Late August (27th)
Quite a big reorganisation today for the girls, (I hope they approve!). As you will have read from my previous "Tales from the Cornerfield Apiary" our Victoria swarm has lost it queen a couple of weeks ago, as a result of this we had paired the   swarm with the small "Mary" swarm , thereby giving them a new queen and the Mary swarm a better chance of surviving the winter as they were small ( 6 frames of bees).
Well today we inspected to see if they had paired and the holes chewed in the dividing newspaper signalled that they had!
So on this visit we took one of the supers from the now very busy Mary swarm and have paired it with the other of our small swarms " Queen Anne". so again in a week or so this these should also be paired thus completing the reinforcement of the two " Queen right"small swarms for the coming winter.
In a week or so I can see how "Anne" got on and then later  take off the queen exclude rs , because the queens will have stopped laying now for the winter, and they will be able to get up into the super and the stored honey so they does not starve!
Last but not least as soon as the weather cools a little more its time to treat them for for Varoa, that will be at its worst at the end of the summer.
That,s it for now I will write again soon.

August the 16th visit

Its Now August 16th, its over two weeks since I visited the Apiary, having taken off the last of the honey that once spun proved to be another 10.5 Lb . it was time to see how the possible new ( Victoria) queen was doing in hive with two Queen cells.
Well sadly it looks like either she has failed or perhaps was never there. But I did find tow new , what looked like new queen cells under construction. This and the fact that the brood box should be full of "polished " cells waiting for the new queen to start laying .led me to  believe that that this swarm was "queen less".
Its now the end of season as I said in my last blogg, so even if the two Q cells I found did turn out to be queens, the chances of them getting matted this late in the season is slim. This means that the swarm would survive the winter on its stores, but come the spring there would be no queen and new brood to carry on and the old brood once it stated harvesting in the 2015 spring would all die in five or six weeks.
So there is only one solution, and that is to join this queen less one with a Queen right one.
That's my mission for the next visit. I will put newspaper with some small holes punched in it onto the top of one of the Mary swarm as it is  only just big enough to survive the coming winter, then plonk the old Victoria hive on to. The bees will  get used to each other through the holes, chew their way through and be one big happy family for the winter! (I hope!).
Of course I had not forgotten the other swarms, Anne the newest and smallest is fine and the "Girls" are still coming back with orange! pollen. They also have enough sealed only for the first part of the winter ( I will feed them after the new year). The same with Elizabeth, her swarm is also well prepared for the coming winter and also still taking in pollen ( a good sign because it means there are larvae being raised inside).

Well that's it for now, I will write again soon.