Yipee its a bee

You know that instantaneous pleasure you get when you buy a new gadget? I got it yesterday when Adrian brought over a swarm of bees he found in a tree. He waited patiently for dusk and boxed them up.

Adrian will run an introduction to bee keeping course from my place in November. I've bought a hive box and get to have the bees :)

Hope they hang around to supply honey.

Three weeks later

The weirdest thing happened last weekend during Ben's Bday party. All of a sudden we heard this buzzing, like an aircraft taking off. The whole of the back garden, and our neighbours, filled up with bees! It was thick with them. We quickly got all the kids inside. At first I thought we must have annoyed them, but it turns out to have been a new swarm moving in. Thousands of them arrived and piled into our hive (see pics below). Following an inspection, we knew the initial colony had been weak and small. The new one must have kicked out the old queen. They're now building comb and making honey at a great rate :)

Three weeks later, we opened up the box and had a look at the honey flow and how the brood was developing...

Adrian's bee keeping intro course from Keith Rhodes on Vimeo.