The Bees Knees!

The latest news from the hive:  my bees have been coming home with loaded knees!
They are bringing in pollen - which is new - meaning that they are storing up food for larvae.
And THAT means my queen bee is laying eggs.....all is going as it should.
Hooray!

See the yellow bulges on the side of the bee entering the hive?  That's pollen. Mark was brave enough to take this picture - not an easy thing to do, as they buzz in and out remarkably fast!  He's getting the bee bug too...

Pollen can come in a huge number of different colours and shades. If the bees store enough of it, you can end up with honey comb that looks like a mosaic of hexagonal colours! (Blue, black, red, brown, yellow, green, orange....)

I am itching (not with hives) to open up the brood box and see what they are up to, but I have to wait at least until next Wednesday when they will have had two weeks to get established.   I'll just have to be satisfied with taking a quick peak in through a hole in the crown board when I change the feed bucket.  There was a mass of bees crawling all over the place last time I peaked....and the bees had eaten at least 3lbs of sugar after one week.

The other positive news is that the weather has improved vastly, so the bees are getting out and about a good deal to forage.

Will report further on Wednesday......

Contemplating the stars

Warning, Mummy brag heading your way:
I set Joel a task this morning.
I had been looking at diagrams of star lifecycles to show the kids, but they all seemed to be a little different from each other depending on which website or book I looked at. I suspect some were out of date, others simplified, or being used to demonstrate one particular aspect of the process.
Either way, as usual, I was not satisfied with anyone else's answer, so I decided to make my own.
Except Joel knows far more than me about such things, so I delegated the job.

I was MOST impressed with the resulting diagram he came up with, using a simple graphics package.
Here it is.

Click on image to get a bigger readable version.

Swarm again!

How exciting - I got to do it all over again!
I had a phone call from a friend at a local park to say "There are bees on the swing frame, are you interested?"  It just so happened that I had a friend who was, but since he couldn't get there in a hurry, I headed off to stand guard and be on hand to led a hand at redirecting bees.

This lot could not be snipped and pruned into their box - the park might not have approved of us chopping up the swing frame....but just look how they had wrapped around it!

the other side was covered too - lovely stripey orange bees again.

This time was not quite so text-bookish!  We tried to sweep them into a box using goose wings, and caught the main dangly bit at the bottom, but at least half the swarm flew off.

We placed the box on the ground with a pale sheet next to it.  A few bees were clustered on the outside of the box,doing their "Nasonov" fanning (the bottoms up thing I mentioned in the last post), which led us to believe that the queen was inside.

As time passed, some bees landed on the sheet, others re-clustered on the swing frame.  Then, the bees on the sheet made a nice straight line, and firmly marched their way onto the box.
So, we opened the lid a crack, and in they all went!  I was totally fascinated to watch them....and standing around waiting for them to do it themselves was much more fun than trying to herd bees.  They are worse than cats!

Periodically we swept the cluster on the frame off, and gradually they would land on the sheet and do the same thing.  Clever little critters that they are, nearly all of them ended up in the box!
We wrapped the sheet around, and as far as I know they are now safely in my friend's hive.

Bees move in!!

Wednesday began as an ordinary day.

Then there was a phone call at 4pm.  A swarm of honey bees had landed in a garden in Impington, 4 miles away and the swarm warden could meet me there at 8pm.  4 whole hours!!!!  I was like a cat on a tin roof!  Amazingly I did not chop any fingers off while cooking, and at 7-50pm Mark grabbed his camera, I donned my white telly tubby suit, and off we set.

The first time bee keeper in pristine white suit!

We arrived, met the swarm warden (the volunteer who take calls from distressed villagers saying "Help! There's a swarm of bees in my garden"), and wondered down the road to the find the swarm.

Does my bum look big in this? (comments with answers to this will be censored...)

And there it was. A huge, beautiful swarm clustered around some branches of a privet bush.
They did not look like the usual north European bees, which have black bodies. They are classic stripey orange and black bees - classic, but not like any I've have come across so far. I wonder what their story is?

Mark thought they looked a bit like a giant Tiger's Eye rock in a tree.

First we had to prune away a little of the greenery, then our swarm lady got on the ladder with the secateurs while I stood underneath with my ready prepared (ir. holes blocked up!) cardboard box. Very high tech...

Another bizarre and new experience in the Strivens household...

