Busy, busy bees

What a lovely day, today and very good flying weather for bees.  They are coming back to the hive covered in white pollen which makes them look a little mutant!  This is from - love it or hate it - Himalayan Balsam.  The scourge of conservationists, it is a wonderful insect, and particularly, honey bee plant.  See how busy they are ...

By now, there should be 50,000 to 60,000 bees in the hive - wow!  That's a lot of bees to be working with.

Apart from bringing back pollen and nectar to the hive, they'll also be defending it against predators.  Mostly me, disturbing them with my regular inspections.  However, at this time of year, wasps will be attracted to the source of carbohydrate (honey) and will be attempting to get into the hive to rob it from the bees.

The guard at the entrance of the hive reduces the area that the bees have to defend and is very useful.  Once the winter comes, the guard is turned upside down reducing the defensive area even further, as there will be less bees in the hive then.  Mice looking for a warm home are kept out by this narrowing of the entrance.

If the hive is really strong and there aren't many wasps around, then the guard can be taken out altogher facilitating the heavy bee traffic as well.

What is going on?

Thursday was an amazing day - if it had snowed or sleeted, I wouldn't have been surprised!  There was sunshine, rain, showers and cloudy gloom!  And the temperature didn't fall below 18 degrees.  If the bees were inclined to fly at all, there would have been plenty of forage ...

bramble ...

 white clover which they love ...

lots of red clover ... 

which is more difficult for their probiscus (tongue) to reach.  They wait for the bumbles to bite into it and then take secondary nectar from it.

But lookee here - blackberries ready to pick in July!!!

With the apple crops coming weeks early, too, now would be a great time to learn how to make pastry for yummy, scrummy blackberry and apple treats.

14th July 2011

That a fantastic day! Let hope its a classic summer. Sorry I havent done any blogs recently, but we have been away.

Walter the boar has had a bad leg so we have brought him in to the farrowing pen for closer observation. He does seem to be getting much better

Victoria has been busy doing all sorts of jams. The red and blackcurrants have been brillant this year. The guests seem to love the raspberry and redcurrent the best.

What a change in the weather and the bees are loving it. With no rain, and the sun to help the flowers bloom, they're out collecting the pollen and nectar necessary to sustain developing bees. You have to look closely but there they are - coming into land or preparing to take off. 



And inside the hive, all is well. The queen is laying like crazy and the nurse bees are feeding the worker larvae with a mixture of the pollen and nectar (called bee bread).

There was a lovely contented buzz in the hive today. More like a gently hum, really.  Bliss.

Sutton Mawr Farm in the rain!

It's July - what do we expect!!!

The umbrella isn't for me - it's for the bees.  They don't like the rain - at all.  They are usually quite spiky if the hive is opened up in bad weather and this was no exception.  However, if I miss a visit and they start to build queen cells, then the first warm day and they'll be off!

All was well inside the hives.  The queens are laying well, the pattern of brood, pollen and stores is as expected in spite of the weather.

What a joyful day - the sun is shining, the Rowan trees have berries on them all the way up the drive to Sutton Mawr Farm, and we have two brand new egg-laying queens in the two hives we split from the parent hives in recent weeks.

I saw the queen in one of the hives run across the top of the frames and will be marking her next week with a blue numbered dot.  This will tell me that she started laying in 2011 (each year has a different colour so that you know the age of the queen), and the number will allow me to start a family tree if we decide to breed from her.

I knew as soon as I opened the hives that the virgins had been successfully mated.  The bees were delightfully quiet and industrious and barely conscious that I was in the hive.  There was a calm, quiet and contented buzz which is indicative of a happy collective colony and a heralding of an assured existence.  For those of you who can't imagine why anyone would want to be messing around with insects, this is a time of rebirth and natural succession unfolding in front of your eyes.  There couldn't be a greater sense of satisfaction.

This is a frame of bees from one of the parent hives.  Can you spot last year's queen (green, numbered dot on her thorax)?

What appears to be empty cells in the middle of the frame, have eggs like a grain of rice in the middle of each one.  When I visit the hive next week, that eggs would have changed into a larvae and the week after will be capped with wax and the week after that will have emerged as a new bee. 

The wax capped cells in the middle of the frame have larvae pupating into bees in them. The flat ones are the workers and the lumpy ones raised from the surface are the drone males which are larger.  Just above the queen and to the right, you can see exposed drone larvae that haven't developed enough yet to be capped, but are just about ready for that.

The open cells around the edge of the frame are shiny with nectar that the bees have brought back in their honey stomachs.  The bees add enzymes to it and then fan to evaporate the water content and once it reaches the consistency of the honey we are familiar with, they cap it with beautiful white wax.  They use this to make bee food for the larvae and mix it with pollen for a mix of carbohydrate and protein that is very healthy for developing bees.

This is what a Thermo Beehive looks like.  Double celled industrial plastic for healthy bees, warm in the winter and cool in the summer.  The bottom box is called the brood box and this is where the queen and her attendants and a lot of the female worker bees are: drawing out wax and feeding the young.  This is also where the greedy boy drones are.  Above this box is the queen excluder which is an internal barrier to the queen moving up to where the honey is stored and laying in the comb that will eventually be extracted from the 'super' boxes above.

The alighting board is helpful to the bees.  They can land with their heavy nectar and pollen loads and then walk into the hive.  The entrance cover is there as shelter from wind and rain.

 And here is one of my girls, coming to investigate the early morning ruccus!  The entrance has a removable block (not seen) that has bee-size holes in it.  This will be inserted later in the summer to help the guard bees defend against wasps as it narrows the area to be protected.