Baking, bees and bonfires....

I love a Saturday with a plan and today started with a plan and a half.  We have a couple of family Birthdays this week -Granddad is three score years and twenty and we are off to his party tonight but littlest nephew is rather younger next week and as we won't actually see him on his birthday we need to make the most of Sunday lunch tomorrow - so perfect excuse for some cousinly baking!

Little hands are perfect for preparing baking tins, but need a little help for creaming butter and sugar together...

 

They are also good at cracking open eggs, stirring in chocolate and folding in flour...

 

But little fingers absolutely come into their own as the perfect tool for cleaning the bowl...

Whilst the cake was cooling I thought I'd take advantage of a few hours of sunshine to take a look in the hives.  The temperature was just about 10'c today, bees don't really like flying under 11'c unless its really bright and sunny and it was a little overcast so there wasnt very much activity at the front of the hive.  

I quickly lifted the lid on Becky's hive and was greeted by a lovely sight...

 

Lots and lots of bees coming up through the crown board to chew on some of the fondant icing I put there a few weeks back.

Sadly however it wasn't such good news in Amelia's hive.  You may remember a few weeks back when it snowed I noticed how Amelia's colony wasn't generating enough heat to melt the snow.  Well I was right to worry. 

There's no nice way to put this, all her bees are dead.

They had exactly the same fondant as Becky's bees but haven't touched it.  Maybe I panicked and put it in there too soon - there was plenty of stores around them, only a couple of cells away from where they were huddling...

 

The fondant had started to melt and drip through the hive in the warmth of the last few days and was beginning to attract the attention of some of Becky's scouts.  I don't want them taking any viruses or bacteria back to their hive so decided it was time to destroy all these dead bees and wax...

Time for a bonfire.

It took a little while for the flames to catch...

 

 

A whole floor of dead bees needed to be cremated...

 

 




And gradually, very gradually it all started to go up in flames.

One thing is for certain, judging by the lake of wax and honey that melted from the pyre they didn't starve to death...

 

 

I'm not sure I'll ever work out what killed them but it was a very sad end to an otherwise great weekend.
I'm hoping the bee keeping weekends improve rapidly from here, lets face it they cant get much worse...  :(