This is the first entry for the 2011 Bee diary and the bees are back on site and I am happy to report they have come through the winter in excellent shape much better than I was expecting and last years Queen has been spotted and present despite the bees looking as though they intended in changing her late last year and just goes to show they are the experts.

The first thing to with the hive this year is to move them into a larger Brood Box and fresh frames with a method called shook swarm. This in its simplest form the bees frame by frame are shaken off each frame into the new Brood box one by one and the queen transferred over carefully, they are then fed and will if successful quickly drawer out the frames and the queen can continue to lay as normal. The advantage of this method is first you remove all the old comb and frames with any potential disease and as you also remove all the brood with the old frames that removes up to 80% of the Varroa in one go as this is the percentage of Varroa in the sealed brood at any one time.  

The larger Brood Box will give the bees more control over the size of the brood nest and give them more room to store honey that will not be stolen by me at the end of the season so giving them a more natural diet through the winter months.

Also this year I have experimented with 60% of the new frames in the Brood box fitted only with wire supports and no wax foundation this will give the bees the freedom to build the comb as they want to they will have control over cell size for instance. If everything works well this year then from next year I will stop using wax foundation altogether.

The problems with no foundation will be trying to get the bees to build the comb straight and within the frames as I still need to inspect and to be able to remove the frames and I will have no control on the amount of drone brood in the hive and if it is high it may result in a higher amount of Varroa in the hive as they prefer Drone Brood over Worker Brood. The Drone Brood has a longer brood cycle of two days and this two days gives the Varroa extra time to multiply. No one knows how the Varroa Mite knows when it is close to a Drone cell before it jumps in but they do and given the choice will choose Drone over Worker cells.

The year has started well for this hive and I hope it will continue to be the case.