Bees, Chickens, and Cake
I visited the Langstroth hives at Selmeston today as we have had some beautiful spring weather and I wondered if the bees were flying. Sure, enough, they were! https://videopress.com/v/ySTaeADc?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata Their hive has completely sunken in to the ground so they are using this entrance which they opened last year. There is some very pale pollen …
I last went to see these bees in August last year (read about them here) and I was really hopeful that they'd made it through the winter. The landowner had said she hadn't seen much activity, and the cold snap we had a week or so ago had doomed a few colonies I know, so …
I went to check the wild-living bees as I've not been to see them since the beginning of May - not that they will have been remotely bothered! These hives were effectively abandoned a few years ago, and the home-made hives are disintegrating, making it difficult to establish what's going on as I daren't prise …
I was invited to come and talk to the Year 6 children at Western Road Primary School in Lewes, East Sussex, about honey bees, as they have a feral colony living in the roof of their school building. They have been there at least a few years, and are not normally particularly noticeable, but since …
I have had a colony at my apiary which was occupying a brood box full of comb we'd taken out of a feral nest in a wall at Crutches Farm in Winchelsea (see post here). The comb had been piled in and robbed out, but we'd discovered bees bringing in pollen, so moved them over …
Back in May, I visited the bees at Knockhatch Adventure Park, and there had been a small cast swarm in the bait box. We'd put this in a National, and kept an eye on them. I had last checked them from the outside at the end of August, and they had been bringing in pollen …
Today's weather was finally good enough for us to visit the bees on Langney Marsh. We also wanted to see if our tarp experiment had vanished in the floods, so Paul and I headed down under blue skies and a brisk and chilly breeze to see what was going on in the apiary. We saw …
Now that the bee commitments are starting to quieten down for the winter, I went to visit Paul to discuss plans for next year with the Market Wood bees, and any other swarms we capture from the feral colonies in and around Winchelsea. I have one of the swarms here at my apiary as we …
I wrote a post back in January about a hive I had which contained the bees we rescued from a wall in a squash court in 2016. As it was free comb cut from the cavity in the brood box, I couldn't have access apart from 6 frames in the super above, from which I …
Paul and I wanted to check on the Winchelsea church bees, and also the swarm from the church bees who were too angry to live domestically so to speak, so Paul took them from Mary's garden down to Crutches Farm, where the bees in the cottage wall had been; those bees are now at mine, …
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Wayward Bee 