Another quarter of this years new trainees were in the Training Apiary for the first time this year, and we had some interesting things to show them.  James led, Elsa and I took a few through some of the Plastic hives, others led a few more, with James, through the wooden ones.

My main hive is doing well, but wasn’t quite ready for a third Super yet. Some laying in 3 frames, but the newly mated queen isn’t quite up to speed yet.  The 2nd hive is now seeing heavy laying, but not much work in the Super still.  Maybe I should give them some water/sugar mix to help them build?

James then called us over to Hive 11, where they’d caught the queen and had decided to clip her:

The idea is to stop her swarming, and taking half the colony with her.  You can see her here, marked for last year, as James goes in with the snips to catch her wings.

We then moved onto the two plastic hives in the middle that had had problems with Chalk Brood and were now two separate hives.  Both seemed to be doing well now, with all the queen cells in the one that didn’t get the queen in the split now open, so one had won the battle and is now in charge.  No laying yet though, but still some older brood yet to hatch, so they’ll be fine.

The two new beekeepers did most of the work, so I had more time for pictures – which includes the one right at the top, showing an open and empty queen cell.

We’ve got new record sheets in each hive now, so we also made sure they were filled in each time, and popped in under the roofs, so we can see how things have changed over the weeks.

Mid-season, so not much else to do.  The group that had been building under one hive had gone, so clearly someone else dealt with them.  So other than patching the corner of the fencing, I had little else to do.