Bees

Here are some pictures from my weekly inspection of my bees.  At the moment I have two hives, one really strong colony and one very small colony which I have persevered with for two seasons but to no avail.  My bee keeping friend Tony gave me a virgin queen last week to re-queen this weak colony but as yet she hasn’t started to lay yet.  She needs to go on her nuptial flight with some of the boys (drones) to be fertilised, then hopefully she should start laying eggs.  The other hive (the really strong one) is doing really well.  At the moment I have two brood boxes on (the boxes where the eggs are laid and the young bees are reared) and 3 supers (the boxes where the honey is stored).  There are a LOT  of bees in this hive, literally thousands and luckily they are evenly tempered and don’t get too narky whilst I am looking through them.

This first picture is a frame of uncapped honey which is probably still being processed by the bees.

 

The next picture is of capped honey, sealed by beeswax.  This is ok to take off but I won’t be doing that for a few more weeks yet.  Each super if full normally holds about 20 pounds of honey.

The next picture is of the bottom brood box where most of the bees are, you can only see a fraction of the bees.

I have another hive of bees in the garden as well but these are Tony’s.

A chap who keeps a lot of bees locally is reducing the number of hives he keeps due to ill health and is selling them at a very reasonable price - £160 for a full colony of bees.  I have ordered two of these to try and increase my stock as usually I would have had a swarm by now but none have been forth coming.  The hives should be available middle of August.