I am still alive, honest. Just taken off the honey from the Nature Reserve. Had a slight panic after the first taste that somehow I'd ended up with a lot of syrup in the supers. Then the sensible side of me kicked in a realised that this colony has had no syrup whatsoever this year but still the Honey is a lot runnier and less distinctly "honey" tasting than the stuff off the allotment. There's still a box or so to come off there tomorrow and hopefully that will be the end ...
Just to show what a shameless self-publicist I've become, here I am at the bees. The server this morning was (sensibly) reluctant to upload the picture for some reason. And if the TV channel France 5 post a video of their trip to Scotland to talk bees at the weekend I'll let you know!
I usually try to take the bees to a site in the Angus Glens for August and a bit of September. There is only ling heather at the site so going in July isn't worth it. The last couple of years I've struggled to have colonies in the best state, which is packed with healthy, Varroa-free bees and brood, and headed by a vigorous young queen. This year I had one colony on brood and a half with the half underneath, which hadn't filled the frames available and was headed by last year's queen. One other ...
I haven't updated this or a while so here goes. I shipped out the last queen cells from my best colony a fortnight ago and I am starting to get some semblance of my life back now that the queen rearing has stopped. I have enjoyed every minute of it - although my other half has made a few thinly veiled asides about becoming a bee widow. I took away the last 6 Apideas from Mervyn's mating apiary this morning and there were only two with mated queens. I swapped one of my ...
I took the extractor for, pardon the pun, a spin this afternoon as I have a couple of boxes of capped honey ready for extraction. Having festooned the kitchen in newspaper and retrieved the rubber gloves from the apiary (surgical gloves FTW!) we finally had a go at sorting out some honey from one of the supers (the others are on my new apiary and I want to extract them separately). I really want to stick some photos up but as the extractor is still dripping honey into the tank below ...
Archive
Recent Comments