Then, plop, in the fell! They were quite a weight.  By the time we had snipped all four branches and dropped the clusters of bees in, a few of them had flown off the swarm, so it was time to quickly close the lid...

wrap it up in a sheet, and put it in the car... (note seat belt - Mark was worried about having a bee box on the head in case of an emergency stop!)

This boxful with the main swarm in it was humming gently. Ahhhh.

Time to wait a while for the AWOL bees to re-cluster in their original position, and try to catch them in a second box.  A few still got away, but we were confident that we had the queen in the main box, so into the car with the second box, and a slightly nervous Mark (not in a bee suit) drove us home on the smoothest drive he has ever done in his life!
The second box, with bees in a cluster and no queen, were a good deal less happy than the first - they BUZZED very loud all the way home.  BBBBBBZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Not a very Royal way for a queen to be welcomed to her  new Palace

 Box one opened and unceremoniously dumped into the empty brood box. Shake shake bash. A few left on the sides, but most went in.  

On a nice warm sunny evening, the fun way to do this is to put the sheet on the ground and place a ramp up to the hive entrance. Put the swarm on the sheet and watch them march up the ramp (Bees ALWAYS walk upwards, never down) and into the hive. It was too late and too cold for that on Wednesday.

Note the expensive equipment: rubber washing up gloves!

Next it was time to remove the privet branches and shake of the hangers-on. Well, most of them.
All this time I am having to watch that I don't accidentally shake the queen onto the ground. She is impossible to see in the swarm....

In goes box two. They calmed down quickly once they were back with the rest.

Gently and slowly placing in the wax starter frames, avoiding squashing the bees

A lovely site - worker bees at the entrance with their backsides in the air! They are fanning their wings rapidly to send off a pheromone which tells the other bees "Here is a good place for a nest, come on in!"

A few bees did not want to leave me - I am not sure whether they were thinking I was a threat or a flower petal.

 

I wasn't stung once throughout the whole episode. Unfortunately, after it was all over, Mark did get stung by a couple of adventurers that were stuck to my suit as I walked away from the hive. Another got tangled in my hair, but we brushed it out intact - obviously good tempered little things.

Mission accomplished.  I had a feeder-pail of sugar syrup ready to feed the bees - popped that over a hole in the crown board, super over that and then the lid.  Now I have to leave them alone for a couple of weeks while they pull out the wax starter to make comb, and the queen gets to laying eggs. 

By nightfall, all the stragglers and tail fanners had crept into their new home, and there was a low contented humming coming from the hive.  Utterly delightful. 

Hive in place ready for occupants!

I am totally behind with my posts.
This should have been in two weeks ago, as since, we have had developments.....but you'll have to wait a day or so to hear about those...

Anyway, see below. It is all quite self explanatory.
Not the pretty white boarded peaked roof type hive, but its functional, and keeps the bees happy.

Just waiting for occupants...

Saying goobye again....

Last weekend we had to face another emotionally traumatic event: saying goobye to some very very good friends.  We have known them over two years and they have now returned

Anna wrote a poem to try to express how it made her feel. I thought it was rather good and spot on.
Here it is. Read in conversational voice:

Goodbyes
by Anna Strivens

Goodbyes are the worst thing in the world,
Or at least that's how I feel.
They make you unhappy or angry or sad,
And it can take ages for your heart to heal.
It's as if tears refuse to show themselves,
And you don't feel it at the time;
The horrid empty feeling
That you later feel inside.
Parting with friends is the hardest to do,
Especially those you know well,
How much you will miss them; I'm afraid there are
No strong enough words to tell.
It's as though part of you is missing,
A part of your life suddenly gone,
And although at that moment you don't realise
Exactly how you feel your life has gone wrong.
Eventually you start to feel the sadness
As if it had been delayed.
As if you almost didn't want to believe that
Your friends had to leave that day.
When it comes to goodbyes,
I always find myself stuck.
But I can tell you honestly...
Goodbyes truly suck.

And Even More Nettled...

My garden is full of nettles, but not all the stinging variety.
Here are some pics of a few of the huge variety of ornamental and "Dead" nettles scattered liberally around.
The bees love them, They fill spaces where little else would grow and cover bare earth to give a luscious feel even to the broken wall of my compost heap!

Just at their peak of flowers, which, for a humble nettle look remarkably exotic - almost orchid like.

These are already past best, but have provided a symphony of buzzing bumble and honey bees

This one is rather easy to confuse with the stinging variety. I'm not sure it would make such good soup! It gives a lovely understated highlight of white among the colours elsewhere.