Little Income

Todays' inspections show very little coming into the hives; fortunately all seem to have plenty of stores from the flow of nectar earlier in the season. There will be a need to monitor in the coming weeks and maybe even put an early feed on if the flow of nectar dries up completely. To add to this the wasps are beginning to appear at some hive entrances determined to sneak past the guard bees at the entrance; I've already started making some wasp traps and they will go out in the next week or so.

New Bee Keeper

Sue, the lady who I have been mentoring this year, is now a real bee keeper; following in her grand fathers' footsteps. I took a developing nucleus from one of my apairies over to her site near a restaurant/pub in Cannock Woods, Staffordshire. It was safely installed into a WBC with a good 3 frames of brood headed by a 2008 (red marked) queen who I had kept on following an artificial swarm on her original colony: a difficult decision was whether to give a colony with a 2010 queen of unknown ability or a queen who has to date been good and always produced gentle bees to set Sue safely on her way.

I hope the colony thrives well in its new location for Sue.

This leads me nicely into opening up my blog- new beekeepers, mentors, and training. All these new bee keepers should be a good thing, but is the level of training good enough? Is it right to make bees available to anyone regardless of their ability or experience? Should there be a more rigid/licensed route to becoming custodian of these sensate super organisms?

I have many points to raise with the bee keeping fraternity and in the coming weeks and months will be voicing my opinions on quite a few issues. Indeed it is hard to know where to begin so watch this space!