Despite Dad's finger being stung so many times that it swelled up like a golf ball (he even had to take his wedding ring off for the first time in 20 years...my mum didn't seem to mind but I think he found it a bit odd) it was a successful operation - we took all their honey as well, and it fills up our 5 gallon brewing bucket. We may not be able to sell it as we might have to melt it out of the wild comb, but it will still make good feed for the bees in winter, Christmas presents, honey for our own toast etc.
Yesterday we inspected the hives at our main apiary. We had left a stack of empty boxes there and amazingly when we went back this week there were bees living in there! A swarm had settled! And it didn't look as if it had come from any of our hives. Anyway, they obviously came down from the top, as the queen was laying in one of the spare supers we'd left there, but we marked her and moved her down into the brood box and now she'll be off to a flying start. We donated the brood in the super frames to our triple nuc colonies who appear to be struggling. But a new generation of house bees will get them going.
The good news is that one of our queenless hive has requeened - she looks healthy and fertile, and it's so satisfying when you can breed your own queens. We did buy 5 new queens this year, but next year I'm hoping that we'll use our own stock for a while. We've been quite successful at it this year and we've got enough new blood in now that we should be able to breed them ourselves for a while.
Our main honey-producing hive was looking swarmy, so we did an artificial swarm. Luckily however they're such a strong colony that I doubt our honey harvest will be effected much. We still aren't doing as well as we'd like this year on the honey front, but now we know about the importance of VENTILATION in a hive if next year is nice I expect we'll do much better.
Today we inspected the bees at the association apiary with Jane and Paul, two new beekeepers that Dad's mentoring. Jane collected a swarm 3 weeks ago and they're now covering 4 frames - not bad! We marked the queen today, although she was hard to spot because the bees were abnormally long in the abdomen - Jane's workers are about as long as our queens! Paul is still waiting for bees but his hive is all assembled and ready to go, along with a very snazzy alighting board of a type I hadn't seen before. So I'll be looking those up sometime.
We got a call from the Dave, whose garden the wqild colony is now in. They have already stung a neighbour, but no one seemed that bothered and I think Dave and Vicky are too excited about having bees at the bottom of the garden to worry about things like that! The bees were quite active when we turned up but they're just finding their way around a new place. Eventually they'll settle down. They were doing beautiful circular flights tough. I'll see if I can get it on camera to show you.
Another batch of elderflower wine is now on the go, 75% of my tomato plants are now in the ground and are beginning to flower and even set fruit; I planted chives amongst my celery a while ago to ward off aphids and I think it's working, though I may have to put more chives in; and we finished off the weekend with the perfect barbecue, topped off with homegrown salad, homemade garlic bread, rude bananas and chicken & lamb kebabs with a marinade that included pollen! Our first barbecue of the year and it was probably the best one I can remember. A good summer so far.
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