And relax.....

Well it's been a tough few days.

Friday was a 19 hour day and then as I still wasn’t ready, I was up at 4.30 on Saturday. After all the hard work and stress the show itself was a crashing disappointment as I took only £63 and the rent was £80.  It was awful weather and everyone was suffering, but I have to accept that it didn’t fly off the stall when people were there. 

This dismal photo is just before the steady drenching rain.

Still there are several positives to take from it 1) having a deadline spurred me on to get everything ready 2) I have an idea what is going to sell (Gardener’s skin balm 3) I have several ideas of what I can do to improve presentation 4) I may have to readjust my ideas of how long it will take to make it profitable.

Yesterday was meant to be a day of recuperation, pottering around, slowly getting organised again but after separating the quail and getting the two male quail into a cage (much needed- Goldie has been chasing Una round the brooder box with sex in mind and she is not ready for that sort of thing), I took a stroll round the garden and noticed I had a swarm.

Same tree as last year conveniently, about 8- 10 feet off the ground.

I called beekeeping friend who came round with her two boys and her friend and Rosie and Oliver came out to watch too, Oliver looking very cute in his beekeeping suit.

 Confidently I climbed the ladder ready to brush them into a cardboard box. Unfortunately they had clustered in an awkward place where two branches crossed, still as long as I got the queen it would be alright as the others would follow. I didn't get her and it wasn't alright. I got 80% of the bees down and inverted the box over a sheet, which they slowly left and returned to the tree. Meanwhile  friend’s son got stung  on the arm and went screaming out of the garden,  friend’s friend got a bee entangled in her hair and in the general stress and panic she got stung on the scalp (ouch!). We administered antihistamine cream, and took a deep breath and started again – this time without spectators.

Second time around, the bees were quite irritable. I was up the ladder again, holding the box in one hand and trying to brush them in with the other, when they started stinging me on the arm that was holding the box. I tried to ignore it but it got too much and I had to retire again.

Friend decided to take her entourage home and I called Steve who is Oliver’s father’s father.

 Steve started keeping bees at the same time as me, but his died over the winter. I said if he helped me take the swarm he could have it. By the time he arrived, I had had the idea of balancing the box above them and trying to drive them into it. This did seem to work although it took a long time. 

When it was full, Steve went up the ladder and tried to close the flaps of the box. Disturbed, at least half the bees plummeted straight down to earth. We brought down what we had and again inverted the box over a large piece of netting. This time we must have had the queen as slowly all the other bees went in the box. Then all that was needed was to tie the netting round the box, put it in the back of the car (!) and drive 3 miles to Steve’s hives and then shake them into a hive box. Job done. By that time it was 9 o’clock and I was seriously ready for bed.

Monday I was shattered and battered, my arm which had been the site of multiple stings had a red swollen area about 5 inches by 6, nevertheless I thought I had better go in the hive that had swarmed and see how many queen cells they had made as I didn't want the risk of them throwing a secondary swarm. Without the queen the bees were cross. To my absolute horror I spotted one crawling INSIDE MY VEIL. I squashed it with my glove and took off down the garden to where I could undo my suit, take out the dead bee and get properly zipped up again.

Second time around I discovered many queen cells, I removed some and I took one on a frame of brood plus two other frames and put them in a nucleus box to try to rear a fourth colony. Bending down to look at the hive, I thought I had been stung on the back but I moved quickly and the sting didn't fully go in. Shortly after though I definitely got stung on the ankle (foolishly I was only wearing trainers). As it was in such an awkward place I wanted to get antihistamine cream on it as soon as possible so I put the hive back together and hobbled down the garden at full speed. 

I'm sure I have left more than one queen cell in the hive and should really go back in again to check, but the weather forecast for the next few days is not good. We may well get a second swarm from that hive.

Some Reassurance ....I Think.....

Last night I took my photo of the queen cells to the Leeds Beekeeping Association night and asked for advice. Robin Tomlinson, who has around 50 hives and has been keeping bees for 30 years or so, took one look at them and said they were supersedure cells built by the bees to replace a dead or failing queen and that I should leave the hive alone for three weeks. He then complicated things by looking at another photo and saying I had an emergency queen cell where the bees try to take an existing worker bee cell and turn it into a queen. He said I should go in and destroy any cells like this as they don't make good queens. Then the beekeepers in general started looking at my photos and trying to assess the health of the colony from the appearance of the sealed brood cells in the photo, whether they were drone cells or slightly raised worker cells which were deformed slightly due to the presence of either chalk brood or chilled brood.
So I am taking Robin's advice and leaving them to get on with whatever they are doing. Much as I would like to go in for another look, and check how many queen cells were actually there and if there are any signs of disease, this isn't strictly necessary and I don't really have the time. My best hope is that they do a swift and efficient supersedure and that the new queen is stronger than the old one as this hive has never really thrived.
Just in case they do swarm, I have filled a nucleus box with empty frames of foundation and left it temptingly nearby.
On the soap front, both the printer and the labels arrived safely yesterday so I have much to get on with.

