just before it popped out and did the gruesome wiggle at us!
I quickly dug away the cappings where it was with my hive tool but it had already popped back in, ghastly creature! It made our skin crawl to look at it, I just hope a bee will be quicker than I was the next time it comes out for air! Yuck!!.
New Hive: 30 mite drop in a week.
This is the first bait comb frame, loads of young larvae on both sides.
And this is the second frame, slightly further developed larvae but still unsealed, so an ideal temptation for a varroa mite!There was also no sign of a laying queen in this colony yet but she would only be a week old now - she should be laying within the next few days, hopefully.
There is nothing more we can do now but wait for a fortnight and then remove and destroy all these bait combs and hopefully all the varroa mites with them!
As soon as I lifted the first marked frame out with a queen cell I noticed something very exciting - the queen was actually hatching out before my eyes!
This cell was the one shown still sealed over just one hour ago - the one on the same frame as the empty cell which produced the cast swarm. I couldn't get a good photo of her hatching out and as I rested the corner of the frame down to try to take a better photo she ran off the side of it!
By pure luck, I caught a glimpse of where she had run to - she'd scooted straight into the corner of the brood box and I managed to take a couple of pictures of her.
Surprisingly, she isn't remotely 'fluffy' like the worker bees usually are when they have just hatched [
She didn't hang about for long and I didn't want to distress her so I just watched her scurry off down into the brood box.
At least I now know for sure that this colony has a live queen in it - I quickly worked my way through every other frame removing every single queen cell on it.
I saved them all in a tub to have a closer look at later, though it was clear that some of them were actually empty! It just shows that it's impossible to tell from looking at it just what is really inside.
I need to do exactly the same in both the nucs now - this one first.
Having removed every inferior-looking cell, these two looked the 'best' to me, but which one to save and which one to leave? I just had to plump for one as they both looked identical.
I decided to keep the one on the left - it was surprising that such a large queen cell still only contains a small pupa, as shown in the picture.
This nuc next, as you can see I've already accumulated a whole pile of discarded queen cells.
I chose to leave this cell in this colony - it was noticeably the largest and fattest of the lot. I decided to open up the end of that one extremely long queen cell I'd photographed earlier, thinking that if it contained a fully-developed queen already I could just manually release her, but surprisingly it only contained a small undeveloped pupa, despite the vast size of it!
This colony was artificially swarmed a little while ago and they have plenty of room -we are not expecting to find any evidence of swarming here.
A good pattern of eggs and brood here and they have started building up good stores already.
Sure enough, Charlie is still here, laying happily. Nothing to concern us in this colony so we quickly moved on to the next one:
Just like the previous colony, this queen has already been artificially swarmed so everything should be fine in here.
Just like in Charlie's colony, they have started building across the brood box but there is still plenty of room for expansion.
Sure enough, we found Bea quickly. This a relief because it shows that we did artificially swarm them correctly - there seems to be no evidence of swarming here at all now.
Time to look at the swarm we caught two days ago - they should have started settling into their new home.
They have already built up the foundation on a couple of frames, just on the further side.
We found the queen quickly enough - there aren't many bees here as it was just a cast swarm. A cast swarm occurs when a new queen hatches and, instead of staying in the hive and leading the colony herself, she immediately swarms from the hive, even before mating, taking all the flying bees and as much honey as they can carry. This seriously depletes the strength of an already-weakened colony and I thought I'd taken all the necessary precautions to prevent this from happening, but obviously that didn't work!
Sure enough, she's a virgin queen. As shown in the photos, her abdomen is visibly far smaller than our other two queens because, as she has not yet mated, her ovaries haven't swelled up yet. A fertile queen is an egg-laying machine; she can lay more than her whole body-weight in eggs in just one day! This young queen will need to mate in the next few days and then hopefully we will find that she is successfully laying eggs next time we check.
These are our first two nucleus hives. These have been queenless so far but we are hoping to find laying queens in them now - either one of these (or even neither of them!) could have produced the cast swarm.
The drawing pin stuck in that frame above is there to remind me which frame we left in there with a good queen cell on it...
... but looking at this frame there is no sign of the queen cell at all.
Instead there are two different queen cells, clearly ripe and ready to hatch...
... and then on another frame two more, also ready to hatch at any moment! We found a total of six ripe queen cells in this nucleus.
This colony is the exact other half of the previous N1 nucleus.
Again, the frames with queen cells was marked with drawing pins, and again, there was no sign of the cells we had left there!
Instead there were also loads of different, ripe queen cells!
This one was huge - apparently this can happen when a queen tries to hatch out but the workers won't let her - every time she nibbles her way out they just stuff a bit more food in there and seal her up again! I have no idea why they are doing this, it just seems bizarre.
I had relocated this hive shortly before the queen was due to hatch so that she would not have any flying bees to take with her in a cast swarm but I must have moved it too soon, despite all my careful calculations.
It's a very long one, like she was sealed in there well beyond her 'due date' and it is now obviously recently vacated - the jagged edge where the queen nibbled her way out is still visible. This is clearly where the swarm queen came from two days ago.
There was also this other ripe queen cell on this same frame..