Whilst drinking a coffee outside yesterday morning on a clear blue Sunday morning, I noticed there seemed to be a few more bees flying about around the terrace than normal. It made me wonder whether the feral colony in the gate pillar was thinking of swarming. An hour later, whilst reading the Sunday newspaper in the bath, my wife called to say there was a swarm.  I jumped out and in a towel, was able to see that ’000′s of bees were airborne coming from the gate pillar.  I always like to catch this colony, as there has been a feral colony in this pillar for 10+ years and my believe is that they have built up an immunity to varroa. All experts I speak to about this, disagree. However, I have watched this colony for more than 10 years coming and going. I know they are not a new swarm annually finding this pillar as a nest, as I see them in winter when the sun is on the pillar and there are a few flying outside the entrance.

Kitting up, I went and had a close look at the swarm, which was now starting to cluster on the wooden fence, only 5 yards from the gate pillar they were swarming from. In the past when I have caught them swarming, they have clustered on a branch close by, which has made it easy for me to capture them. This time they chose to cluster along the side of the fence.

Looking closely at the swarm clustering, I was surprised I saw the queen. Grabbing a few photos, I was hoping she would remain in the same area within the cluster as I got everything together. I placed a hive in the garden, which had new wax foundation plus 3 frames of drawn comb. I built a ramp up to the entrance and covered this with a white sheet. The hive was open, so hopefully I could get the queen in, close the lid and the others would join her.

My wife got into one of my beesuits, ( as you can see it is far too big for her ) and she held a travel box under the area where I had seen the queen.  I quickly brushed a good number of bees into the box, hoping that I had the queen. I shook the bees into the top of the hive and quickly added the crown board. Was she in ? I was confident she was. We continued sweeping bees into the travel box and dumping them on to the white sheet. About 6 box loads of bees got dumped on to the sheet and I knew the queen was in the hive, when I saw the bees all running up the sheet and into the hive entrance to join her.  Within an hour they were all in. I left them, as we were going out to lunch with friends and returned in the evening, removing the ramp and sheet. Normally I don’t feed a swarm for 48 hours, as they have engorged themselves with honey before they swarmed. However, this morning was wet, so the bees couldn’t forage and tomorrow is forecasting showers. I therefore have now added a feeder and hopefully this will sustain them and help them to draw out the foundation, whilst we wait again for fine weather.

 

 

Saturday was a perfect day to inspect all my hives. I was surprised that with colonies as strong as they are, that I am not seeing queen cells as yet.  A few play cups along the tops of frames, but nothing yet appearing along the the bottom bars or central in a frame. The only queen cell I found was in the hive I split last week.  I left two queen cells when I split this hive, one capped and one with a larvae in it. The capped cell has emerged so I removed the second queen cell which was now capped. I later opened up the cell and as you can see in the photo, the fully formed queen bee, probably a week away from emerging. Hopefully the emerged queen has mated and I will see the first eggs when I do inspections next week.

My other hives are all strong. I am pleased that the one hive I was concerned about, in which I introduced a new queen, is back on track. She is laying and I could spot eggs and young larvae curled up in the bottom of many cells.  I am expecting all the hives, which are all with one and half brood boxes to want to swarm soon. So hopefully I will spot queen cells next week and can then split these hives.

Even with the bad weather we have been having, I have a few supers full of honey. Some capped, so will get these extracted as soon as the oil seed rape stops flowering.  I love opening up the hive and seeing the bees hard at work. As you can see in the photograph, bees lined up along the tops of the frames in a super all busily filling or capping cells.

 

This weather is getting me depressed. As a pro commercial photographer jobs are building up and I am unable to do them until we get some sunny days. I also specialise in photographic land surveys and this year have sites to cover from Glazgow to Penzance to Canterbury to Norwich and everything in between. Desparate to get going, as I would like to complete these surveys before the Olympics start, as not keen to be flying with surface to air missiles tracking us.

There is nothing I can do with my bees, until I do my weekly inspection over the weekend.  I therefore have taken up oil painting, haven’t painted since doing art A level back in 1978.  Another good reason to paint in the evenings is to avoid ” Britains got Talent ” on TV. I find this mindless dribble of extroverts who generally don’t have any talent and just want to be on TV.

I attach photo of my first effort at painting. This is an oil painting 90 x 70 cm of a Tuscan scene, from a photo of mine. I wish I had wild flower meadows like in the painting for my bees.  I see Edvard Munch’s ” Scream” sold last week in New York for $120,000,000 ( £75 million ) If anyone wants to purchase my painting I can do it for a knock down price of £5 million.  Cheap !!

And if this rain doesn’t stop soon – I will just have to do my own version of the ” Scream ”