Busy bees

Abdications, swarm management and hiding in the undergrowth

As you will have read previously, we installed two new colonies of bees in the orchard here last week. This is the beginning of a beekeeping journey for us, but with expert help, we hope to yield good wildflower honey later in the summer. It’s truly a privilege to be able to assist these little wild creatures in their busy lives.

Maple and Scarlet have swarmed. We inspected both hives yesterday, the frames full of brood, stores, larvae and thousands and thousands of bees, but both of our queens were absent. On the weekend one hive had a small swarm on the outside but it had decided to go back in after about an hour, though clearly as the lack of newly laid eggs showed when we looked at the cells. Queen Maple had left. With the lid off, the bees were anxious, slightly aggressive, clearly not content and obviously without their queen I suppose that’s quite reasonable. Like a professional kitchen on the Head Chef’s day off, slightly unruly and potentially troublesome…

Our girls

With a little gentle levering with a hive tool, the hive was opened and puffed with oak smoke to encourage the bees to gorge on honey and remain calm. Leaving it for a minute or two and then removing the heavy top level, the frames in the brood chamber are exposed. Lifting out one frame at a time, taking care not to bang or roll them, we check. Looking to see that the bees are in good health, busy, laying eggs and putting away stores is a weekly task for us. There were about six or seven new queen cells being developed on the sticky frames in the first hive. A queen cell is a strange waxy cup-shaped cone that looks like a morel mushroom, full of royal jelly and queen larvae. We removed most of them, as more than one isn’t a good idea, leaving a large single queen larvae on the edge of a wooden frame, putting her back in the centre of the hive to let the bees seal her in with wax to await her emergence. We closed everything up slowly and quietly and ratcheted the strap closed, just in case an errant badger or deer comes to investigate.