So only six weeks since the last pillaging of combs of brood and honey to make three walk away splits - and the TBHs were again bursting and full of comb and
honey and brood - so more splits
Earlier in the week I had finally finished the painting of the eleven angstorth style hives i made during school holidays - and my wife could have our carport back for her car. Man those end grains take up a heap of paint.
I also had to quickly change the style
of front entrance landing platform – previous version a bit flimsy
Also did some CAD designing and then 3D
printed some hive entrances I could attach to the hives to close off hives
during transport. the slide lid can be reversed to close off entrance.
First task once the bee suit was on and the smoker started was to transfer the old splits in shorter TBHs from 7 weeks ago into the eleven new Langstroth hives I had made recently.
To do this, I took two of my
shallow super boxes, removed and stored the frames – then to place the two empty
shallow boxes on top of the brood box – this to fit in the deeper TBH frames.
It was hoped (and expected) that the
bees will migrate down into the brood box frames before adding a queen excluder
between brood box and shallow boxes. The TBH frames can be removed for repeated
use in splits and such back in to the older TBH boxes– and the shallow frames put back into the
shallow boxes for honey collection
Well that’s the plan!
Of the three previous splits – two TBH boxes
were absolutely full of brood and pollen, even a bit of new comb with the
starting of honey being capped - so an active queen is present – but while she wasn’t
seen a very active hive.
After transfer of placing the new box in the old box’s place – the bees where not entirely happy as – wrong shape and colour but eventually the foraging bees found their way in and adjusted by the evening
The one split that didn’t have a queen – was all old workers and
heaps of honey but zero brood eggs, larva etc – will add a frame or two of eggs
and nursery bees from the big TBHs asap to this one to give it another chance
My Brother-in-law and a mate of
his are working on some queens so maybe might get one of those queens - if it
happens and is timely for the hive
So two out of three walk aways
succeed from last attempt – enthused me to try again
But only enough combs of honey, pollen
and brood from the large TBHs for two attempts this time
Sat these two new splits away from other hives on another frame work of 40mm pipe. I used two of the new hives I made here again – so far not much going on but hope the ladies are making their new queen for me
Forgot to grease legs and by
morning ginger ants were attempting a coup - Fixed that up right away
Will be 5-6 weeks before I check
on these again
The big TBHs were a mess of cross
comb and were totally agro at my shifting, moving and cutting frames - those ladies were surely pissed off at me –
really charging the net of my hood with a repeating “thunk” as they hit it.
During the process - got some honey and some comb for personal use – actually, I gave away most of it
