BETSIE CONTINUES TO FLY

Last week went by in a flash. I embarked on a Queen Rearing Course, which I was really looking forward to when I realised quite early on that I am too busy to do it! Is this a good thing? Well, on the one hand yes, because I am busy with Betsie Valentine which is doing everything and more than I could have imagined. Actually, now I have said that, I am not going to erase it but amend it.. Betsie Valentine is doing every bit as well as I had imagined it would.. that’s better! And no, going back a sentence, because I really wanted to learn about Queen Rearing, especially after last year when I had such a disastrous year with Queens. Ah well, I will have to leave the Queen Rearing to others and get on with what I love best.. talking about the Honeybees.

Lovely talk at Ley Hill School on Wednesday. It was so nice stepping back inside the school. My two youngest boys went there and I used to photograph the children at the dress rehearsal of their nativity play. The school would then sell the photographs of the children, all dressed up in their nativity outfits, to the parents and that was my good deed for the school. I wondered how many of the children I talked to were the children of the children I photographed!

I also attended Turnfurlong School Fête in Aylesbury. They set aside a classroom for me where I gave three separate talks throughout the day about, of course, the honeybees. It actually went very well and the feedback as always was extremely positive. I love that so many people want to know about the honeybees and are fascinated by them and ultimately, at the end of the talk, leave saying “well I didn’t know that” or “I have learned so much” That is a “Boom” moment for me.

And so, on to my bees. Well, as I expected my hive that I brought through the winter has expanded to the degree that when I did my inspection I found Queen Cells. I was prepared. I had taken a spare hive up with the intension of doing an artificial swarm and an artificial swarm I did indeed do. It went well. I hope you can read the diagram below..

I collected a hive of bees from a friends house that she, Sally, had prepared for me. It was touch and go as to whether I would bring it back at this stage. This stage being, It had two sealed queen cells in it. The problem with moving a hive like this is its fragility. I spoke to another friend, a more experienced beekeeper about the pro’s and cons of moving it. The ‘con’ being damaging the, as yet, unborn queen, which would have been a disaster. The pro’s being having the hive on my site when she is born. If I waited for her to be born it would be another 3 weeks before she started laying and could be moved. She would have to go to someone elses house first who lived further away from Sally than me and three miles, at least, from me for another few weeks so it would be summer before the hive arrived and much disruption to the hive. So I took the decision to move the hive very carefully to my apiary. My husband helped me. I drove at a snails place to get bring it home and left it alone until yesterday. I peeked in to have a look. The cell was undamaged and open.. she has been born. I didn’t disturb the hive any more than that, I closed it up and will wait a couple of weeks for her to mate with the drones and start laying.

The hive I picked up a couple of weeks ago had not taken to The Bailey Comb Change as had my original hive a few weeks back. The bees are in a Deep National Hive and therefore have plenty of space so simply don’t want to go up. I caught the queen and put her in to a new brood box above the old one. I could not put the frame with her on up there as they are so much bigger than my National frames. So I shook a load of Nurse bees in there and they simply flew out and so did the Queen. I was devastated but not surprised. A couple of days later I went back in and to my utter surprise she was back in the old brood box. She must have just flown back in. Luck was definitely on my side. So I took off the Queen excluder and left them to see if they would go up, but as I said before, highly unlikely given all the room they have in the bottom box. I am afraid to say when I went up there on Saturday I intervened with nature and decided patience was getting me no-where so I did a shook swarm, which has meant sacrificing all the brood in the bottom box which I hated doing, but I was never going to get them into the new box any other way. I am feeding them and the weather is good so hopefully all will be well.

I now have four hives. I really do want to have a good flow of honey, so I may unite two of them to give me three strong hives rather than two strong and two weak ones. I will watch them very carefully over the next few weeks and keep you in the know.

The sun is shining and the honeybees sure are buzzing, well they are at my apiary. Not many in my garden apart from the odd black honeybee which keeps appearing in my house as well. They are not mine, so someone close by has black bees. I would love to know who!

The pictures below were taken in my friend Sally’s garden. Sally being the lady I acquired my latest colony of bees from and whose bees I steadfastly looked after last week while she was away. It wasn’t a sunny day but they were still out foraging on her wonderful apple blossom. Clever girls.

Finally.. my lovely Dad is 97 and his wife is currently in Hungary for about 6 weeks. I am going over as much as I can to make sure he is ok. Meanwhile a splendid man called Len is popping in twice a day to keep an eye on him and help him with his very old dog Boysie. I was wondering what I could give to Len by way of a thank you for all he is doing when who should appear at the door when I was there but Len himself. You will gather I had never met him before. He had come round with his gorgeous granddaughter with an equally glorious name, Layla Rose. We started chatting about this and that and you guessed it, got on to the subject of honeybees. I had gone there straight from the talks at Turnfurlong School.. So.. I gave Layla a copy of Betsie Valentine And The Honeybees. Her mother very kindly sent me these photographs of her with said book. Thank you Layla’s mum for these, they are lovely..