First of all some sad news. The swarm we caught from The Dolphin hive unfortunately died, we are not sure why. We fed them after hiving them, but then their numbers reduced dramatically over the next couple of weeks. We think the most likely cause is that we somehow lost the queen when we caught them. Another explanation could be that for some reason she didn't start laying quickly enough and the flying bees she left with would have started dying off naturally, within a couple of weeks. So we still only have one colony, but what lovely bees! They did send off at least one cast that we know of (it escaped) and maybe more that we didn't see, but they are thriving. They have loads of honey and we were able to take some off, with difficulty. This is because they still have a very "creative" comb building habit. This is clearly not a problem to them, but it means we have great difficulty doing any sort of inspection, without causing damage. Therefore we mostly leave them alone and observe from the outside. We are hoping to remove some of their "creative" comb in the late winter and try to encourage a straighter pattern. The periscope entrance seems to be helping them defend against wasps well and we are going to fit the deep litter floor soon.
We had 2 x 1litre plastic boxes of comb that we put through a fruit press to extract the honey and ended up with just over 2 jars which we are very pleased with. We are hoping our Daughter in law is going to take our wax to make furniture polish as she restores furniture.
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Fruit press in action
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| The magimix came in handy to tilt the press onto |
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| Liquid gold |
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Our first full jars of honey
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We held a meeting of The Atlantic Coast Friends of the Bees on Saturday 31st August at the home of Richard and Essie Nichols near Red Post, between Holsworthy and Bude. Nine people were there including our new member, Tessa, from Poundstock. We discussed problems we had been having with emails not getting through and attachments not opening, but are unsure how to get over these problems. We don't really want to start posting information out as this would incur costs and so membership fees etc, which we would prefer to avoid. We went on to talk about how those of us with bees had fared this year and the general problems of bee decline in the area. We then went to see Essie and Richard's bees. It was a little late in the afternoon, by then, to disturb them and so we didn't spend long, but were impressed with the lovely straight comb we saw and the vigour of the colony. They have 2 good colonies.
Our next meeting is at 6pm on Sunday 6th October at The Old Smithy Inn, Welcombe with Phil Chandler. It's being held after the next beginners course at The Yarner Trust that weekend and Phil is staying on specially to meet with us.
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