gavin

Great to meet Neil and Marie today at the apiary. After our three hours (three hours?!) rummaging in the hives, they seemed to still like the idea of keeping bees. Marie was a natural at spotting queens, and Neil had the relevant skills required to get my new queen marking pen to work. I hadn't.

One of the duties for the afternoon posed a conundrum, and this was our solution, a completely new hive design. What were we up to? Does it make sense? Will it work?!

...

A month on, and finally we had a nice warm Saturday. Were the bees building up explosively? Was I going to see swarm cells? Massed ranks of drone cells? Would they need a super?

Hardly! The queenless one had gone, the one in the middle was down to bees in the super only with a small patch of eggs on one frame, and the 'strongest' one was down to a couple of frames of bees and brood in the brood box and in the super.

It is going to be a long, slow spring build-up from ...

I know, its only March. The sun came out and stayed out, the wind had dropped, and I was still fretting about the level of stores. So off I went ...

Parking in the usual lane behind the big wall, I picked up the usual bits and pieces. The jacket and veil with the metal hoop sticking out. Hive tool. My favourite smoker, now sadly with a few holes nibbled in the bellows from a winter in the shed with the mice. Bag of crumbly bits of wood. Camera. Newspaper, but not the lighter ...

What a marvellous bright sunny day we had here. Rolling up at the old orchard around 1 pm, the mud in the lane behind the walled garden was still sufficiently frozen solid to take my considerable weight, but the sun was on the hives and the bees were out in numbers. Three of the survivors were bringing in lots of pollen, and one - the Monkish bee colony - didn't seem to be. Might it be queenless? Too early to tell. It may also be well out of its comfort zone, climate-wise.

So, ...

Time to see where the bees live. They have a wonderful setting in an old orchard, with cherries, plums and gages, pears and apples to keep them happy from March to May.

The series of photos shows the row of hives (with the end ones strapped in preparation for the summer visit of the sheep who take some time to learn that these scratching posts have defensive occupants), the view out to the old trees, and the view they get on their way back in after stopping off at the clover in the ...