April in the Apiary

Finally, we have reached the month where we can start beekeeping on warmer days above 15 °C. Here’s hoping for a good Spring ! Moving and marking – If you need to move your bees they are usually less heavy now, so early April is a good time. Remember you either move them over 3 miles or ‘walk’ them 3 feet at a time, as flying bees may return to the old location. Drones begin to emerge, giving the opportunity to raise a new queen if the original gets damaged and, as there are fewer bees than in the height of summer, it’s a good time to mark and clip queens.   Swarm Prevention – Preventing swarming is a tricky business. We find that 7 brood frames with larvae or capped brood is an ideal number at this time. We find that if we have more than this in a single brood box, the bees start to prepare to swarm. You can remove all but the end frame of food from the brood box and extract them for personal use or save them for making nucs or to give back at the end of the summer, but remember to freeze them to kill wax moth larvae. This removal gives you space to add 3, preferably drawn frames to give space for the queen to lay before the next inspection. Place this comb next to the brood nest. In strong colonies, you can put a frame of foundation in the middle of the nest in late April and May and it will be drawn and laid up by next inspection.   We weaken those on 8 or 9 frames by removing frames of capped brood and giving these (without bees) to a weaker colony on 4 or 5 frames or we make up nucs (in which case we remove frames with bees and make sure they have an extra frame of bees shaken in for each brood frame and add a food frame with pollen). Over crowded colonies are probably starting to get ready to swarm and if you don’t weaken them you are likely to have queen cells in a week’s time.   If you have a 2 or 3 year old queen it is worth taking her out with the nuc and letting them make a new queen, as older queens are more likely to swarm. Otherwise you can just let the nuc make a new queen. You can recombine these at the end of June to avoid increase. You can also mix frames with bees on from 3 colonies when you make up nucs and they won’t fight.   We combine colonies on 1 or 2 frames, as long as they are disease free and leave or combine those on 3 frames. We only strengthen those on 4 or 5 frames by adding capped brood frames (without bees) as these have enough bees to keep the capped brood warm. Comb change – If you need to do a comb change, now is a good time. This removes old comb and helps reduce the presence of diseases like Nosema, Sacbrood and Chalk Brood. You can either replace 3 or 4 frames each year, do a Bailey comb change or a shook swarm. We tend towards the Bailey as they don’t abscond, you don’t lose brood and it’s less fiddly than replacing a few frames. It is also less stressful to the bees than a shook swarm. If they are weak they struggle to draw comb so do a version of the Bailey comb change for a weak colony. Don’t forget to keep feeding light syrup, without supers on, until the brood box is mostly drawn. With one frame to go we swap the last 2 frames around, stop feeding and add a super. Disease checks – If all of this is not enough to think about, in the first warm days in April we also do a disease inspection, shaking bees off all brood frames. Are all your larvae pearly white, shiny, C shaped and segmented? Do all adult bees look and move as normal? Uncap anything that looks unusual using clean tweezers to pull out and check odd looking pupae. Put debris in your smoker. It’s a good idea to take photos of anything odd looking. The APHA booklet on brood disease is really useful to help you know what to look for and what to do if there is an issue. If you have a problem with varroa, MAQS is your only treatment option with supers on and it’s not been available for the last 2 years. You could remove supers and use ‘Formic pro’ which has the same ingredients and you should also seriously consider culling drone brood as this is now where most of the varroa can be found.   Next month I will discuss what we do if we see queen cells, how we add more supers, and touch on collecting swarms and queen rearing. References  “Guide to Bees and Honey” by Hooper, T. ‘APHA booklets on diseases. ‘Healthy Hive Guide” BBKA