Following an operation to remove a benign but rather large lump from my back… imagine my delight when a friend phoned and said her daughter wanted to come and see my bees. “See my bees?” I thought… “If she likes what she sees…she can help me!” And so it was that Arabella and my friend Joanna joined me at the apiary. The sun was shining, the bees were busy and Arabella took to it like a duck to water. She, like most people who experience honeybees hands-on, absolutely fell in love with them and hopefully there’s another beekeeper in the making!

Arabella was amazing, totally unfazed by the whole event and, I promise you, I put her to work as there was a lot of lifting of heavy supers involved. We even had to change a floor and she lifted a heavy brood box full of lively honeybees while I exchanged one floor for another. Wow! And you what know the biggest thing was? I think in all my seven hives, three strong and the other four developing, there were around 250,000 honeybees, buzzing and milling around, not to mention Challis’s hives - so you could go as far as to say 350,000… and not one single sting… boom!

What do I tell you? Bees are defensive NOT aggressive and if you have good queens and you work gently all the while showing them the respect they deserve for allowing you into their world you should not get stung.

Inspecting seven hives is a lot. Each hive has something different going on inside and it occurred to me as we went through them together, how important my notes are. And, I cannot stress enough the importance of keeping notes. I am a stickler for this. It’s so important to look back at last weeks notes before you start your next inspection. To be aware of, for example:

• How many frames were the bees on?

• Was there a queen?

•Is she marked?

• Were there any queen cells?

• Was the brood healthy?

• Was there a healthy amount of pollen?

• Did they have sufficient stores?

• What was the weather like?

• What was the temprament of the bees?

• Were you feeding them?

• Do they have supers on?

With the best will in the world you wont remember in an hour what was going on up there let alone a week! I not only tick boxes on my notes I also make notes in a separate book as to what I should be looking out for in each hive during the next inspection which sometimes involves taking the right equipment with me which is time saving in itself.

Now all that said, as I say all the time, although honeybees don’t live in the wild anymore they are wild. We may have domesticated their living habits but not the bees themselves and so, for all my due diligence, I am aware that in the space of a few days, let alone a week, things will have, more than likely changed! But, the notes give me a good indication of what to expect if only the unexpected!

For example, about three weeks ago, one of my hives wasn’t expanding as rapidly as I’d hoped, so I made a note of that. When I went in the following week, finding a supersedure cell was no surprise. (A supersedure cell is a single queen cell… maybe two… in the middle of the frame and it tells you the bees aren’t happy with their queen ). Last week I went in there and the cell was open. - I made a note of that. Hopefully this weekend there will be a queen in the hive. If so… has she mated? If so… did I mark her? You get the picture. If there’s no queen in there should I be thinking about joining the hive with another? You get the picture.

It’s not mandatory to make notes but it does help and makes beekeeping slightly less chaotic! Incidentally, I also keep last years notes with me, so… as the season goes on I can compare to the year before. Sometimes you can worry that all is not as it should be and look back and find out… ok it was like this last year… and you can relax a bit more knowing what the outcome was. Not only do I take my notes with me I have all sorts of information with me about artificial swarms, asian hornets, lifecycle of a queen, Bailey comb change etc, so if anything comes up I have a quick reference of what I’m dealing with or what I’m about to have to deal with.

Before I leave you below is a short video of Joanna’s and Arabella’s beekeeping experience and once again I doff my cap to Arabella, and cannot thank her enough for her help, having never been near a beehive before she was lifting and moving boxes full of bees like she’d been at it all her life.

So there’s another week done and the weather has been stunning so the bees have been busy-busy-busy. Not long now before I take the first harvest of honey off… now that’s exciting! Have a great week.

“Bees work for man, and yet they never bruise their Master’s flower, but leave it having done as fair as ever and as fit to use; So both the flower doth stay and honey run.”