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!