Making a beeline....

We've got to that time of year when everything in the garden is looking very lush and all those breeding birds  are rushing about trying to find enough food to feed their nestlings. Our garden is full of nests with robins, great tits, song thrushes, blackbirds, goldfinches and swallows all 'doing their thing' at the moment and watching all this new life happening around us is magic. The warm weather coupled with the rain in April has sent flowers off to a racing start so the air is redolent with the continuous sound of bumblebees. All those years of selecting plants specifically for their nectar giving properties for insects is beginning to pay off but not everything in the garden has been rosy. Regular moth traps have delivered much lower numbers than expected at this time of the season and as moths are an indicator species it does give me slight worries. After all, bats need moths in the food chain and I have noticed a significant absence of them so far this year. Even the couple who have roosted in our roof for many a season seem to have disappeared. Even butterfly numbers have been low  here this Spring but the main reason for my post has been to write an update on our bees!  

During the terrible wet winter the beekeeper I'm married to  lost his hives. They tried to keep going but it was just too wet, so we thought long and hard about re-stocking before ordering 12 frames from a specialist supplier, but my husband is passionate about his bees so I also knew, deep down, that it was a no brainer. Then we had that glorious warm weather in March followed by the wettest drought in April and the news came through that everything that had started thriving had been put in jeopardy by the rain and the return to cold weather. It has been a saga but the bees were finally organised for delivery today. By the time they arrived via courier, they were hot and bothered. The noise that came from the boxes seemed to unnerve the delivery driver and the runny honey that had seeped out of the boxes all over his floor were a sign that they needed to get settled in quickly so the beekeeper set to work, freeing them from their temporary home. 

 They need to settle and then get out and start to forage today before he moves them into their respective hives tomorrow. So far, so good. The weather is cool and not too hot so I'm hoping all will be well. They've now gone quiet but all around them is the noise of bumblebees so I'm glad we've got a big enough garden to fulfil their needs for nectar and pollen at the moment.

 Up in what is meant to be the herb bed, the foxgloves have gone berserk but they are beautiful and absolutely teeming with bees climbing up their trumpets and flying off with pollen laden legs. My prayer flags look a bit sad don't they? It's amazing how much of the indigo dye from the vat we trialled has already been washed out by the poor weather and the wind is certainly giving them a hammering. They now sag a bit, and when you go up there a little bit of limboing is required to get past but I am not moving them. The foxgloves are in every form of white, pink and magenta imaginable. I remember thinking it was madness to leave so many of last year's seedlings in the ground but they make the bed look magnificent while everything else is building up.

Let's hope our bees settle in well and start to explore the nectar potential of the foxgloves and everything else out there, If they breed as well as the birds have this year our hundreds of bees will be thousands of bees in a very short time. I hope they get a good summer under their belt so the chances of winter survival are improved. Watch this space as I have my own outfit on order and am being schooled in beekeeping this summer so that I can get closer to take photos etc. I wonder if I will make a good mother.....