and warm sunshine in the day to release nectar from the Sedum, much to the delight of the bees.


They are still throwing out unwelcome visiting wasps...


and are bringing in nectar and pollen from Himalyan balsam, Impatiens glandulifera. It begins to flower in July, is highly invasive, and is the tallest annual plant


The bees carry a distinctive white patch of pollen on their thorax from the balsam and bring back loaded pollen baskets and nectar for weeks. Both bees are also collecting water; the bee’s tongue in the centre is just visible sucking up the dew on the leaf. Honest guv’na!


Beekeepers have a system for marking queens on their thorax with a coloured pen to denote which year they were born,


but generally I prefer to leave them unmarked so that I look for more than just a queen with a dot on her head. How influential are those that impress us first with their teaching!

The queen cage is pushed gently onto the queen to keep her still and she is marked on her thorax through the wire with one of the coloured pens.


It’s been good practice too for Tom and Rachel to find unmarked queens and now they are good queen spotters, it’s useful to mark one or two in the larger colonies. Job done!


It’s not easy to see queens amongst the 50,000 workers in summer...


unless she’s a big 1st or 2nd generation of commercially produced stock. As they interbreed with local drones, the queens get smaller. I look for a bee with long legs and a spidery walk, especially in the brood area where I’d expect to find her. Hope, not expect.

You may see her long abdomen, even though her head is in a cell checking it out for laying an egg and


a retinue of worker bees surrounding her, exchanging food and pheromones with the queen, which over 24 hours, informs all the workers that the queen is still there.


They in turn pass on the pheromones to each other, called trophallaxis.


There are fairies at the bottom of the garden.




They fill every nook and cranny with comb in a nectar flow in the summer


so there was a bit of housekeeping to do where the girls had built comb in an area of the hive without a frame.


They were quite calm while we cut it out


but there was surprisingly little food in it due to the wet and cold August, so we’ll have to make sure they have enough stores for the winter.

Hey wasp! Buzz off………………

Gillybee x

‘Look girls’, I said,


it’s the end of July


and I’m all beed out.

Too many swarms. Too many colonies.


Next time I go to the apiary and see a swarm


I’m going to ignore it……….


let it fly away and find itself a new home………..


Oh!

Sort yourselves out, I’m going home...


to do some gardening!


I’m back now, and you’re still there? OK, same routine; shake into box, check!


Girls fanning to send out location with their 'Nasonov' gland pheromone, check!


Bees going into hive?

Check!


Sometimes the bees freestyle with their comb if they’re not properly contained in the hive -


properly for us, that is, not them...


so we have to rearrange their perfectly air conditioned house if we don’t want them to permanently jam themselves in, normally using elastic bands (but airfield tape will do in an emergency),


which they chew off


while they attach the comb properly to the frame


and we remove the remaining tape asap.
Anybody spotted the queen above? A puzzle because she’s a mated queen and I couldn’t think where she’d come from...


until I found the other nucleus box empty, because they’d decided that wasn’t where they wanted to live!



Going back to this photo from earlier...

I thought you might like to see a close up of this row of tiny claws supporting the weight of the cluster. Remarkable!


I can only guess that they clustered like this because the hive was too full of bees, so I gave them a super with empty frames for a bit of space and something to do. Spoilsport!


Gillybee x

A diligent mouse found a cosy winter hideaway in one of the hives, heated by several thousand bees with plenty of food in the larder. Unfortunately for the mouse, this excellent little nest was never lived in, as I put a metal mouse-guard over the entrance while she was out so that the hole was too small for her to get back in...


...which was lucky for me as mice make a terrible mess eating the wax comb, the honey, and the larvae and can disrupt the bees. Smelly too!
   In a strong colony, there may be up to 10,000 female worker bees left when spring arrives, as well as a queen, and the two pictures below will introduce you to the members of the Honeybee family (Apis mellifera):


Queen: 'Daisy', in her third year, egg-layer extraordinaire, mother and grandmother to all the other queens whose colony names begin with the letter D. Very yellow in colour, her heritage is from Italy where it’s ok to be in light colours because the sun always shines. Virgin queens mate with around 10 to 15 drones, so their colouring soon averages out.

Drone: Drones don’t get names as they are only in the nest from April to September (up to 1000) as they are only there to mate with new virgin queens. Oh, and to eat as much honey as possible.

Female workers: dominate the nest with numbers of around 50,000 in late May or June.  The workers do just that, a lifetime of housework for the girls, living for 5 weeks over the summer and 6 months over the winter.

New generation of worker chewing its way out of the cell: I’m very hairy until it all rubs off, so somebody feed me, groom me and I’ll bee off to work!


Honeybees are often mistaken for wasps, so this is a queen Common Wasp; yellow and black, thin waist and yellow legs and later in the spring, she will be out of hibernation, looking for a place to build a new nest.


On a warm afternoon, after a time clustering inside the hive, Honeybees fly out backwards in ever increasing circles to remember landmarks, so although this photo looks like it’s from a very expensive slow motion camera, it’s because the bees are hovering. (Should have kept that one to myself!)


Despite the continuing low temperatures, spring is definitely on the way and I was very happy to see that a few bees had popped out to collect some pollen on their back legs, a good sign that there must now be young bees developing, as pollen is the protein part of their food and the nectar (which they make into honey) the carbohydrate.