The H.E.M.T.

Sunday's Bee Trading was huge fun. The best part was renting the Honey Extraction Machine Thingy (H.E.M.T) to take it home with me at the end of the morning. It's time to extract some honey - whooohoooo!

So I went down to the hives today with a clear list of tasks:

Itchy Knee:

• Check to see if the colony looks "queen-right", and if temper has improved.
• Do that Brood Super inspection I didn't get to last time.
• Place extra Crown Board complete with 2 Portis Bee Escapes between Honey Supers 1 and 2.

On San-Shi:

• Check to see if colony is "queen-right".
• Add brood frames to make up for the ones that have been missing so far, so that "bee space" is now correct in the hive.
• Ensure colony is growing well, and make doubly sure it has room to grow.

Well,

• Itchy Knee does not look queen-right anymore. Brood is decreasing, I didn't see a Queen (I've never seen this new Queen), and there are no early rice-grain eggs.
• I think I made a fatal error - I destroyed an uncapped Queen Cell filled with larva and Royal Jelly, but there's still a Play Cell.
• There just seemed to be too many frames of honey - perhaps they don't have a Queen, are running out of things to do, and are just bringing in honey now. As a temporary stop-gap I took one frame out, and put a new framed sheet of foundation in, but this is not the long-term solution.
  
• I didn't achieve the Brood Super inspection, other than inspecting underneath for QCs.
• I did manage to put the extra Crown Board in place.
• Temper is extremely, extremely bad.
  

San-Shi - bless them - are wonderful. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

• They were busting out all over with honey-rich wild comb, so I broke that off, and gave them 2 new frames to starting drawing wax out - bringing them up to their full complement of 11 frames.
• I inspected every frame and there were 3 empty Play Cells. Left 'em alone.
• I saw all stages of brood, including lots of early stage rice-grain eggs. She's been laying in the last 3 days.
• At least 5 frames of brood now; maybe I need to super them soon. (Time to buy yet another super!)
• Above all, they were calm, calm, calm, happy and not fussed by my intervention at all. Bless 'em!

So in a day or two, I go down to Itchy Knee to check that all the bees have escaped from the top Honey Super, and I take it off the Hive. I then spend the evening in the kitchen, exploring the delights of whizzing full honey supers round and round in the H.E.M.T. Once that's done, I take the "wet" emptied Super frames back to Itchy Knee and replace them in the top Super.

I am thinking that I may take 1 or 2 frames from San-Shi and put them into Itchy Knee's Brood Box. If it's properly filled with a mix of early rice grain eggs, capped brood, honey and young nurse bees, it may save them. From this frame they can rear a new Queen if they do not have a laying Queen anymore, as I am beginning to suspect.

I will do that at the same time as I replace the Honey Super filled with empty "wet" frames. This encourages the bees to clean the comb and, all being well, refill the existing empty comb with even more honey, for another possible Honey Harvest later in the year.

As I write, I'm wondering "who am I really writing this for anymore?" But in a way, instinctively, I do know; more than anything this blog has become an extension of the minute details recorded in my Hive Notes - a narrative for me to understand the unfolding story of each hive on a broader scale so that, with the wider view gained from a distance, I can plan the way forward.

I write this with a throbbing left calf, stung good and proper, to remind me to be a humble and respectful Bee Farmer, to pay attention to the bees, and to consider that it may be the bees of Itchy Knee who are suffering more stress than anyone else right now.