Latest News from my hive.
Update from 4th September 2015.
Well it's been a busy time since my last update and the main reason it has been so long is I droped my laptop and broke the screen which meant I didn't have access to the Internet to update.
After losing my bees in the winter of 2013 I went a full year without bees but had a new colony on order from Mike The Bee Man.
Ironically I collected these on June 15th 2015 and I caught a swarm a week later.
I wasn't 100% sure if I had caught the queen with the swarm, so I transfered a frame of newly hatched brood and eggs from my other colony. Bees are able to promote a normal worker into a queen provided the chosen worker is less than 3 days old.
Every newly hatched bee is fed Royal Jelly during the first 3 days of it's life before being fed a mixture of honey, nectar and polen. The queen bee however is fed only royal jelly all it's life. This allows her reproductive organs to develop which allows her to mate and lay eggs.
So at the moment I have two colonies as I head into the winter of 2015/6, I hope they both survive the winter as I hope to buy another two hives next year and increase my apiary to four or even five hives of bees.
Update 2nd April 2014
My bees didn't survive the winter and I found them all dead today when I went to check on them to see how they were doing after the winter.
What went wrong?
My bees didn't seem to be eating anywhere near the amount of sugar fondant I was giving them that I expected. I had only needed to replace the 1kg slab of fondant once since November when I shut the hive up for winter.
I hadn't taken into account my bees were also eating the honey they had stored for winter, this was deeper in the hive than the fondant I had given them. Since they were hardly touching the fondant I thought they had enough to last them a long time. Oncemy bees had eaten all they honey stores they ate the fondant faster than i thought they would.
Basicly I never replaced the fondant fast enough once they had finished the honey stores and they starved to death.
I plan on getting more bees next month which will be several months sooner than I got them last year, this extra time should give them more time to gather more stores for next winter.
