Snelgrove board

Look what Doug made!

It is a snelgrove board - you’ll need to google what it is for. The interesting thing about it is that it is made from our own wood! Doug cut it in to planks and now look at it!

In situe

Bees swarmed!

A little before our French lesson, Doug popped outside to do some small thing, to be greeted with a loud buzz from the bee hive area. One of them had just swarmed!

Quick! Prepare the spare hive, suit up and catch them and do it quickly so we can make it to our lesson on time!

We think we got the queen, but need better weather for an inspection to be sure. 

It means they are very happy and felt they had the strength to split in two. But from our point of view it is not what we want as they will spend time gaining their strength back instead of making honey.

They obligingly settled not too high off the ground. They stay like this for quite some time while scouts go and look for good nest sights.

We knocked them off the tree in to a box and then poured most of the box full in to the spare hive, leaving the rest to follow through the entrance. You can’t really make out what is going on, so no way to be sure we got the queen other than waiting. Hopefully when Doug can open the hive when the weather is better he will see brood and other signs that there is an active queen.

The old hive that the swarm left will be busy making themselves a new queen. Hopefully we can combine the two parts back together with a bit more space and they can get on with gathering honey…

Swarm!

We knew the bees were going to swarm as they were making new queen cells. But then when Doug set off to perform some swarm control measures, he  couldn’t find the queen. Her location was critical to allow us to fake them in to thinking they had already swarmed and not doing it.

Doug was strimming near the hives this afternoon and noticed they had swarmed. We followed them and they settled in a holly tree not far away.

I held a cardboard box under them and Doug snipped the branches off in to the box.

Then we knocked them out of the box in to our spare hive (which is there basically for this purpose). 

Then we put all the frames back in, and put the lid on and watched for a while to see that bees were heading in to the hive rather than away from it - suggesting the queen is in the hive as they all seek her out.

This is a bee sending out pheromones so all the other bees can find where they are...

We have HONEY

 We got the bees just about 2 years ago and we just harvested our first honey!

We got off to a bad start when the swarms we bought weren’t as strong as they should have been. Bad luck with the guy we chose to buy from. Annoying!

There has also been a steep learning curve and we’ve only learnt a fraction of what we need so far! Thank goodness for the internet!

The honey spinner is FANTASTIC! It was really easy to extract the honey without damaging the wax, which is great because it saves the bees the effort of making more wax next time (wax takes a lot of resources to make that could go in to making honey when they don’t need to make more...)

It wasn’t all capped, but we decided to go for it anyway as we need to now move on to some swarm control measures before the main nectar flow, and we didn’t want to miss our first chance of honey!

Beautiful!

I made crumpets in celebration!

Bees and hornets

 Doug saw an Asian hornet queen this morning. The asian hornets are complete bastards who hover outside the hive and scoff lots of bees, so we need to put out traps now to catch as many queens as we can before they start making more of themselves...

The bees are getting busy with it too

Keeping busy and seeing friend

Had a fun day ‘video call baking’ with Anne for her birthday challenge Hot cross buns. Yum! Anne’s yeast seemed a bit of a dud, so we are going to have a take 2 before Easter. 

Also planted some seeds, mowed the lawn...

and Doug checked the bees and rotavated more space for the potatoes (not planted yet as frost forecast).
It was quite an exciting inspection as one hive has surprisingly replaced its queen. The new one seems to be laying, so hopefully all good.
The other hive has been queen less for a while, we gave them some eggs from the first hive and they seem to be creating a new queen as we hoped.

The resultant buns. Yum!

Vin d'orange and crisps

Happy Birthday (for tomorrow) Wee Anne, and have fun ‘video call camping’ xx

Bees are busy

To steal Doug's line... 'Un-bee-lievable weather!'. It has been so warm recently that the bees have been out and about despite it only being the start of February.

I am sure there is a bee in the picture somewhere...

Bee progress

One of the hives is still quite weak. We decided that it is the queens fault and decided to replace her by killing her and letting the bees replace her. We set about doing this by putting her in a separate box so we could see if they correctly started making a replacement. Then... we decided to ask some advice on the all knowing internet and the internet said 'nnoooooooo stooooop, that queen is ok' so we put her back in with her bees and hope they take her back ok!

We are feeding them a lot to help them build up ready for winter.

It is all a very good learning experience and we feel great about it as a kind gift has allowed us to have the money set aside for a new swarm in the spring if we fail to nurse these ones through. If all is good we will buy a honey extractor instead... so interesting and good learning whichever way it goes.

Bee arrival

We couldn't manage to wait a whole week to inspect our bees, particularly as we were concerned that one of them had very little coming and going.
We opened them up and were not impressed with what we saw. A bee keeping friend came round to look also after we sent some photos. It seems there are fewer bees than there should be for what we bought - much more so in one hive than the other. The less worse hive is also not the sort of bee we bought it is a black bee rather than the buckfast. The black bee is a lot more agressive - though they can be very productive and are more hardy.
Looking at activity from the outside. The better but more agressive hive is on the left and the weaker but calmer on the right.

Preparing some insulation to go in the lid. It is useful in summer as much as winter as it helps stop the hive overheating

The frames where the bees should be laying eggs and keep their stores

There should be lots of sides covered like this but there are only 2 and a scattering of bees on a few other frames

Brood (baby bees). This is not a good coverage

Quite a few empty frames

We don't know yet whether the problem is just the number of bees the person we bought from put in to the hive or whether there is also a problem with the queen.

Bees are here!

We decided to get bees nearly 9 months ago which wasn't a good time of year to be starting out with them so it has felt like a long time coming...
Here they are on their special patio below the house.

We have seen them on the valerian outside the kitchen (well we presume it is them as we didn't see honey bees before they arrived)

This one is a bumble bee

We gave the hives to the bee man and he filled them with bees (somehow!). He said we shouldn't look inside for 2 weeks and that looking inside too often is one of the most common beginner mistakes. We are not sure we can wait that long :)
During this time they should be getting in stocks of honey and hopefully when we inspect we will be able to put a super on top which is the part of the hive we will eventually be able to harvest from.

Preparing for Bees

We ordered some bees in the Autumn from a beekeeper who lives in Tarbes. They will arrive at the end of May so we have been preparing the spot the hives will sit as well as reading reading - it seems quite hard to keep bees alive.

This is just below the house. We have levelled an area on a track that was already cut in to the hill

We then laid sand and weed block membrane and then some paving stones

It is not the best laid patio as we didn't get the area level enough before starting to lay the paving. Hopefully it will work out well for the bees though. It's main purpose is to keep make it possible to keep the area round the hives and access to the hives free of bracken and brambles.
It was a pretty big job just clearing enough to allow us to reach the spot we wanted to locate the hives as we kind of lost control of this field a couple of years ago! It is also very useful that this clears round a few fruit trees that had been struggling to get established in competition with all the weeds.

The hives have now got to the person we are buying the swarms off and we have to wait a couple of weeks until they are established and have built up a food supply before collecting them.

Exciting and scary!