Bee days

 As you have seen in the blog, we have been expanding the honey business this year, Peter built new bee boxes when he was here with the cheese building team.

A few weeks ago the new bees arrived that Victor had ordered and were put into the new boxes.

Victor is out here several times a week tending the bees, and recently he got a book to wrote down details about each hive, so he could remember what they do. He says that is what his father did. His father was the beekeeper on the collective that Victor grew up in. One of the things he does when he checks on each box is hunt for the queen and look for extra queens and remove them. It is always interesting to see him and Garry trying to spot the queen in the piles of bees crawling around as they pull out frames from the boxes and then slide them back in.

A few days ago Garry and Max caught the swarm, as seen in the most recent post. Victor thinks they did come out of the first box in the line, the yellow one, but not the group that took off earlier. He says we have to wait two weeks to see if the queen of the new group starts laying eggs.

 The yellow box has no queen at the moment, Victor says there is a new one getting ready to hatch out, so the hive that had been making lots of honey is stopped and waiting for their new queen to emerge and start laying eggs.

Since they are hoping to prevent more swarms escaping, on Wednesday morning Garry helped Victor move the busy green group from their old box into one of the new ones with a second story on top. They had stored lots of honey like the yellow group had before they swarmed. The way it works, the queen stays in the bottom box laying eggs in the frames and is prevented from going to the top, the top box is where the workers make honey, and the beekeeper moves the frames as needed to keep things in balance.

Garry has found a bigger shirt to wear for beekeeping

Garry has been learning all about beekeeping  from Victor and has even got his own hive to take care of. He gave his a second story, even though though he says they are not quite ready for it yet.

Wednesday morning before Victor came he was getting frames ready to go into boxes, putting new wires into the old cleaned wooden ones, so they can put new wax sheets in them.

Garry was watering the fruit trees while he was working, because we are still really dry. Tuesday we had a few drops of rain as there were thunderstorms around us, but we missed getting enough rain to do any good.

After they finished with the bees they saw this hedgehog coming to get a drink where the water drips from the connection pipe in the yard.