A call...... and I suddenly have a hive unexpectantly

Monday afternoon 4:30pm , working in my office catching up after my African trip - and I get a call asking me if I want a hive of bees...... but I have two nucs coming in a few weeks time.

The deal is: I need to take it immediately... Mark has too many hives and is giving one away, just need to provide woodenware.

I ran down the stairs, gathered up all my bits and pieces , forgot a long sleeve shirt, or gloves or anything else. Put together all the parts for one hive and two supers, and headed out.

Just over an hour later , my girls are home as the sun is setting.

South African Adventure

 

My dad lives on the south coast of South Africa in a small town called Sedgefield. This region falls within the Cape Floral Kingdom, which has thousands of unique flora speci. These are known as Fynbos which are mostly heather type plants and small flowering bushes.

The region is temperate with mid winter only getting an occasional frost, and by mid morning will typically be in mid 50's F. Summer only just climbs into the 90's occasionally.This is the only region of South Africa that gets all year round rain.

For bees there is food all year round, and they have two strong honey flows, beginning of summer and end of summer which is usually stronger of the two. Hives close to the natural forests will forage on both Fynbos and Forest plants and create the most unique tasting honey.

My dad arranged for me to visit a local Beekeeper, Corrie, who gave us a great tour and info on both local methods as well as his hives.

Another day working the bees

I was very kindly invited back to work the bees of my Bee mentor Rob , last weekend. A beautiful sunny Sunday , temps in the 60's finally.

The Red Maples were in full bloom and the bees are definitely working the nectar and pollens.

Rob gave Dylan a lesson in lighting the smoker again, using the scorched knuckle method. We started looking at a hive that Rob was worried about, in fact when he opened it , it was showing swarm tendencies, with a few queen cups and good brood patterns, lots of stores still, and a good cluster, We found the queen too and saw all stages of bees, plus a few drones. This time Dylan was with me and worked with us right next to the hives , which really impressed me that he had taken so big a step.
The next hive was the one that had a duff queen the last time out (she was only laying drones), and we confirmed again that she was not laying worker brood. We searched for her and caught her and Rob put her in a queen cage, then started planning for combining the rest of the hive with the hive of this queens daughter.

The good hive was checked , and once confirmed that the queen was laying strongly, Rob added a sheet of newspaper over it, made a few slits in the paper and started stacking the hive deeps onto the new hive. At the top the top covers were put together back to back so that the new top based hive had an entrance. The lower still had its old entrance on the bottom board.

This was pretty fascinating to do. By now the wind had come up and we also had overcast weather so stopped for the day.

I learned about combining hives, I learned again about lighting the smoker, I learned about the stages of brood, handled and felt the weight of a good food store "super",  I saw queen cups and saw royal jelly , so a great day

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