It’s cold and frosty here at the moment. Any brambles that haven’t lost all their leaves look like this …
Cold brambles
… but it won’t be too long until the days get warmer and they flower again …
Hot brambles
… my bees are usually a lot darker than the one in the picture above which was taken in September. I suspect this was a visitor from a neighbouring apiary, possibly the same one that also provided a lovely swarm that occupied a bait hive of mine earlier in the year. Here’s the queen (now clipped and marked) at the end of June …
Or perhaps that should be “Time to change the queen?”. This disappointing brood pattern suggests that the queen is not laying very well and that – with an excellent flow from the bramble and clover – the bees are filling any gaps they can find with nectar before the queen has a chance to lay.
Patchy brood pattern …
The colony has ample space in the supers and there were several other frames with a similar patchy brood pattern. The colony is very strong. Clearly the bees also think a new queen is needed by the row of charged queen cells along the top bar. There was even one attached directly to the queen excluder. I could have transferred this directly to a queenless colony without any further manipulation.
Queen cell on excluder …
However, I’m waiting for the most recently grafted larvae to be sealed, so it will be about three weeks before I have spare mated queens to replace the current one. In the meantime I’ve given her another chance. I knocked all the queen cells back and did my normal Demaree swarm control. I’ll let the bees exploit the good flow to draw out some foundationless frames and see if the queen lays these up well.
