Category: Bees

Meet Cleo,

May 25, 2022 / Emma / 0 Comments

the Queen of Bluebell.

Every hive needs a queen, ours has Cleo. She is the heart of our colony and the biggest bee in the hive. She is also the longest living bee in the colony, and if all goes well she will be with us for 3-5 years.

Her main role is laying eggs, lots and lots of eggs, up to 1500 a day to keep her colony strong. As the queen you might think she has all the power, but actually she doesn’t have that much power. Her hive is a democratic system influenced by the worker bees. They will decide when Cleo needs replacing, and they will do it. She does, however, set the tone and temperament of her hive through her pheromones. These also let her colony know how healthy she is. When the pheromone levels fall it can be the signal that a new queen is needed.

One of the first things you learn on the beekeeping course is that a queen-less hive is a grumpy hive!

Cleo, circled here in blue, was born in 2021. She is unclipped and marked with a white dot to help me find her. Trying to locate one bee in the colony of 60,000 is blooming hard so a quick dot can make all the difference.

She came from a fellow bee-keepers colony when he split and overwintered them. He marked her for me and has done a brilliant job, it is easy to spot her! Well it is at the moment with a small starter colony.

Why a white dot?

Good question, it is all to do with when a queen bee is born and helps you to age her. There is a colour system consisting of White, Yellow, Red, Green, Blue. Queens born in a year ending 1 and 6 are dabbed with a White dot; ending 2 and 7 are Yellow; ending 3 and 8 are Red; 4 and 9 dabbed Green; and finally 5 and 0 are Blue. Therefore, Cleo born in 2021 gets a white dot

If you want to remember the sequence: Will You Raise Good Bees (white, yellow, red, green, blue).

Bees in a Box…

May 23, 2022 / Emma / 0 Comments

How do you get the bees from their original colony into your hive? What the new beekeeping course didn’t prepare me for, suddenly being a beekeeper!

Collection day has arrived, and I admit to having a few moments over the weekend where I thought ‘is this a good idea?, can I really look after these bees? and am I going to change my mind once I get stung!?!’

I had arranged to collect a Nuc (nucleus colony), a small scale version of the larger colony complete with a mated queen, from a fellow beekeeper at my local association. Nucs can come in all different sizes and I was informed that mine would be a 6 frame nuc in a polystyrene box that I was only borrowing, it had to go back to the beekeeping club the following week. So not only was I collecting new bees and somehow getting them into my hive, I now had a time pressure to do this. Would my bees even want to move into the hive? Would I be taking a full nuc box back and admitting I had failed at step one???

Can you hear buzzing?

I packed up the car, a quick google search suggested I take my veil, smoker and an old duvet cover – not sure what the duvet cover was for but took it anyway. On arrival I was handed a box of bees and reminded the box had to be returned next week. Yes, I think I have understood that bit. That was it, I was now a beekeeper! I grasped this humming box of activity very cautiously and walked to the car. I had decided now was a good idea to introduce myself to the bees so at this point I am talking to the box. “Hi Girls, I’m Emma and I will be looking after you, I hope you lot know what you are doing.” Into the car it went. The eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted the duvet cover in the picture, you get a bonus point if you have correctly identified it as a very faded My Little Pony duvet cover, perhaps betraying my age!

Nothing in the beekeeping course prepared me for what came next – the drive home! A box of a few thousand bees buzzing in the boot of my car. Are they secure? What if they escape? Do I drive on? Is that a bee on the window???

The drive home was probably the most cautious and slowest I had driven in a while. Every turn or bump had me straining to hear if the buzzing was getting louder. Why did I pick the bumpy way home? Ok, it was quicker but on this occasion speed was not the important thing. Five minutes from home, I suddenly realised what the duvet cover was for, put the box inside the cover and tie it shut so if they do escape…..

And just like that Cleo and the Girls were home, the #BeesatBluebell

In a cottage garden, not so long ago…..

April 10, 2022 / Emma / 0 Comments

The adventures in beekeeping began. It all started with the gift of a beehive, a very good friend had considered keeping bees several years ago and was bought a hive as a present. His bees never arrived and when he was moving house, the empty unused beehive needed a new home. It came to Bluebell Cottage.

The hive sat in the corner of my office for several months whilst I wondered what to do with it.

“Did I really want bees? Did I have time? Did I want to get stung?”

Eventually, I signed up for an online beekeeping course to find out if beekeeping was really for me. After six sessions we had covered what bees were, how bees worked and importantly, how to keep those precious bees alive.

Now theory is all well and good, and you can learn a lot from pictures on a screen – when asked what I could identify on the screen during one of the lesson tests I had answered bees, then when pressed for more detail, lots of bees?, but I still didn’t know if when confronted by thousands of bees buzzing around my head I was going to remain calm or run a mile. I was about to find out as part of the course meant going into the apiary and spending time with the bees. It also included my very own beesuit, an item of clothing that can never be described as flattering.

Off I went to the apiary, excited and terrified at the same time. It was at this point I wondered if I was allergic to bee stings. Oh well we may find out later. I felt slightly sorry for these very experienced bees going about their daily business unaware that 10 complete novices were about to invade their space. Our beekeeper mentor approached the hive and said “right somebody take the top off”. The first volunteer eagerly stepped up remove the top and stepped back again. So far no bees apart from the few a buzzing around wondering what on earth were doing. Next came the removal of the crown board, essentially releasing the bees. Another volunteer was requested and you can imagine my surprise as I realised everyone else had taken several steps back leaving me nearest the hive, so in I went. It was at this exact moment I started my new habit of talking to bees.

After we’d all had an opportunity to remove a frame, describe what we could see and carefully replace it, we closed up the hive, job done. And best of all nobody got stung.

As we were leaving the apiary we were told to go away and decide if this was for us and if so we could arrange to get some bees from the group in the next few weeks. As I sat in the car ready to drive home I had decided…