It can only get better! Can't it?

Feb 9, 20243 min read

So my last blog described the highs, well lows, of a beekeepers first season. In this post I'll describe a second year. I can't make as many mistakes...can I?

The winter came and went. My two hives increased to five as someone locally sold me a hive with bees in it, a split and two swarms I went to collect in the summer of year one. I eagerly opened up my hives at the end of March to find all had made it through the winter. I was later in the season to find out how good my swarms were. Keep reading to find out!

The hive and bees I'd bought late autumn was an unknown. It was cheap enough to have a punt at being £60 including the hive, supers, and a feeder. I'd inspected them and found high Varroa loads and treated them with OA vape.

My original BMH F1 Buckfast queen was a massive colony immediately when I inspected them, my second BMH colony wasn't as large just about filling a 6 frame nuc box and hadn't eaten as much over winter, the two local swarms were quite small along with the colony pictured.

I was immediately concerned as my BMH hive was so large with massive amounts of stores the queen didn't have much room to lay as they'd got so many stores. I asked Laurence in one of the live Q&A's about what to do. He'd recommended putting a frame of stores in-between the brood and bruising the stores which I did in April.

I went into the colony the next week to find the frame completely cleaned out and eggs laid within it! I was amazed as the amount of work the bees had done and how simply it was resolved with a bit of knowledge.

I think if this happens again now I'd remove the stores and keep it for a nuc. At the time I didn't have enough comb to swap this out.

As the season moved on the BMH colonies continued to grow. I persevered with my local queens eventually putting them into a full size hive. The £60 bought in hive just wasn't growing at all, very little brood, and the bees made some queen cells which I knocked back to one to let them requeen themselves.

I got to the end of May and it was time to get the Spring harvest off. My best BMH queen had two very heavy brood boxes of honey, my other BMH queen had one and the local queens had nothing worth recovering. I took supers off on the same day I was ready to spin them out. I was worried about crystallisation of the rape honey like the year previous. To my amazement this year I had lbs of honey from the hives. I averaged about 60lb of honey from the Spring crops from the two BMH queens.

Now to many people this is just normal but for me, having had less than 10lbs of honey the year before, having over the full season around 250lbs of honey was a massive success. I'd gone from two hives to five hives and during the summer had managed to collect some swarms, made some splits to get up to around 25 hives. I'd now got three apiaries too. Would these get through the winter? We'll have to see!