We have been waiting for about 2 months now but our bees have finally arrived today!
I had bought a flat-pack beehive at the start of the year and it has been sitting in the garden now since March, fully constructed but still sadly vacant. March was the earliest I could have expected them to arrive; May or June is much more likely.
A very experienced local beekeeper makes up a number of 'nucs' every spring for new beekeepers in the area ('nuc' {pronounced 'nyook'} is short for 'nucleus', the name for a sort of 'mini-hive' containing just a few frames of bees. It's too small for them to live in for very long but ideal for a small colony before they are at full strength.).
The delay has been in waiting for the young queen inside to start laying eggs successfully - there would be no point in bringing them over if it turns out that the queen is infertile. All the other bees only live a few weeks and are unable to reproduce!It's now becoming quite late in the season to begin a new colony and I was almost giving up on having any this year. An old beekeeping rhyme goes:
'A swarm in May is worth a bundle of hay, a swarm in June is worth a silver spoon, a swarm in July isn't worth a fly!'
This is because a small colony like this needs quite a long time to build up enough numbers to be able to survive even a mild winter. Honey bees are unusual insects in this way because a large amount of bees need to survive the winter so that they can maintain the temperature in the hive - if there aren't enough bees to huddle together, the whole colony would die from the cold! Wasps, hornets, etc are different, only their queen survives the winter on her own and has to build up her colony from scratch at the start of the year.
However, the phone call came this afternoon to say that that he was coming this evening with the bees! About 6 weeks ago I'd planned where the hive was to go and it all looked great 6 weeks ago, however since then a jungle of six foot nettles has shot up again! We shot out to get busy with the scythe and within a couple of hours we'd cleared enough space to work in.
We stood the full-size hive to one side then set the nuc down on the permanent site and opened the door block. We were only standing about 15ft away now but not a single bee came anywhere near us - as soon as each bee came out it could tell it was in unfamiliar surroundings and only flew within a couple of feet of the hive, trying to get its bearings. This is why the nuc had to be set on the exact spot where the full-size hive will end up - the bees will navigate directly back to their front entrance; if the hive is moved too far away they'll just fly back to the empty spot, unable to find their way back home!
We left them to explore their new environment and when I went out to have a look a couple of hours later I could see they were already flying back in with full bundles of pollen on their legs, they seem to have settled right in!
