Colony 11

I visited the apiary where Colony 11 is sited this evening. They are still angry 24 hours after I reorganised the hive in a failed attempt to extract the lid of a nucleus box. They bumped against head when I came within 5m. When I had my veil on and got closer they went into attack behaviour (high pitched buzzing; staying in one place on the veil; jabbing movements with their abdomens). I hope that they calm down and don't spend the season being angry.

Colony 11 arrived in a nucleus box from a member of my bee keeping group. The box did not contain frames so the bees had started to build comb on the roof of the box. Today I tried to remove the box with mixed success.

Mission not accomplished. I now have a double height hive with the Queen in the top part.

When I received the nucleus box I took the bees out of the body of it and placed the roof on top of a Commercial hive body. The remaining space was packed with framed comb. The top was packed with a wooden board because the nuc' roof sat on top of the hive body.

I'm happy to say that my transfer of Colony 11 from its nucleus box to Hive C have been successful. There is pollen on the hive floor; debris from cleaning of the framed comb and evidence of new comb building. There was also lots of activity at the hive entrance.

The less welcome news is that the comb building is happening beneath the nuc' box lid. I had hoped that they would move onto the framed comb and leave the lid area alone. That hasn't happened so I'll have to do something a bit more destructive to sort the hive out so that it has only framed comb in it.

At lunchtime today I successfully removed the nucleus body which Colony 11 had travelled in.

They had almost all moved down into the hive body but there were now several entrances. I removed the nuc' body and arranged it so that it is part of the hive roof. The area of the hive body not covered by the roof is packed out with wood. A regular lid is on top of that

Colony 11 appears to be a feral colony which was forced out of a roof by building work. It was collected by a member of my bee group and put into a nucleus box. Unfortunately the colony was behaving very aggressively so she gave it up.

I collected the colony last night in its nuc' box. As I gently wheeled it on the back of my bike I could smell the alarm pheromones coming from the ventilation on the top of the box.

When I arrived at my out-apiary I moved the hive box from the stand where Hive C was positioned. I then placed the nuc' on top and went home.