Aprici

The blueberries have started.  The photo is a small harvest from today from a few small plants of different varieties I am trying out:  Duke, Polaris, and Patriot.  The Patriot variety appears to be the best overall flavour.  The Duke is the sweetest and possibly biggest berries.  Overall Patriot seems to be the best so far.

The small bushes are producing a lot of berries, might have something to do with all the bee colonies I have.

The robbing episode that occurred recently was quite an eye opener.  When robbing starts a new or weak colony can be quickly overwhelmed, its guard bees killed, its queen killed, and the colony soon collapses and dies out.  This can make it quite difficult to start new colonies when there is a nectar dearth as there was here recently.  The new weak colonies are soon discovered and robbed by other colonies until the new colony dies out.

Beautiful new maple cultivar called Gwen's Rose Delight (a.k.a Shirazz) from New Zealand added to our little maple collection.  Very striking pink variagation.  Another interesting feature is it purportedly does well in full sun.  Most of the Palmatum seem to need part shade or the leaves tend to burn at the edges.

Started the Alstroemeria collection.  Commonly called Peruvian lily.

Lost several of the new nucs to what appears to have been an outbreak of colonies robbing each other.  Even with the entrance reducers (2"x3/8") five of the new nucs appear to have been heavily robbed by other colonies and dwindled until all the bees disappeared.  Robbing conditions probably made worse than normal due to a terrible spring/early summer nectar dearth this year.  At least the blackberries and borage have started blooming in earnest and there seems to be good nectar coming in now.  Created 20 new queen grafts yesterday. 

Today at lunch while inspecting the colony that swarmed I heard the challenge call of imperatrix Apis mellifera, and I saw a new queen emerge from her cell.  I had never heard a queen bee's call before.  The queen was challenging all other queens (in this case not yet emerged) in the colony.  As I inspected the colony I found a queen cell and saw the new queen emerge.  Regrettably a royal duel to the death is bound to ensue.

Found a youtube video of what a queen sounds like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qXLEZejRow

Captured my first swarm today.  One of my colonies swarmed, even after I created 4 new colonies from them just last week and removed all the swarm cells.  Little devils decided to swarm anyway.  They alighted in the cedars close by.  Quite the scene, here is a brief movie of what the swarm looked like.

I manually moved most of the swarm into a box as can be seen from the photo on the right.   Since they were on the trunk it was quite difficult to get many of them, so I quickly built a bee vaccuum roughly based on the plans on this site.  The bee vac worked very well and all the remaining bees were captured into another box.  They will all be combined into a new colony tomorrow.

Created 10 queen grafts.  Used reading glasses to see the tiny larvae.  Reading glasses do work better than trying to use a hand-held magnifying glass, but still not very satisfactory.  Placed the grafts in colony 2. 

The snow and giant crocus collection is all flowering now.  Quite beautiful, and the bees are taking advantage.  Lots of bee activity, and the pollen is being harvested by all the colonies.

Click here for the rest of the crocus photos.

Some other things in bloom today include a type of pussy Willow with plenty of pollen, and another Hellebore opened today for the first time.

Several additions to the winter flower collection: Hellebore double queen, Heathers (Jenny Porter and Myretown Ruby), Diane Witch Hazel, and a Viburnum tinus 'pink bouquet'.

The bees responded very quickly to the new additions.  They were on the viburnum even before we got it out of the car!  The heathers are also popular, having several bees per plant already on them.