What's new on the farm:
Happy Summer Solstice! It's officially summer and we are ready for some hot weather. June is an easier-going month for beekeeping for us compared to the rest of the year.
It's the calm before the storm, the last bit of respite before we get into harvest mode in the latter part of July and the rest of August.
Most of our time is spent checking the hives to see how they are growing and if they are healthy.
We also spend a lot of time making new hives with all the queens we've bought or raised.
To make a new hive, we go through our really strong hives which have lots of brood (baby bees) and a strong worker population.
From each hive, we will take one or two frames of brood plus a frame of worker bees that will help start the next hive.
We put the donor brood and bees into a new hive box and then move the box to a separate apiary site.
We move to a new site because honeybees have excellent homing instincts and know which hive they belong to. If the worker bees leave their new hive box and are in the same environment as their old hive, they will find their way back to their old hive.
By moving to a separate apiary site, they will be in a completely new environment when they leave the new hive.
When this happens, they will readjust their sense of "home" and observe all the environmental cues surrounding their new hive (trees, grass, fences) as markers to know how to get to their new home.
After a day in their new hive without a queen, the bees get pretty antsy to have a queen in their hive. We either introduce in one of the queens that we have made, or put in a queen that we purchased.
The queen is placed in the hive in a closed cage so that the worker bees can't get in and she can't get out.
This is because workers are hostile to foreign bees, and her pheromone is unfamiliar to them, which can trigger them to attack her.
So we keep her caged to protect her while she has the opportunity to spread her pheromone throughout the hive through contact with the worker bees through the cage walls.
After a day, they will have become used to her, so we can then release the queen from the cage so that she can freely move about her new colony.
There's still a chance that they might turn on her later and kill her, so a week later, we will check the hive to see if the queen has been laying eggs. If she has, then we know the new hive is a success!
For those of you who have been following along each week, you'll be glad to hear that all of the Buckfast queens that we introduced were accepted with 100% success! If you missed that newsletter issue, you can read it here!
This is the most sustainable way to make new hives because you can generate them from your own population of bees.
Firstly, it's less costly than importing hives from other beekeepers or countries.
More importantly, using your own bees and queens also means you know that those bees are acclimatized to your environment and will likely survive better than bees that are from vastly different climates.
