What's all that buzzing?

This morning's sunshine helped some new oriental poppies open at the bottom of the garden...

 

I wish I could have recorded the noise they were making 'cos these poppies were almost roaring with buzzing.  I had to get in closer and find out why...

 

Ah yes....I can see you.....but are you really making ALL that noise all by yourself?

 

I thought not!
There's somebody else in there with you isn't there?

Now if you actually spent less time standing on each other's heads and played NiCeLy!!

There would be enough fresh pollen for breakfast for everyone!

Poorly Me and poorly bumble...

I felt really under the weather today.
Nothing major wrong..... just the trials of the common cold.  It crept up on me from nowhere and filled the front of my brain and my nose with concrete... so I was feeling a bit sorry for myself as I strolled down the garden to have a chat with the girls...

In fact I nearly stepped on someone else.
Thankfully 'im indoors came to the rescue of a rather droopy looking bumble bee who was looking very sorry for herself up side down on the garden path, and with the aid of a bit of twig propped her up on a grape hyacinth...maybe a drop of early morning hyacinth nectar would revive her...
It certainly gave me the opportunity to see just how good the macro function on my snappy camera is...

If she crawls round the flower head far enough she is bound to find some nectar in there somewhere... 

Just sit still and let your tummy settle....

Time for a final top up...

And with a final shake of her lovely fluffy tailed bottom this buff-tailed bumblebee ( Bobus terrrestris) was off.

Un buzzy buzziness.....

The best advice for beginner bee keepers includes keeping two hives as a minimum.  That way you can compare how they are performing, which helps reveal if something isn't quite right and also means you have some extra bees to hand ...which might....at times be very involved in an action plan to remedy a problem.

I hadn't realised just how soon I might need to call upon that best practice....

New hive number one doesn't at first sight appear to have many bees....

But there were more than enough to run over and repel this bumble who thought it would sneak in and pinch a suck or two of honey...

So maybe its just that the queen has yet to feel the warmth of spring and get into the groove of laying lots and lots of eggs....

Onto hive number 2:  Almost straight away the queen was visible...

C'mon now - you can see her can't you?

But what can't you see?

Let me shake some bees off and look again - what's missing?

And what can you see instead?

That's right...there's no sealed worker brood cells.  All those lumpy cells have been extended to accommodate a bigger larva. In bees, this means drones (males) all developing from unfertilised eggs.

This is most definitely NOT A GOOD THING.  

The colony needs workers...and workers develop from fertilised eggs....and I can't find evidence of fertilised eggs...

If the queen is not viable because she didn't mate well enough last year ( and who could blame her for not going out in the rain!) it could be curtains for this colony, sadly there is no such thing as honey bee IVF

Its time to call in reinforcements....and a second opinion...

But try as we might to find fertilised eggs the only thing we could find was drone brood...and then more drone brood....

 

So now the only hope for this colony is to introduce a queen who has been well fertilised and hope that she can take over these bees.  

Where can I find a queen who might be up to the job?

I should check on that small colony and see if that queen is laying well....

Never has the sight of capped worker cells been such a welcome sight!

So on with uniting two colonies.

First locate and kill the redundant queen.  

I'd like to say I observed this routine procedure with due ceremony and dispatched her with a solemn heart.  

But the b*tch was really annoying me so I resorted to flick and stamp.

Secondly I needed to deploy a really high tech piece of bee keeping kit.

Something perfectly designed to allow the permeation of the good queens pheromones gradually across the boxes both colonies have been living in.  That way, they will all gradually be convinced they are all from one happy colony and live together happy ever after.

What a good job I've got one of these gadgets handy....

Yup - its a piece of newspaper!

Pierced with a few holes to aid the circulation of pheromones the bees will gradually tear it up and push it out of the hive, and every hole torn through is a bit more pheromone that will circulate more easily.

So now I just have to re-stack the hive boxes and leave them to chomp newspaper.

Time for this bee keeper to practice patience.

Honeycomb Heart

Today promised to be a typical April showers kind of a day so I wasn't really sure if we'd get to open he hives at the apiary as all.  I'm quite like a bee in that I don't much like to be out and about in the rain....so I was delighted when the showers held off long enough for a few hours bee keeping.

After last weeks "Shook Swarm" we were expecting to find the bees busy building honeycomb on the new frames ready for the queen to start laying in... early signs of bees in "strings" looked good ....

Some of them had been very busy and built some rather wonderful, if somewhat wasteful honeycomb shapes....

 Can you see the shape?

We also found an intruder the bees had dealt with!!

This is an invading bumble bee - she probably went in to rob a drop or two of honey - but she was dispatched with a sting and the covered in propolis - can't have been a nice way to go - but its certainly an effective way to deal with thieves

The day ended with a demonstration of "hiving a swarm".  A swarm had taken advantage of the warm weather earlier in the week and made a break from where they were but had happily fallen into a friendly bee keepers hands.  So - how to get them from the cardboard box into the hive???

The answer - shake them onto a plank of wood and let them walk in!

This is surely where the science of bee keeping meets the art of keeping bees - allowing the bees natural behaviour to work for you - they walk up and into the dark place that looks like a great home - hey presto - the swarm are in your hive!