Looking for the Queen

Sunday 29th June

4pm - calm and sunny, perfect weather for opening up the hive again.

Our main aim today was to find the queen and mark her so that she'd be easier to spot another time, should we need to find her.

It's a good idea to do this as soon as possible because with every week that passes there will be hundreds more bees each time as more and more bees hatch out.

We went through every single frame, trying to spot how recently the queen was on it, by examining the size of the larvae to see how recently the eggs have been laid. We found a frame with eggs less than one day old (they are the same shape as but about a quarter of the size of a small grain of rice and stand up straight on their tip end at the bottom of the cell) but we couldn't spot her.
However, the pattern of the developing brood is ideal (that's the cells in the centre of this frame, where the developing larvae are old enough to be sealed away with wax until they are old enough to nibble their own way out. When a bee hatches the first thing it will do is go to the nearby honey stores - visible here sealed with paler wax all around the brood - and then return to their cell and clean it out, ready for the next egg to arrive! The hive-cleaning job is what all female bees (except the queen) do for the first few days until they are ready to graduate to the next skill level!
As the bees were very calm still we went through every frame once more trying to find her but then had to give up. It's a bit frustrating, especially knowing that it'll be even harder to spot her next time we look, but at least finding day-old eggs proves that she is definitely there and didn't get lost during the transfer!

Foraging Bees

Wednesday 25th June

Hot sunny weather all this week and it looks from outside the hive like all's going well - loads of busy foragers all around the garden! I topped up the rapid-feeder last night as they'd taken over a pint and a half since Sunday night!

It isn't usually necessary to feed a colony extra rations like this in good summer weather but we really need them to hugely increase their population as fast as possible and they need to build up all those empty wax frames too.

Foragers usually go out with one specific goal in mind on each trip; water, nectar or a specific pollen crop (they don't usually seem to mix pollens). You can see what a bee is harvesting on a flower by watching it closely; sometimes they scurry all over it making the pollen cling to their body and then bundle it together on their legs, other times they head straight for the centre and dip their heads in to suck up the nectar. Borage - flowers for ages and good a great source of nectar (makes very clear runny honey)
Blackberry - masses of pale grey pollen.
A huge Cow Parsley (about 5ft tall). This gigantic weed has been saved because the bees love it, they seem to come back all afternoon!

Transfer from Nuc to Hive

Sunday 22nd June

Finally, what we've been waiting so long for - the opportunity to introduce our bees to their new home. It was very gusty wind today, not ideal for handling bees, but this is a fairly simple process.

The bees all seemed extremely calm (this is the first decent sunny weekend we've had in weeks - this helps us a lot because it means a large number of the bees are actually out foraging, not getting in the way while we work!)
1:45pm - We shifted the nuc forward a couple of feet and stood the new hive in its spot (keeping the entrance at the same height, of course)
Lid comes off the nuc - there are 4 full frames inside.
4 empty frames are removed from the centre of the new hive.
The full frames are removed from the nuc - the beeswax cells have been built up but they are mostly empty so far.
The last frame from the nuc - this one is heavy with brood, honey and pollen.
We didn't spot the queen but recently-laid eggs ages were visible so we know that she's there. On this larger photo you can see honey sealed with beeswax in the top left corner, some larvae in cells in the centre, and the orange/yellow filled cells in the centre left have pollen in them.
Each frame is placed into the hive in the same order then pushed up close so there are no large gaps.
2pm - Hive closed up again with 4 pints of sugar syrup in a roof-space rapid feeder. The foragers are returning to the new hive and flying straight in.
8:30pm - I opened the roof up to check that the feeder was being used and everything seems to be going to plan. Now the hard part will be waiting another fortnight until we can look inside again!...

My First Bees Arrive

Friday 20th June 2008

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!