THE first meeting of Okehampton Beekeepers’ summer programme was held on May 12 at Charles and Juliana Montgomery’s apiary at Nymet Wood, Spreyton and was well-attended by 15 members of the branch.

The bees are kept in an ideal lovely spot at the edge of a field next to the house, conveniently adjacent to a wooded area with horse chestnut trees in bloom; excellent spring forage for bees!

Juliana currently has two colonies housed in National hives and the afternoon’s task was to inspect and perform manipulations on both of these.

Inspections were performed by Juliana assisted by Neil Lamey and Simon O’Sullivan. The weather was cool and overcast but remained dry throughout.

The first colony inspected was small on a single brood chamber and Juliana was concerned either that it held laying workers, or maybe the queen had been poorly-mated last year and was now a drone layer.

Examination of the first few frames however showed eggs and larvae.

The second colony was a whopper, occupying two National Brood Boxes. Juliana was concerned that this might swarm whilst she and Charles were away on holiday and wanted to perform a pre-emptive split to avoid this.

The aim was to separate the two brood boxes with the queen in one box on a new stand and the flying bees with a queen cell on the original stand (this approach differs from a standard Pagden artificial swarm in that the queen is separated from flying bees and is the method favoured by Wally Shaw, who writes for BBKA).

The problem for the afternoon was finding the queen amongst more than 20 frames in the double brood box. Neil adopted a very thorough approach to this task.

The boxes were removed from their existing stand and separated. An empty box of frames of foundation and drawn comb was placed on the old stand to ‘bleed’ off the flying bees.

Then four frames were removed from, first one box and placed in a nucleus hive with the lid slightly open. The remaining eight frames in the brood box were paired together into four pairs. The queen, if she was on these frames would hide on the dark faces of adjacent frames.

We resumed the hunt for the queen after a 30-minute break. Although still fairly elusive she was eventually spotted by Richard Flenley and duly marked.

It had been a very busy afternoon and Simon thanked Juliana and Charles for a very full and informative afternoon’s beekeeping.

Will Pyne