Bees...

As you may have seen from Facebook, I had a misadventure with the bees the other day. I decided I would try to put off the bees's ability to swarm by clipping the wings of the queen. I went through the hive lloking for her but as usual she alluded me. I eventually found her on my second run through and managed to pick her up. I dropped her again, of course - silly me...trying to be too delicate and not firm enough. The second time around I got hold of her and held her between my thumb and two fingers like she was a delicacy I was about too eat. I clipped her wings with some nail scissors and put her back on the brrod. Pop Morgan would have been proud of me!

Later, having been back through the hive checking for disease, stores and so on I decided to check on the queen. Darned if I could find her! I spent ages looking for her because I needed to know she was okay. I had moved all the frames by the time I found her again, so this time I decided I would mark her with a dot of paint to ensure I could find her more quickly. The red was nearly worn off from last year, so I tried yellow....only, unbeknown to me, for some reason her sisters didn't like yellow and when I released her she was attacked and 'balled'. Bees don't sting their queen, they over-heat her and cook her. I didn't see it at first until I was closing up the hive. Not much I could do after that. I now await what we call supersedure where a new queen is raised from an egg and takes over the hive. It tales about 23 days before the new queen is developed, mated and laying so this will set the hive back a little...but I should still get a bit more honey than last year. Currently they are raising five or six new queen cells, so I have to keep checking in to see how they are developing.

In the end I think they did me a favour as I would never have had the balls to knock her on the head myself and I probably needed a new queen as they only last a couple of years and I don't know how old she was, coming as she did from a swarm.

Fun, fun, fun... Anyone want to get involved?