Mating Apiary Visit

I have been blundering my way through twelve years (feels like more) of beekeeping and, more recently, raising queens, so some people might assume that I have achieved beekeeping enlightenment. What’s more, I have had the privilege to travel and meet/work with/interview some very enlightened keepers of bees, some of whom are now friends. Then I went and wrote a couple of books. Given all of this, the chairperson of a local beekeeping association thought members would benefit from a visit to my mating apiary. To see how it’s done, walrus style.

Tidying Up

With plenty of notice, I was able to tidy up and get the mating apiary looking reasonably organised. Old equipment was hurled on a fire or chucked in a bin, grass was cut to create an Augusta, Georgia vibe (not!), and I managed to ensure that some mating nucs were populated with bees and queens. More importantly, I acquired a large water boiler so that tea and coffee could be provided alongside Costco pastries and sandwiches. What could possibly go wrong?

Making Queens

It always surprises me that so few beekeepers make queens of their own; deliberately I mean, not through losing swarms. As I explained to the assembled crowd about how I select queens, make cell builders, graft and so forth, I was not 100% confident that many people knew what I was talking about. I suppose that’s how I was when I started; I heard the words and could picture some of it, but how it all fits together remained a bit of a mystery. That’s what books are for, and apiary visits.

However, my cell building site is several miles away from the mating place, and this was a visit to see where my queens blossom from nervous virgins into plump, content, laying machines. Well, sometimes, anyway. I am pleased that I was able to demonstrate how I use both mini-plus hives (which I prefer) and Kieler mating nucs (which are a bit of a pain). We managed to see eggs, and mark and clip a queen. Given the appalling lack of summer sunshine this season, I was happy to find that at least some of my queens have got on with the job, and will soon be ready to move on to larger nucs and hives.

The Easy Way

I was keen to show visitors the correct size of larvae to choose for grafting, which I think I did successfully. Most people only need a couple of queens, and they are not going to invest time and money into cell builders and grafting, and all the other stuff that goes with the territory. For such beekeepers, I still think it is important to exercise some selectivity – to raise daughter queens from one of their best. Simply adding a frame containing eggs and young larvae from the hive of a good queen, and placing it into a nuc with some bees, sealed brood and stores, and no queen or cells (!) should be enough to result in a new colony with a laying queen in 4-6 weeks. Simples.

Introducing New Queens

The art of introducing queens was discussed, and is a tricky issue for many beekeepers. There is no getting away from it, acceptance of newly introduced queens will not be 100%. My way, as I explained, is to try to move queens to nuclei first (five or six full-sized frames), then onto production sized colonies. I also use my homemade push-in cages for introduction, which work very well most of the time. Sometimes, even when the new queen is accepted, she is replaced a few weeks later. Bees, eh?

Catalogue Of Disasters

Any illusion that I have achieved beekeeping mastery was soon dashed. In a couple of hours I managed to show folks a colony with a pepper pot brood pattern (I will have to change that queen and maybe treat for varroa), a mated queen who was about half the size she should have been (she needs to go), a colony that had swarmed – somebody kindly pointed to the bees hanging in a nearby tree, and my larger colonies had less than a single super of honey in each of them. Oh yes, I also managed to demonstrate the ‘nucleus method’ of swarm control on a nuc which had a current season’s queen, yet had decided to make queen cells.

Silver Lining

On the plus side, I managed to sell a few books, a nucleus colony and a bucket of honey (from an apiary that actually produces the stuff). And there were sandwiches and pastries left over, which the mole and I worked our way through later that day.

The following day we had a trip to London to see the musical Hadestown at the Lyric theatre in the West End. Wow! If you like that sort of thing (and how could you not?) I would highly recommend it.