Where did the time go?

Somehow life has got frantically busy.
I have my first show on Saturday which is the Otley Show. It is so I hear a good show, about 40 minutes away, busy and popular without being scary like the Great Yorkshire Show. Preparations were going okay. Well to be truthful I had a mental block in my head that said 'I can't do anything until I get the labels sorted out'. Then last week someone asked for samples saying they would call round the following night, I said that would be fine and then spent the next day sweating over the label design and totally forgot about what prices to quote her. I then spent the next morning writing up a price list in a three fold little brochure. This is good as it will be going out on the stall at Otley.
Having finished the label design all I had to do now was order the rest of the labels and buy a laser printer which I did on Monday. My internet was down again so I had to do this from the library. The printer is due to arrive today, the labels, I don't know when, sincerely hope it is before Friday.
So my list of things to do for the show was to finish fiddling with the labels to make sure they print out aligned  properly, to cut and label the soap, to make and label the balms and body butters and to check the set up for the stall, tablecloth, lighting, display etc. It seemed a full programme but manageable but then this happened:

That is a sealed queen cell and means that unless I do something quickly, a swarm is imminent. I took advantage of a small burst of sunny weather to do a quick inspection yesterday and found that in hive 2. You should be impressed that I managed to take a picture as punching a security code into a touch screen phone whilst wearing leather gloves is not easy. Nor is holding the frame in one hand, the phone in another and somehow managing to press the shutter button again in leather gloves. I didn't want to take the gloves off as the bees weren't happy and there were a lot buzzing round and crawling on me.
Now I have to do something fairly quickly here, I have two options (three if you include doing nothing and then possibly watching a swarm flying away), making up an artificial swarm in a separate box to the side of the hive or following the Demaree method and separating the queen cells and most of the brood from the queen by putting them in separate boxes within the same hive.
I like the Demaree method, it has the advantage of not splitting the colony and letting the flying bees work away as usual whilst the new queen hatches and is mated and starts laying. Also if I have read things wrong and these are not swarm cells but supersedure cells where the colony has decided to replace a poor queen then I haven't lost anything as the colony is still basically intact. I have two problems, the Demaree method calls for a brood box with the old queen in it topped by a queen excluder, then a super, then a Demaree board and then another brood box with the queen cells in. I don't have a Demaree board, which is like a queen excluder but with a hole cut out of the side to allow the new queen to leave the hive and mate. I could probably get by with using a spare queen excluder for the next few days but I haven't got one of them either although I can buy one tonight at the LBKA meeting. My other problem is that I have not yet seen the queen in this hive.
I don't have much time to decide what to do, if they haven't swarmed already the bees will swarm between 10 and 4 on the next fine day. Fortunately it is due to rain until 3 today so I can probably risk leaving it until tomorrow morning when Oliver is at nursery.
Meanwhile the the two male quails are practically fully grown now and need to be out of the brooder box. I have been bidding on ebay for the last two weeks for an old rabbit hutch which could be converted for quail. I was finally successful on Monday getting one for £19 which I picked up yesterday. I could do with getting it out of the back of the car, cleaned out and put inside somewhere to let the quail acclimatise to life without the heat lamp before transferring it to the hen coop. This may not happen before Sunday as I have to prioritise the Otley Show and the swarm.
Finally Mary laid her second egg yesterday (I think). She still doesn't know what a nestbox is for and laid it in a heap of dust.

A Tale of Two Chickens

A couple of days ago, when it was sunny, I went out into the garden about five o'clock to have a nice cup of tea and a bit of a sit down as they say. I was enjoying the colours of the garden, the sky was a deep blue with white cotton wool clouds. the new leaves on the trees were very green, as was the lawn and this was also spotted with the bright yellow colour of dandelions (the presence of dandelions is less annoying to me since I discovered they are good for bees), when something white caught my eye. Towards the edge of the lawn, under the apple tree, was an egg:

Strange, I thought, who would leave an egg there? I ruled out human intervention, many of my neighbours have their idiosyncracies shall we say? but  it was most unlikely that they had started flitting round the neighbourhood secretly giving away eggs. Amelia, the chicken lays in the nest box, generally the first box from the end, Bertie has never laid, which left Mary the new chicken, who is only 18 weeks old and not supposed to lay for another three weeks also she is supposed to lay blue eggs. On examination, the egg, as if washed in Daz had a sort of bluey whiteness to it, so I suppose that taken by surprise by her first egg, she had laid it where she happened to be at the time.
We lavished praise on Mary and Bertie sulked.

