Pimms o'clock garden party

Well maybe not Pimms, a pint of orange squash, with a generous portion of ice cubes. And garden party? h
Hmm, the guest was probably me, my little ladies allowing me to join them as they sipped some of the old purple nectar. Me, well a few pages of the kindle and a little David Attenborough cameo :-)

Bee's been beelocated

Bee beelocation finished and it felt really good on the last lift to feel how much heavier the hive was compared to the first lift, the colony has been growing fast in this good weather, there are loads of bees inside, although a long way from full strength of 50,000 bees, they are also struggling to get enough stores of honey in, consuming all the nectar they are collecting.

That might not bode well for the "June gap", the time when historically few flowers are in bloom in England, mind you I suspect that all this strange weather will mean that the plants are pretty confused too!

Waste not want not I have added a super and put the granulated honey stores from the old hive in there in the hope that the bees can salvage some to help them out, I put the frames in the freezer first to kill anything off and then scratched open the cells to help them on their way. In the video you will see that I have let the home forlorn looking hive open and put some brood frames in a black plastic box, will let them rob those for a few days and then will dispose of comb and foundation, ready to start again with a second colony, hopefully will collect that in a couple of weeks time.

But first up need to scorch the old hive to kill off any nasties and must remember to order some brood foundation.

PS my neighbours must think I am mad filming bees in just a pair of shorts, could feel the bees flying into my back as they were returning to the hive, no stings so far this year, amazingly! :-)

Three feet or three miles

Well eventually the old hive has passed, well almost, the queen lies dead in the bottom of the hive and there are perhaps 10 bees still alive.

The new colony is struggling along, although they seem active, they have no stores, (honey), and they are not building more comb so that the colony can increase in size, I have tried feeding them with sugar solution but they won't take it, so now decided that perhaps I can use the surplus stores from the old colony, I've broken the wax capping on a few frames and left them out for the new colony to take into their hive, a bit risky because it can encourage other bees to rob the honey.

The short video shows the old and the new hive, the new hive is much to close to the house and will need moving to the position of the old hive, there is an old law of bee keeping about moving hives three feet or three miles, anything in between and the bees will get confused and return to the original location and get lost, so guess it will take three moves over a few weeks to move them down the garden.

Can you find my new Queen Bee?