A Garden Full of Bees

I had a phone call yesterday from the lady whose bees I look after; they'd swarmed. It was a dreary, drizzly, murky day so I hopped in the car with a box and a beesuit and went to collect them. The cluster of bees was beautifully situated on an overhanging branch, about head height, along a path :-) couldn't be better. So although bees are very rarely aggressive when they swarm as they've nothing to defend, Ann's are a feisty lot so I did put on my suit and after a sharp tap on the branch, into the box they went. I wrapped them in a sheet just in case as there were a few stragglers - a couple of whom decided to negotiate their way out of the folds of material and buzz ominously around the car as I was driving home.

There were a lot of bees as I put them in to a hive in my garden, but despite the rain they all flew around orientating themselves to their new home. A good job done.

Or so I thought. I noticed this morning that there were a lot of bees around the other 2 hives: not just at the entrance but also trying to get in to the vents and the floor and buzzing along the joins between the hive boxes looking for gaps. Little whatsits were trying to rob my hives!! So, back on with the beesuit and gloves, and armed with a roll of parcel tape and the tiniest, most useless pair of scissors we own, I set about reducing the size of the entrances to the hives so that the guard bees had a smaller gap to defend from their cheeky upstart new neighbours. Trying to unwrap parcel tape, cut parcel tape with Christmas cracker-quality scissors and stick parcel tape on to wood all whilst wearing rubber gloves and in slightly breezy conditions - well, I'm glad nobody was filming that particular exercise in cack-handedness. Or indeed recording; my language had deteriorated somewhat by this stage. And I couldn't seem to retain in my head that there was no point in trying to sever the tape with my teeth: I was wearing a veil. Anyway, the new bees seem to have calmed down now and left the others alone. The tape's still on the entrances which they don't really mind, although you can almost hear the tutting as the bees return, laden with pollen, and have to queue up at the doorway.

My new run arrived today (yes, another one!) as I thought the ducks needed more room, especially with the prospect of babies. It's really good and I feel much happier about them being in there. Rose helped me build it:

Isn't it great? It's the large freestanding lawn run from Flyte So Fancy - I have been so impressed with their other stuff and this is no exception. John and Jean and any future family will be safe and secure in there, and I can fit their big tub of water in too.

I must go and look for Mary the Adventurous Hen who has been gone for a couple of hours which she does frequently. Off she goes, all on her own in the more-than-chicken-high wheat crop behind the house. I did find myself having a fleeting, subconscious thought that I should text her......