All Blog Entries

Well, the schools are off for 2 weeks & I have the pleasure of taking the first week off work. I would love to go to the bees but my youngest is a bit too young to go along too, however in the true spirit of school holidays, it rained heavily from 9am-4pm with very strong winds so gardening & trips to the park were out of the question as well. The children decided to watch a movie after lunch which left me trying to find a way out from doing some house work

I remembered ...

Spent the afternoon with the folks as it was mothers day. Inevitably I spent more time with the old man looking at his bees.
His bees have overwintered well as he only lost a couple of nucs and still has a dozen colonies and two nucs.
He was worried about the two nucs and a couple of the colonies so I volunteered to check them for him.

The first nuc had only 3 frames of bees but there were a couple of frames of brood in a good pattern and I saw an unmarked queen. No ...

I had an e-mail from a friend kath last week to say that her colony was down to a few hundred bees and no queen. This was a nuc I sold her in July.
This afternoon I had another e-mail to say that she had had another look and there were only a couple of dozen bees but the queen was still there.
This was her first and only colony so I volunteered to rescue her queen to an Apidea.
I put a cupful of bees in an apidea from a nuc I have in the garden and brought it over. She opened ...

After 6 months of watching the cabin fever set in across the various forums where some exploded more frequently and spectacularly than others over the winter it's great to finally get out and up to my elbows in bees again. I've missed you ladies.

Despite the weather inevitably turning yesterday compared to all of last week, I opted to carry out a quick inspection of the two colonies on the allotment apiary. One in a 14x12 the other in a Double National.

The plan was ...

The temperature hit 16C locally at lunchtime - I keep an eye on the online live weather records from a network of amateur weather stations - so I set off to see what the bees were making of their warm day. Willow! You can't miss the early spring willow frenzy. They come back excitedly with huge yellow baggy trousers and heavily yellow-dusted undersides. Like on the cover of Ted Hughes' book. From an online Pbase gallery, a bee half way through pollen collection:

...