We now have a new Apiary within a short walk of our house in a wonderful copse, many thanks to our neighbours kindness and hospitality.
The new apiary has three beehives spaced wide apart and consists of two new Warre bee hives and one horizontal African top bar hive. We also now have for sale horizontal top bar hives, please do call for details.
Whilst two of the colonies were nucleus allowed to develop on the correct size top bars for our hives the third colony was a swarm.
Now I had been keeping a close eye on the garden south beehive that has over wintered without Varroa treatment and on its own stores. Despite having a higher Varroa level than I would have wished this hive just seemed to go from strength to strength and very quickly went from their wintering Warre beehive two box setup to three and then four boxes.
Suspecting a swarm I positioned several bait hives hoping to slightly increase my chances of capturing the swarm. Now I can see the hive from my office window so I felt relatively happy I had a good chance to observe the bees if they should swarm and be ready to catch them.
As they say bees will be bees and nature has no consideration for the fact that I might be out of the office for the day. Yes, unobserved by me a swarm landed in our neighbours’ garden, ignored the bait hives and was eventually captured by a neighbouring beekeeper who very kindly handed the bees over to Melanie in my absence. Many thanks!
Stop Press- This weekend we are also repositioning the garden beehives again thanks to a very kind offer. I will let you know how we moved our two Warre beehives, both of which are four boxes high to their new bee apiary location.
Best wishes,
David
