It's been a long Easter Weekend.
Suddenly the weather has turned and the bees sure do know it.
Weve spent most of the weekend adding supers (the boxes used for honey storage) to the hives, and I've been pondering over whether I need more. All the planning over winter I used the assumption that I would need an avg of 2.2 supers per colony this year. So expecting roughly 40lb of honey per hive in spring and 40lb in summer. That feels like a very optimistic figure. But it seems that we are in the position of having 6 weeks to go before we take the spring honey off, and we are down to the last 20 spare boxes. I think if the weather remains good I'll be panic buying again.
Other tasks this weekend included starting our queen rearing. Only our very best queens are chosen each year to breed new queens from and the first step is to put the chosen queen into a small frame to get her to lay egg into transferable cells.
My son, Dylan (age 8) has been helping a little and is very excited at the prospect of next week establishing his own 2 colonies from scratch using some queens we have in the incubator at the moment. This is his opportunity to learn all the skills involved in beekeeping from making a colony, managing it and finally one of the two he plans to sell so he can keep the profits for things he would like to buy (no doubt some kind of games console).
He learned this weekend how to mark a queen, a harmess process which makes it easier for us beekeepers find her later on.
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