They are here!! ? ?

Good news, we have a NUC! It arrived on Sunday at 9am at the apiary after the bees had been asked to come back earlier Saturday night for capture. Or at least that’s how I understand it.

There are 10,000 of them, I’ve not counted, but seems that this is a pretty good estimate. They are beautiful, and noisy. When we got them out of Andy’s car (our apiary manager) they were vibrating the box, and they sounded angry. Apparently though they were just keen to get back out. It was very hot Sunday so putting on the suits was a challenge. I was keen to get out of that so I can understand the bees mighty have been keen to exit the box.

We transferred the frames from the NUC into our hive, gently mind, as my gloves are only marigolds and I can feel the bees walking in my hands. then we checked for the queen, eggs, nectar and larvae. Everything was there, so clean and healthy looking, even the queen.

I’ve not seen a lot of queens but ours is beautiful, she is not that big but she’s sleek and active.

We are going up to feed them tomorrow (it’s the June gap, don’t you know) with sugar solution, since apparently only blackberries, clover and limes are providing forage so they need a top up. Luckily Tesco delivered tonight and the sugar came for us to make it, unlike the rocket lollies which would have been useful too.

Anyway, get these pics!

The green box is the NUC before we opened it

Our bees!

There is so many of them

So this shows the bees starting to find the entrance, they started to use this after a few of them popped out the bottom. `they do this little dance, waving their tails in the air and emitting a signal to the others basically saying ‘this is us, we are living here, make sure you know your way around’. More news soon!