All for nothing

Due to a motorcycle accident I had on 5th June 2014 I will be unable to look after the bees for quite a time, as I am not well enough on my legs and don't have the core strength to lift heavy things either. This means the bees will run wild until I can look after them again. All my careful planning and work with the queens has therefore been more or less pointless and I have no clue whether I'll be able to extract the honey currently in the supers in any simple way.
Although I always wanted to train up a second beekeeper in the school for situations such as these (not that I anticipated having an accident - I was thinking more of illness or holidays), all attempts to do this failed for one reason or another; schools are busy environments, I guess. My accident has made me realise that it is vital we have one and I hope to have a second soon.

Voracious readers

Two days after having newspapered together the green queen with her court and the Star hive, I went to have a look whether all had gone as planned. The idea was that the bees should have chewed through the newspaper and found sweet unity together. Indeed, when I got to the Star, a covering of fuzz lay beneath it - obviously the remains of the dailies and tabloids which the bees had consumed in a rather different way to how we usually do. But was the queen all right?

Headlines down low

Having taken off the supers (the old one was very heavy - good news for the honey crop!), I saw that the bees had devoured all the reading material I had given them. Looking into the nuc's brood box, I saw the green queen happily moving about. So everything worked out as I had hoped and the green queen is now the new Star queen.

The wall has been breached!

The only thing I had to do was put the three frames from the nuc that had brood on them into the main brood body of the Star hive. This was not quite as simple as it sounds and the feather was put to extensive use, as all frames that were no longer going to be used had to be clear of bees. Try explaining to a bee that the room she has been using so far suddenly will cease to exist. Eventually all was back to normal and I stored the extra equipment after all bees had left it. The Star hive is now full to bursting, so I suspect they will want to swarm soon. It never ends....

Everything back to normal

Marie Antoinette

Now that I know which queen is where and why, I inspected Moon, Star and nuc (or should I call it (mushroom) Cloud?) to see how they are doing.
The new Moon queen is laying beautifully with a good laying pattern (just as it should be) and some frames are completely laid out already. She's obviously on her 2000-a-day (eggs, not fruit & veg), as eggs seemed to be everywhere. Some frames are not drawn out and the new super is as yet unused. With so much to keep the bees busy, I hope they won't think of swarming any time soon.
I didn't see the queen herself, which is disappointing, also because I need to mark her.
As this queen is doing well, I thought I would exchange the Star queen with the new green queen, which I've been wanting to do for a while now.
The green queen is also laying fastidiously and the nuc is a lovely little colony.

Last view of the yellow Star queen - RIP

In the Star all is also well, though I saw lots of drones and took off a whole row of capped drone cells. As I wanted to introduce the green queen into the Star, I caught the yellow queen, which once again was not as easy as it should be. Somehow they never want to be caught...

Having put her to one side, I covered the brood box of the Star with newspaper, put an empty broodbox over it and filled it with the frames from the nuc. Newspaper on top of that separated the nuc bees from the Star bees in the supers. The theory is that the bees will chew their way through the newspaper and by the time they have, the Star colony will have accepted the green queen which I have foisted on them. Hope that all works that way.

Something for the bees to read

The Starscraper with newspaper separating the green queen and her court
from the rest of the Star colony

The Star hive now looks like a skyscraper, or more like the leaning tower of Pisa, as I have discovered that the brick on one side must have slid, as the hive is no longer level, but lopsided.




After having closed the Starscraper, I then had to kill the old Star queen. This was undoubtedly one of the more unpleasant things I've had to do in my life and certainly the worst thing I've ever done with the bees. Still feel sad and bad about it.