Trog

The queen was disgruntled. Very disgruntled. “Do you really expect me to lay my lovely eggs in this?”, she grumbled. The housebees, like teenagers who'd not quite tidied their rooms to the required standard, replied somewhat grumpily, “We did our best, ma'am.”
“Well, it's not good enough. You'll have to use this one for stores or something.” Queenie flounced off to find a better frame. Hearing the somewhat mutinous, though muted, mutterings from that part of the hive, Mitzzi went to investigate. ...

The Wee Bee flew swiftly home from the beekeeper's house and reported straight to Mitzzi and the Queen.

'She's planning to have the association over for a demonstration on Sunday afternoon', she said.

'Have you been hacking her email again?', asked Mitzzi.

'No, just looking in through the window at the laptop.'

The beekeeper had indeed noticed a bee taking a great deal of interest in the area around the window and wondered why she was bothering, ...

This originally appeared in the SBA magazine but for the sake of anyone here who didn't see it, and who enjoys the stories, here's the first of the Tales to celebrate today's visits by my bees to the snowdrops

Oh, there was such a buzzing and dancing in the hive that night! Fresh food at last after a long winter huddled round the summer harvest, trying to keep warm on calories alone.

“Y’know, I’m heartily sick of clover honey.” said one.

“Aye, you can’t ...

'Excuse me!', said bee and beekeeper simultaneously as they narrowly avoided a collision. The beekeeper had decided to check round the hive entrances to see that all was well now that the air was warm enough to encourage hive-work and she wanted to see that the bees were in good enough heart to throw out some of the accumulated floor debris.

The wee bee, a bit breathless – both with the effort of flying after a long time in the cluster, and with the excitement of any young creature ...

The beekeeper had been busy before Christmas boiling up sugar for bee candy and leaving it to set overnight. The next day she scraped the half-set, gooey mess out of the moulds into a pan and boiled it all again before pouring it back into the now very sticky moulds.

This time it worked and on Christmas Eve she headed out to the apiary with the bees' Christmas presents all nicely wrapped and stacked on a tray. The temperature had at last risen above freezing and as she removed each ...