Gloucestershire Honey, Cambridge Videos

Keeping cool
Absolutely amazing . These workers fan the hive with their wings, using evaporated water to help it stay cool. Basically, they are the air conditioning for the hive.

Not today🤦🏻‍♀️
Today was not supposed to be a bee day. Today was a printing day. Well they had other ideas when they decided to swarm!!! I persuaded them it wasn’t a good idea and locked the queen in with a queen excluder on the bottom. Tomorrow I’m going in to sort them out🤬

Just in time
Life got in the way last week and the hive in the middle was skipped. It’s always been a bit feeble so it was not a huge concern. Oh my… well. Just in the nick of time. Look at that swarm. I got there just in time and within 10 minutes they were all back in the brood box. I have taken some brood frames away and created another two small colonies which have capped queen cells in them. Fingers crossed they will get the virgin queens mated when they hatch and we will have two new working hives next year, just from this one “feeble hive”

Orientation flights
I thought you might like to see what an orientation flight looks like. The swarm hive was brought back yesterday and some greenery placed in front of the entrance to make the bees reorientate as they took their time getting the hint to get out of the chimney. “An orientation flight at the nest entrance begins as a departing bee turns and hovers back and forth, turning in short arcs, apparently looking at the hive entrance. Then, the bee increases the size of the arcs until, after a few seconds, she flies in circles while ascending to heights of 5–10 metres above the ground. This spiraling flight takes the bee out of sight of human observers. She returns a few minutes later, always without nectar or pollen.” Beautifully described in the introduction to a paper by Capaldi and Dyer

A hot afternoon
Another swarm comes marching in

Volume up. X
I popped 4 frames of old cut out comb into the swarm hive this morning. It gives them a major head start. It’s the bee equivalent of moving into a part furnished apartment. Can you hear that loud crackling noise. That’s the sound of them cleaning up and rearranging that old wax.

When the bees come to the beekeeper

When the bees come to the beekeeper
A swarm chose an old hive in our garden which was waiting to be painted. The most uncomplicated swarm trap ever

Honey Time

Swarm magic
When a swarm collection goes like clockwork and they all just follow the queen into the hive. Look at them marching in. For the first 10 days I feed them and leave them alone. They need to settle down and get building their new home. Fingers crossed they choose to stay

Sometimes no matter how busy you are. You just need to stop and watch a new life coming into the world.