Good beehive news, maybe?
We had a professional beek around today. We had been nursing our colony through multiple poisoning events, bad weather and sickness. Dead and dying everywhere, and then oh no, we suddenly had a tiny colony without a queen?
So… we ordered a nuc with the idea of merging it with our (literally only) handful of survivors. We didn’t even know if they’d be alive when he got here. But when our pro beek arrived, he found a recently hatched baby queen!
I was glad to hear that our efforts to keep them alive with feed and herbal medicines was validated. But it’s still not certain that our surviving colony will have the numbers to make it through the next winter…
Anyhow, we added the new colony to our usual Flow hive, and transferred our original colony to a temp corflute box nearby. We’ll nurse them, and watch and wait and see what happens.
We also learnt that our new colony is some kind of mongrel (poss Italian hybrid), while our original colony looks like really dark Russians. TIL! If they survive, they’ll be moving into a new Finnish Paradise hive in a nearby veg patch… 1
#beeks #beekeeping