Land of Milk & Honey

I promised myself to now keep up to date with Blip & no sooner had i done so than I have gotten behind again by 24-36 hours. But there was a reason or two.

I won't go into one of them save to say in the photo, bottom left, is our cock Boris who is great at entertaining his girls, is very friendly but doesn't actually do much else & tends to run away at the first sign of danger.

The other matter was a great, lengthy session on Facebook with people worldwide on the trials & tribulations we beekeepers have with our girls. Very friendly group & all hosted by a Norfolk (UK) small commercial beekeeper. Small is his term but I admire that he makes so much effort to help others & much of it is free or at a small cost. Find his Youtube videos excellent learning material.

Today did an inspection, the second since the girls moved in on 10th May. Given they had to build out the hive & then wait 3 weeks for the first eggs/larvae to hatch, this was the first inspection when would expect to see the colony getting up to normal size.

And indeed that is what I found. Afterwards, I discovered a few mistakes I had made in the last 5-6 weeks which is why I had been posting on Facebook despite the fact it was detailing my mistakes. Think I once heard a beekeeper say it was all about limiting your mistakes. Nature is a damn sight smarter than we are and very forgiving.

One of the mistakes was asking them to build a frame of drone (male) cells. Will spare all the details but drones are pretty much useless for 99% of the time except for the one day in their lives when they might - and it is probably a billion or more to one chance - get to meet a virgin queen on her maiden flight.

Given this and a few more factors, I remove the drone frame when the cells are filled with eggs & capped with wax while the larvae grow & destroy it, by giving it to the chickens who love the delicacy by picking out the larvae.

What I had never experienced before was that the bees were several steps ahead of me - they had worked out that their queen (who can live & work for 5-6 years) was doing a great job, there was no need to replace her, thus no need to have the lazy drones spending all day lounging about & simply eating honey. So they changed from making drones to making female worker bees.

Only as I was taking the Blip did I see the frame 50/50 drone & worker cells. The larger raised drone capped ones are at the top, the smaller flat worker cells below. So sadly lost a few potential new workers & the few drones would not have made a big difference had I left them to hatch & enjoy the rest of the summer until the girls forcibly evict them at the end of the season.

Never stop learning.