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Archive for the ‘Our Hives’ Category
Is The Queen in Residence?
20 May 2012Inspecting two hives – Swanson and Glen Eden 2
6 May 2012The weather was good and the temperature was 22 degrees today, so I decided to inspect a couple of our hives. Days in which inspections can be done are becoming fewer and fewer, as New Zealand heads into winter. Here the summary of the inspections:- Swanson 1 Swanson is a bustling hive with around three [...]
Never hold a frame full of bees away from the hive
21 April 2012What Happened A couple of weeks back we had an incident with the Remuera 1 hive. We were inspecting frames and the queen must have fallen from the it. When we were cleaning up after the inspection, we noticed a large cluster of bees gathered on the ground and then to our horror we noticed [...]
Swanson One and API Var Life
17 March 2012This hive was showing signs of a high varroa mite count; it was on solid bottom board so we couldn’t do a drop count. But the inspection of drone brood indicated lots of mites and bees were spotted with deformed wing virus. The decision was made to treat the hive a few weeks back. API [...]
Some Varroa Hive Counting with the Kiwimana Meshboards
12 January 2012Hi over the last three days, I have had inspection trays in some of our hives. Here are the results:- Whenupai 1 Varroa Count Tray placed 9 Jan 2012 18:30 (0 mites) Tray Checked 12 Jan 2012 18:30 (5 mites) =5/72 (Hours) = 0.069 per hour or 5/3 (Days) = 1.67 mites per day The [...]
Inspecting Hives and Sending Bees in the post?
11 January 2012It was time to inspect hives today in between painting bee hive boxes and dodging the ever-present rain in Auckland. Isn’t it meant to be summer here? These are some notes from the inspections today:- Taupaki 1 Hive is very strong and doing very well, loads of bees in the brood area and their have [...]
The tale of the Pool Side Bees
18 December 2011Day One Got a call from Mary in Glen Eden, a swarm of bees had taken up residence on the side of her pool house. It was into the Kiwimana mobile after work, with a spare hive that I had gathered together from parts found in the workshop. Mary said she thinks the bees had [...]
Visiting Peter and Ceracell
17 December 2011Today got up early and drove to Ceracell to pick up some much needed supplies, we needed some frames to put into our boxes we have made. We also needed to visit Peter in Rangiriri to pick up the NUC box he had made up for us. Arrived at Ceracell at 09:00 but the gate [...]
Catching a large swarm in Glen Eden!!!
13 November 2011We got an email from Aaron this morning about a swarm in Glen Eden, that had landed in his front garden. When we got there we had to say “wow” it was the biggest swarm I have every seen. A colony that decides to swarm, will keep swarming until the hive is empty. The amount [...]
Picking up the Hawthorn swarm – Part 3 “Third time is the Charm”
13 November 2011I headed out to work on the Remuera swarm again, hopefully third time lucky. I spoke to Peter from the Franklin bee-club who suggested we take some old comb to attract them. Which I had done last time, but this time I also took a frame of capped honey from our stores. What I did [...]
