The village where I live is full of lovely neighbours all who did a collection to buy me my first bee hive for my significant birthday last year. We live near Gatwick airport and so a few of my neighbours run Bed and Breakfasts for the weary travelers with early flights, handfuls of kids, business to attend etc. The guests can leave their car at the B&B and get a lift up to the airport at any time of day or night. One such B&B belongs to Angie and Graham and is home to numerous family members (Kate, this is your mention…) as well as a host of B&B guests. This is a house that never sleeps – turn up at any time and you will find someone cleaning, someone gardening, someone mowing, someone chopping, someone dancing and everyone always laughing. And so, it was with a heavy heart that Graham phoned to ask me to identify the contents of his hoover.
It had all started with an enormous swarm of buzzing flying insects that flew straight down the B&B chimney and ended up in the kitchen. Thousands of bees were buzzing on the inside of Angie and Graham’s kitchen window and so, being a little OCD on the cleaning front, the bees were quickly hoovered up into one of those bagless hoovers that has a window so that you can see the contents. Yep, I confirmed, my bees had swarmed …. Again.
The first time the bees swarmed was only 3 weeks after I had taken delivery of them. In hindsight I have been told that because they were transported in the small nuclei and we had such hot weather in April, they were too hot in the box and were probably already in swarm mode before they were transferred to their hives. The other thing I didn’t know was that if you spot a capped queen cell in your hive, your swarm has already left the nest and it is a really bad idea to destroy the capped queen cells – another mistake we made. So there was I, coolly wandering over to meet our new neighbours in their rather lovely house opposite us. As always, guilty of giving away too much information, I casually mentioned that I kept bees – at which point all the casualness and coolness evaporated as my new neighbour described the threatening buzz of bees that had descended on their home only a few days before and how with mighty effort they had got them to move on.
So, two new hives both swarmed. That means that most of my flying bees had left the hives and my populations were much diminished. It would take a while to build up the population of flying bees again to produce enough stores for them to overwinter let alone feed us. By this time Jim’s hummings had almost entirely ceased, until that is the loss of SHTBL2011 (Second Hive To Be Lost 2011) and that really made him go quiet.
Pop over to www.waxsbees.com for further blogs with the pics.
It had all started with an enormous swarm of buzzing flying insects that flew straight down the B&B chimney and ended up in the kitchen. Thousands of bees were buzzing on the inside of Angie and Graham’s kitchen window and so, being a little OCD on the cleaning front, the bees were quickly hoovered up into one of those bagless hoovers that has a window so that you can see the contents. Yep, I confirmed, my bees had swarmed …. Again.
The first time the bees swarmed was only 3 weeks after I had taken delivery of them. In hindsight I have been told that because they were transported in the small nuclei and we had such hot weather in April, they were too hot in the box and were probably already in swarm mode before they were transferred to their hives. The other thing I didn’t know was that if you spot a capped queen cell in your hive, your swarm has already left the nest and it is a really bad idea to destroy the capped queen cells – another mistake we made. So there was I, coolly wandering over to meet our new neighbours in their rather lovely house opposite us. As always, guilty of giving away too much information, I casually mentioned that I kept bees – at which point all the casualness and coolness evaporated as my new neighbour described the threatening buzz of bees that had descended on their home only a few days before and how with mighty effort they had got them to move on.
So, two new hives both swarmed. That means that most of my flying bees had left the hives and my populations were much diminished. It would take a while to build up the population of flying bees again to produce enough stores for them to overwinter let alone feed us. By this time Jim’s hummings had almost entirely ceased, until that is the loss of SHTBL2011 (Second Hive To Be Lost 2011) and that really made him go quiet.
Pop over to www.waxsbees.com for further blogs with the pics.
