On Sunday I harvested two supers of honey from Colony 1. They had filled three supers during the spring and had started building comb on top of the crown board.
Harvesting is fairly straightforward now. Cut; spin; strain; put into containers. Easy.
I saw the first worker wasp of the season. She was hovering near Colony 1.
Earlier this season we saw a lot of Queen wasps. This suggests that it may be a waspy year. There have also been lots of aphids for the wasps to feed on. Wasps require mostly protein early in the seasons which they use to feed their brood. They switch increasingly to needing sugar during the season, which is why they try to rob honey bee colonies.
Colony 1 has been very busy. I opened the top today to find three full supers. The bees were even building above the crown board and would very soon have run out of space.
I lifted off two of the three supers and put two new ones in their place. Then I put a Canadian Clearer Board and replaced the two full ones on top. In a day or two there will be an early harvest.
Colony 1 has been continuously occupied for over 6 years. Every spring, except 2018, there have been bees crawling around outside the hive -- stricken with Deformed Wing Virus or some other paralysing virus. These bees became food for Sparrows.
This year seems worse than previous years. There appear to be more bees crawling and for longer. This might not be worse than usual but it feels it. In April it was mostly Drones which were crawling around. Now it is more likely to be workers.
I have seen a worrying number of Varroa bodies on the floors of my hives. This is particularly concerning at the start of the season because it suggests much higher numbers of the mites later in the season. If I was a conventional bee keeper I would treat the hives now. I'm not going to. We'll see what happens.
All four hives which went into winter have survived. All four are now busy and apparently thriving.
There is dropped pollen on the base boards. There are dropped brood cappings. There is evidence that they're cleaning out old cells (the fine brown dust on the base board). There are also wax moth droppings -- showing that wax moth move in while the bees are in their winter cluster. I didn't see any ejected wax moth larvae. I did seem some dead Varroa.
There is lots of blossom around. The season is underway.
All my current hives (A, D, E, G) are upright (after the recent windy weather) and sound. The hives are fairly heavy, which is reassuring. A peak through the door shows the floor to be fairly clear. Their colonies (1, 4, 8, 12) appear to be fine. They were flying when the weather was warmer; there is evidence of activity on the base board.
The base boards have darker chewed wax which usually means brood hatching. It's hard to know when this was fell because I've only occasionally looked. It does suggest that there has been a slow but steady rearing of brood.
A week ago I brought Colony 11 back to my apiary in Headington and combined it with Colony 1. I'm not sure whether to call it a success or a failure but it is now done.
I moved Colony 11 again from its temporary location back to Headington on the evening of Saturday 8th Sept. Early the next morning. I removed the top of Hive A and Hive B. I placed a sheet of newspaper over the crown board. I cracked the body of Hive B from its base and placed it on top of of the newspaper. The hives were now separated but joined.
I moved Colony 11 to another site in the hope that it would recover. I put honey in a feeder to bolster it. It didn't stop the robbing, although it did significantly reduce it.
Yesterday I plucked up courage and actually examined the comb in the brood area. There were no brood and I couldn't find a Queen. I decided that there was no point feeding wasps or other bees. It was time to combine Hive B (Colony 11) with Hive A (Colony 1).
The unfortunate Colony 11 has been robbed today by Colony 1. I think that I've stemmed the robbing but I will have to move Colony 11 for the second time tonight.
The action began around lunchtime today. There was a big increase in activity at the entrance of Colony 11 and Colony 1. There were bees flying widely around my garden; their flight paths were hard to follow. There were bees behind the hive and under it too. They crawled under the base board. I thought this was strange but didn't see immediately that it was robbing.