New Season, New Look!
So, look at us! we are all smart and fancy for the next season with our new look blog site. Why did we move? We wanted a bit more control over things for the future and since everything else is about to get going again, …
Author: Bee Keeper
Blue Peter badge!
We have been really busy in the last few weeks from returning from France, the bees have been feeding on sugar solution as the weather has kept them out but there has been little or no forage due to the warm weather. We have been …
Bonjour!
Our summer holiday this year was in France. We tucked the bees up with some sugar solution before we left – they were hungry girls – scoffed it down, and put in some varroa treatment and then closed things up to head off to Brittany. Brittany for anyone who is challenged on geography is at the top of France, almost opposite Cornwall. All sounds good so far?
Cornwall is known for its temperate climate, Brittany is opposite Cornwall. Can you see where I am heading with this? So, 26 degrees on the journey out and 26 degrees on the journey back. The middle bit? Well, lets just say we wished we had more socks.
Having said that our holiday was a proper memory making one – ice creams, crepes, sand, collecting shells, boat rides, paddling in the sea, buying and tasting french honey…..That last one crept in, we couldn’t resist trying the competition!
The picture above is of Chantal. She is a French beekeeper!
We bought a jar of her honey, having tasted everything she had it seemed like we should, especially since all four of us had a try of each jar. We had a set honey from Chantal, it was gone in two days with salty butter and fresh crispy French baguettes. We had a lot of sympathy for her, she had a young daughter in the front of that van who was probably getting to the point of wild after hours in the market whilst her mum sold honey!
And this was Jacques, he was selling for a bunch of different people, and had a Seashore Honey! I mean, whats not to like, who would say no to Seashore Honey? Unfortunately it wasn’t sweet with a hint of salt like I might have been expecting but again having tickled him and the whole queue with my French, we had little choice. They were actually laughing at me, even the boy beekeeper was embarrassed at me saying over and over again Mercy Beau Coop and Bonjour (in that order) as we left. We had to buy a jar. Pricey though, not like ours.
Jacques’s expression, I realise now, does not convey the humour of the moment…….
The final jar we bought was due to having tasted very strange honey and needing to remove the taste of it. We found a stall in a market with green honey! We asked them where it was from and they had said, via google translator, that it was horse chestnut. Now then, we were not the right people to hit with this, possibly inaccurate information, given that we are our own purveyors of Conker honey. I would though, pass on this advice, don’t try it unless you have a very open mind. It was bitter, and green.
Like Absinthe.
More honey, its conker!
We have harvested our late summer honey this week. Last time it was a lovely amber colour but this time to our surprise it was a beautiful tawny brown, with a strong and fragrant taste. I am starting to sound like a wine taster, but …
Bumble bees
You might have lots of enormous bumble bees hanging around your garden at the moment, like us. Much much larger than honey bees, bumble bees – or what we think of as bumbles might be any of 24 different types. Pictures from the boy beekeeper. …
Uh-Oh, theres another queen!
So remember that we had a hive under the hive? We took the hive apart to look at it and it was like this.
We also had some advice that another queen under here was unlikely since queens, bit like tomcats, don’t fancy living close by to each other. ‘Don’t worry, just merge them all together!’ but after a closer look there was brood and larvae in there, so a queen was present. Bit of a surprise and presented a bit of a conundrum, especially as there was a queen up top, we had seen her earlier. We couldn’t put the bees into our hive, and we didn’t have another hive to put them in. After a while of thinking and much photo taking by the bevy of other beekeepers who had turned up by now, some head scratching and much discussion, we decided to put the bees in to a NUC box. A NUC is like a cat carrier for bees, but quite small, with no windows and very temporary. In order to put the bees into the NUC you had to shake the bees in. So, we said to Hubby, just shake the bees into that box. Now Hubby wasn’t very keen on this plan but by now all of us had stepped back further and were issuing instructions. Just do it, just shake them in!
This wasn’t actually quite so easy for hubby as we soon realised. The comb that the bees had made was very soft and malleable. It collapsed easily so we then decided to scrape it off bit by bit using the hive tool and dumping it into the NUC box. So this bit turned into a bit of a Crystal Maze episode with all the beekeepers standing back and hubby attempting to put the soft and collapsing comb, covered in increasingly grumpy bees into a box, luckily with no chance of automatic lock in.
This is the thinking and planning bit!
A bit more thinking and a bit of fiddling about
Starting to scrape the comb off
This is moving the comb into the NUC
A bit of shaking!
Bees are installed into the NUC box!
We have to wait and see now. There is a chance the queen didn’t make it into the NUC, we have to return to check in a few days.
Honey – its a-coming!
The moment has arrived! We are honey producers. It seemed very complicated but actually if you follow the process it’s not so bad. We had to get the frames from the hive, well that sounds easy. Lets not mention the tens of thousands of bees …
Honey harvest and er, shopping.
The moment has come to harvest! We are so excited we have done so much research into what to do. We need all this stuff: an extractor – we are using a radial one a spectronmeter a honey settling tank a mesh filter jars for …
Wild hive!
You might recall that in my last blog the bees were grumpy and in the one before that I mentioned about queen cells and maybe not being able to see the queen? You might have been wondered if there was something going on. Well, yes there was something major happening but we didn’t realise. The reason we didn’t realise was that we were planning our honey extraction and that was a bit of a major exercise, more on that soon. The another reason is that we are newbies and are just about managing to get by as ‘beeks’ by the skin of our teeth!
We managed to miss an entire new natural hive being built under our hive. This is likely to have happened as a new queen, which we hadn’t spotted, has popped out for a bit of a spin around the neighbourhood and on returning the hive didn’t, well, find the door.
Consequently she has gone under the door, everyone else has followed her as bees do and they have started to build a new hive, whilst forgetting there is one just upstairs fully equipped, and ready to move into. In fact more than that, it was the one they left not that long ago, probably earlier that day.
The whole episode reminded me a bit of trying to find my car in the multi storey at Gatwick.
What I find even stranger is that the bees didn’t remember about the hive just centimetres above them at any point but continued to construct this new abode over the next few weeks. This is because where the queen goes the hive follows and her pheromones were under the hive, so that’s where everyone is going to hang out. This means that we have a completely naturally formed hive just about floor level, imagine our surprise when we discovered tens of thousands of bees under there.
We had to dismantle the hive to get a good look, check it out is is beautiful!
