March in the Apiary

For most of March it is probably too cold and too early to inspect your bees. You may still need to heft and feed until the flow starts, but only feed if they are light You don’t want to leave your brood box full of stores, leaving nowhere for the queen to lay. The flowering currant is traditionally an indicator of when the flow starts or you can be more scientific and heft them weekly, with a luggage scale, until the weight begins to increase. If you haven’t already taken a sample of 30 flying bees to check for Nosema, do this now and freeze them until you can check them. First brief inspections – On a good day towards the end of March or early April, if temperatures hit 15°C you can take your first quick peek in the hive. You only need to check the edges of the brood nest, very briefly, to check that there are eggs and capped worker brood. Avoid further disturbing the brood nest until the later in April. Mouse guards need to come off and entrances can now be rotated to the larger entrance. You should give your bees a clean floor around this time of year. Drone laying queens – If you only see drone brood keep checking the next frame. If you see nothing but drone brood you have a drone laying queen. You need to nip her, if you can find her, and shake all the bees out in front of another colony and remove the empty hive for cleaning. There is no point in trying to re-queen as you only have old bees, but these bees will help to strengthen another colony. As long as you have killed the queen, you could do a newspaper combination, but it is less risky to just shake them out as it avoids disturbing other colonies that are doing OK and they will decide which bees get to join them. If this was your only colony you could consider buying an over-wintered nuc and doing a newspaper combination as long as they are disease free or again just put your new colony a few feet away and shake the drone laying queen’s colony out. Don’t put a new nuc on the same spot as they may get overwhelmed and the queen killed. The shaken out bees need to politely beg their way in elsewhere, not barge in! When do they need extra space? If you see eggs and worker brood during this quick check, go to the other end of the nest to see how big it is, without removing more brood frames. This way you can count the number of frames of brood, without removing them or separating them if possible. We also remove leftover fondant and food frames to leave no more than 1 or 2 frames of stores and replace removed frames with, preferably, empty drawn comb. Spare frames can be frozen to kill wax moth and stored to give back later or used to make up nucs. If there is no food you may need to keep feeding them fondant or light syrup in a contract feeder, especially if poor weather is forecast. Research tells us that pollen substitute is not helpful, so don’t waste your money!   It is not easy to know when to add a super or a second brood box to create space. At the end of March, If a colony is on 3 or 4 frames of brood, we leave them until the next inspection. The amount of brood will roughly double in 3 to 4 weeks and they won’t need more space just yet. If you have more brood than this, you need to give them space now to reduce the chances of swarming later on.   On 5 or 6 frames of brood, we add one, preferably drawn, super above a queen excluder (QX) . This might be a nadired super (one left below the brood box all winter) put back above the brood box, making sure the queen is in the box below. We try and return the same supers they used last year to minimise the potential spread of disease. More supers can be added in a few weeks time. If they are on 7 or more frames of brood we add a second brood box with foundation frames and no QX, to give laying space and feed light syrup in a contact feeder (or small amounts in rapid feeder if its warm enough) to get it drawn. You can add supers in 2-3 week’s time, once they have drawn most of this second box. At this point you can leave them on ‘double brood’ (22 brood frames in total) or remove brood frames and bees to make nucs. We also add 1 frame of drone comb, 2nd frame in, or you can use a starter strip. This is used for drones when needed and reduces the amount of drone cells elsewhere. The comb can be removed once capped for varroa control or, if they are an aggressive or very swarmy colony, to reduce the spread of poor genetics. We like to leave our drone comb in and encourage drones in most of our colonies. They are important for colony cohesion and heat generation, as well as reproduction. In summary – shake out drone laying colonies, don’t disturb the nest and give space, but only open them briefly if it’s above 15°C. References: https://bibba.com/thorn-1/ ‘Guide to Bees and Honey’ by Ted Hooper Noordyke’s pollen substitute research, supervised by Jamie Ellis