During the inspection, bee mentor Chris Wells removed a sealed queen cup with a virgin queen inside which was set aside. Other sealed queen cups were found but the queens inside had been killed by the emerged queen.

The second super is now also full, so we have added another super and another lift, meaning this hive now has three supers on it and around 20kg of honey so far.

We also performed an inspection of hive 2 - the one in special measures. Bee numbers were vastly reduced and many emerged queen cups were found, though no sign of the actual queen, suggesting this hive has swarmed, or at least has tried to. It is possible that one of the the swarms found last week was from this hive. We left a sealed queen cup in situ to allow a new queen to be produced and the hive can continue to develop as normal. As an insurance policy, should the queen cup fail to successfully hatch a queen, we introduced the virgin queen from hive 1 into hive 2. This hive will be inspected again in a week or so to see what happens next.


We then turned our attention to the swarns. The main swarm box, in which we placed a brood frame from hive 1, has lost some bees but there are still a healthy number remaining. We were unable to find a queen but the the temper of the colony and 'fanning' behaviour of the bees suggested there was one present somewhere. We are leaving it alone for now, to see if the colony develops and if a queen is apparent next time we inspect. The best case scenario is that we end up with another colony and therefore can start another hive, although it’s quite unlikely this colony will survive if there is no queen. We’ll inspect again next week and see if we can find the elusive queen.

The other box was empty so this swarm has been lost and similarly the swarm left in the tree has moved on.

But there will definitely be more bees arriving at Honeydale this week. The Sainfoin has just begun to flower and and the bees are flocking to it like...well, like bees round a honeypot! Sainfoin is such a popular plant for bees and produces some of the best honey, so Chris has been eagerly waiting for it to bloom and now that it has, he will be installing five of his own hives in our apiary.

Two swarms were found hanging from branches in the trees behind the hives, the largest one 3m high. One of the hives is being left alone while a new queen is created, so Paul’s first task was to perform an inspection of the other hive. He destroyed the incomplete queen cups but left the fully formed ones in situ as they will be needed if this hive proves to be the one that has swarmed and thereby lost its queen. Paul didn’t find the queen in the hive, but the good news is that there were still plenty of bees.

Paul then needed to gather the swarms. He took a brood frame from the strongest hive and put this into an empty nuc box - the containers in which nucleuses of bees first arrived at Honeydale, which Paul had fortuitously kept. Chris Wells had told him that any cardboard box would suffice, effectively mimicking the traditional bee skep, domed baskets which were used by beekeepers for centuries.

Being such an upright plant, Sainfoin doesn't provide a huge amount of weed smothering so a grass companion crop is needed to fill up the sward. It also increases the overall biomass of the crop to produce a better yield.

Looking forward, we can use the crop for haylage with the option to take seed from it at a later date.

As the name implies, the Crimper Roller offers a way of terminating cover crops with no till; by avoiding the need for spraying, mowing and ploughing, it’s a much cheaper and faster method. It relies on having a bulky cover crop which is then crushed, the flattened plants forming a mulch on top of the soil which keeps weeds at bay and also allows new seeds to come through. Ingenious!

This weekend marked our first attempt at controlling our winter cover crop of rye and vetch. The trick is to find the ‘Goldilocks Moment’ when the plants are just right to terminate, in other words when they are old enough to remain flat once rolled, but not too old to seed. 

We have rolled one trial strip in our cover crop to start with but as we suspected, we were a little too early and some of the plants may recover. We will be repeating the process weekly until we have determined the correct stage to terminate, so tune in next Monday to find out what happens!