A mother-daughter beekeeping adventure
BEE HAPPY HONEY | The Bee Garden | October October feels like the end. For your bees, it is the last chance. A few plants can make a real difference on these final warm days. There is a particular kind of October afternoon in Northern Ireland, one of those mild golden days that arrives completely … Read more
Wasps stripped our new queen’s colony back to a few dozen bees, and it turns out we’d left them a snack. What we did, what we got wrong, and how it all traces back to a split that went sideways in June.
Ivy for bees is the last big nectar flow before winter. Why you should not cut ivy in September, what ivy honey does, and the garden centre climber to avoid.
The home apiary. Three hives and a new nuc, as of this week. We ordered the Apiguard yesterday. It hasn’t landed yet, and for once that’s useful, because it means there’s still time to do a proper mite count before anything goes near a hive. Three hives now, and a new nuc that turned up … Read more
No suits, no smoke, just a bench and two microscopes: a bee taken apart wing by wing in the morning, and an afternoon learning to read the pollen fingerprint that tells you what is really in a jar of honey.
One queen thriving, one nuc lost to wasps, and one hive still refusing to say whether it has a queen at all. A bit of everything in this one.
BEE HAPPY HONEY | The Bee Garden | August August in the bee garden: the moment the whole landscape turns purple and everything your bees do this month matters enormously. There is a jar of heather honey on our kitchen shelf. Dark amber, almost reddish. If you tilt it sideways it barely moves. It sits … Read more
Two weeks in on the screen-stack fix, a fresh virgin queen in hive 001, a backup graft ticking along — how three separate queen situations are getting on.
After confirming the Randalstown queen was gone, I had to pick a fix from a shelf of methods that all disagree with each other. Here’s how I weighed them up, what I actually did, and two honest cautions for anyone in the same spot.
So that’s what I did. I built hive stands. I tidied the garden. I enjoyed, genuinely enjoyed, having nothing beekeeping related that needed doing. If you keep bees you will know how strange that feels. Standing in your own garden with your hands empty, on purpose, is not something this hobby prepares you for. I … Read more