More Thoughts on Bees

It's the last day of half term and we spent some time in the garden, and we did some gentle homeschool. I also spent a bit of time organising my beehives. Here are some pictures:



The amaryllis has flowered

I made up a medicinal pot of feverfew and chamomile

I planted baby cacti in a 50:50 mix of molehill
and coarse sand

I have given this National hive a brood and a super, and have
put the deeper brood frames in the super so the bees have a
lot more uninterrupted space to make comb

There is another 3-4" below the bottom bar of the brood frame

I have taken out (or not bothered putting in) the strips of foundation. Foundation is hexagonally-stamped beeswax that the bees then extend out to make honeycomb. However it has been manufactured to have a slightly wider diameter than the bees would naturally build, and this has led people to suggest that it has allowed the varroa mite more room to wriggle around and get attached to the bee. Hence advocates of natural beekeeping try to let bees build their own comb if possible. It also allows the bees to produce drone comb, as the foundation is worker bee size.

A National is still not an ideal environment for bees - in the wild they would occupy a space that would fit in to a man-made beehive, but they don't cope well with corners. They build a round nest in a cylindrical tree, so us providing them with rectangular frames in a square box means the corners get cold and unpoliced as the bees really don't understand that they are there. In the winter they can end up dying of starvation even if there are full frames of honey at the edges of the hive. Bees are incredibly sophisticated insects and highly programmed but this does not equate to being able to think! The lack of hollow trees has been detrimental to our wild bee population in the same way as it has to our owls and other tree-nesting birds, and I feel this should be the emphasis for beekeeping in the future: providing them with a safe place to live rather than purely honey production.

I have given the bees some of last year's honey comb to feed on, but as you can see,
it has granulated and the bees are finding it hard work and leaving the sugar crystals behind.
I have provided them with extra water so they can dilute it; it granulates
due to cold or because of the chemical makeup of the nectar it came from.

This lady is enjoying tucking in to a comb of liquid honey

Lined up at the bee bar

It has been lovely to spend some time in the garden and be around the hens, bees and plants.