A beautiful evening after work, still 27 degrees at about 7, so did a job I'd been meaning to do for a while - transfer Katrina's swarm into Albina's bee box. These bees are going up to St. Hellier (Near Phillip Island), so I wanted to get them into the box Albina left me, instead of keeping them in my spare box.
Sookie and Cordelia enjoying the late afternoon rays...
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First a quick look into The queen-less hive, this one is now finally bee-less. It took 10 weeks for this to go from being a swarm, to dying out due to not having a queen on board. Last week there were still a few hundred bees, not there were about 4.
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..and unfortunately, a whole lot of hive-moths and earwigs had taken residence, and trashed the place.
I had been hoping that they would just be empty, then I could drop the box on top of Katrina's swarm, but this is a bit too over=run with other bugs for my liking. Shows how when a hive is weak, that;s when other critters and diseases take hold. I'll probably melt down these frames.
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Now, into Katrina's (I think it will need re-naming soon.....)
A bit of burr-comb under the lid. I put a hive-mat in there after I finished.
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Loads of brood
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.Loads or grubs
A couple of supersedure cells. No big deal.
One of the 2 uncapped supersedure cells.
Overall, there were about 4 full frames of brood, not much honey, some nectar. I guess they had been too bust re-populating to have time to fetch excess honey. They'll get there.
The other thing, these are very placid bees, I could have done the whole thing without a suit, I reckon. Probably because the conditions were ideal.
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