Bee update

'Within that little hive such hints of honey lay as made reality a dream and dreams, reality'

 Emily Dickinson

An inspection on Sunday in our little hives showed that the introduction of the new queens has not been successful. Whilst she eats herself out of her cage for a couple of days to get into the hive, received wisdon says this is breathing space for the occupying bees to get used to her smell thus giving time to make her accepted. If she is not, then the resident bees will undoubtedly kill her.It would seem that neither of our new queens had the essential 'je ne sais quoi' and neither did we capture the queen with the swarm we were blessed with. So, we now have three queenless hives and no new brood. All the bees in situ are bringing in pollen and making honey but all that can happen now is that they will follow their natural lifecycle of six to eight weeks of life and then die. There will be no bees to take their place and the hive will falter and come to an end. We will be left with honey but no bees. A sad state of affairs but we are not alone as this is being reported as a dire year for beekeepers because of the atrocious weather. My husband has never been interested in taking their honey. The average life of a honey bee is six weeks and it takes the lifetime activity of six bees to make one teaspoon of honey! He thinks that for that effort they should keep the rewards of their labour but we will have to extract it if we are left with a supply after the demise of the hive.

The bees from the swarm have also disappeared in numbers, lots dying and being cleared out by the others so when we got a call tonight from my friend Vickie about a potential swarm at her mum Rita's we went over straight away. Not the best photo, but I was secured in the conservatory with Rita at the time, whilst my husband investigated the comings and goings of bees into her compost bin. This is the inside of the lid where they have started to make comb. He gathered up as many as he could into a bucket with a tight fitting lid and we brought a few thousand home with us but a compost bin is not exactly an easy place to extracate bees from so a small amount were left behind. Rita only lives a few miles from us so I drove the short journey home listening to thousands of vocal bees in the container, asking my husband to make sure he had his hands keeping the lid of the bucket closed! We don't know if he's caught the queen so we will be going back in a couple of days after they've settled  to see if we can pick up the surplus. The new bees have now been added to the dwindling hive with the swarm. They may stay and get accepted or all hell could let loose. Who knows? It's just another fascinating chapter in the saga of our bees this summer.