As Busy as a Bee

Wednesday, July 1st 2015

First thing this morning our bees were at it again leaving the hive in large numbers. They once again settled on a tree in the back garden.

We searched inside the hive to try to find the queen but this time she was nowhere to be seen. This indicated that the hive was swarming, a process by which the resident queen takes a proportion of the hive away with her leaving a fully functioning hive behind for a new queen. So we once again called in our bee keeper Alison to catch the departing bees.

This time they didn’t head back into the observation hive so we were able to successfully remove them from the tree and place them in a skep (wicker basket for transporting bees).

We then left the skep full of bees in the back garden for a few hours so the bees could settle.

Alison then came back this afternoon and we wrapped the skep up in a sheet and she took it away to be relocated into one of her empty hives.

We are now expecting that a new queen will emerge from one of the queen cells in the hive in the Field Centre in the next few days.

Once again we would like to extend our thanks to our friendly bee keepers for their help.

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