 Bertie did not take to the new chickens very well, there was a bit of pecking and bossing on the first few days but since she realised that they were not going away (at least Mary wasn't, Katie sadly disappeared into the mouth of the fox) she has been sulking, being the last one out of the house on a morning and first one in at night and standing around a lot looking morngy. Then like a teenager, jealous of a younger sibling, she decided to run away. When I went to shut the chicken house up that night, I did a quick check to make sure they were all there and discovered Bertie was missing. I immediately thought she'd been got at by the fox as she would not stay out of the house  later than the others and in any case was nowhere to be seen. 
I was hampered a bit here as Rosie was out and it was Oliver's bedtime and he was tired and cross. I could not leave him, to do a thorough search and he did not have the energy to come with me. I settled him down and set out in the dusk to do a lightning quick tour of the garden, the bit of the valley immediately behind the garden and the neighbour's garden.  The neighbour's chickens had also put themselves to bed but had not yet been shut up for the night, I did a quick check in their house and did see a chicken that looked like Bertie. On the other hand there were another six chickens in there and I could imagine the commotion if I falsely accused one of them of being Bertie. I went away and hoped for the best, which is what happened, as in the morning, my neighbour reported her surprise at gaining an extra chicken overnight.
Since then, Bertie has not slept away from home again nor has Mary laid any more eggs. At least I haven't found any, although I am now having to patrol the garden checking all likely spots.
Finally my sister said she had been worrying about Una the quail, so here is the latest picture:

As you see she is still very small, but she is on her feet and moving (hence the blurriness of the photo). She seems to be a fighter, I think she's going to make it.

As I Walked Out One May Morning

Oliver woke me this morning around 4.30, I slipped into his bed to soothe him and he was soon asleep again which left me lying watching the dawn and trying to listen to the dawn chorus through the sound of Oliver snoring (he has a cold). I decided to get up.
Consequently I was up with the sun

 It was amazing on the valley  at this time, experiencing the world of activity that goes on when the people are not there. I saw three rabbits, going lippity lippity, not very fast, until they saw me and scarpered. There were clouds of cherry blossom everywhere (excellent for bees)

Clumps of cowslips

And some early bluebells:

As if to emphasize how much nicer it all was without humans, I came across evidence of their destructive presence. This is most likely where a stolen car has been set on fire:

And it was whilst gazing at the absolute beauty of the mist rising from the pond in the early morning sunshine trying to work out who has a contemplative beer and then tries to spoil the scene for everyone else by chucking the empty can in the water, that I disturbed a heron that flapped slowly away across the valley.

Trying to follow a pair of mallards who were waddling away from the pond, I came across a fox trotting purposefully aware, clearly he had business elsewhere.
Finally I climbed the hill that we sledged down in March to take a picture to show the difference that six weeks can take. Here are the trees covered in cherry blossom with the city in the distance and looming across the photo is my immense shadow. Rosie is currently working hard trying to finish illustrating our children's story about two creatures who are tormented by their own shadows. Given the size of mine I can see why they were scared. As I was alone out there, I tried a few arm movements to try to make my shadow  look more threatening. Sadly it is impossible to make a scary shadow and take pictures of it on a mobile phone.

The Queen! I saw the queen!

Despite what I said the other day, I feel I'm getting to grips with beekeeping, it is no longer a huge mystery that makes my head whirl, I'm even thinking of taking exams in it. Yep the BBKA take it seriously enough to offer a complete exam route http://www.bbka.org.uk/learn/examinations__assessments. There is a Basic Assessment for everyone, then you can choose whether to go down the practical or theoretical route or to do everything and become a Master Beekeeper.
One thing has been holding me back though, the fear that I shall never learn how to spot the queen. Last year   we lost the marked queen in a swarm so by the end of the summer I had three unmarked queens. On every inspection I looked for the queen but newly hatched queens are small and not easily spotted and the weather was so bad last year that the bees would not tolerate the hive being open for long while I searched for the needle in the haystack
You might think if the bees are doing well, and the hive is full of young healthy brood, that it doesn't matter if I can't spot the queen. This is true up to a point, but most manipulations require the queen. Making an artificial swarm to ward off the real thing, for example, calls for the queen to be put in one brood box and the majority of brood and bees in another.
So I was amazed and delighted when I spotted the queen in hive 1 yesterday. Hive 1 is our original hive, it is much less vigorous than hive 3 with brood on 5 frames but from chatting to other beekeepers I find this is pretty average. Having less bees in the hive certainly made it easier to spot the queen. Having spotted her, she was so different from the other bees that I had to laugh at all my attempts to spot her previous when I would stare anxiously at drones or even large worker bees worrying that I might be missing the queen. Here I would love to show you photographs but I was on my own at the hive and holding a frame of bees in one hand and trying to find the marking cage with the other whilst keeping the queen in sight and having my veil buzzed by guard bees. Photographs weren't going to happen. Gingerly putting the frame down on the hive, whilst worrying that I would crush bees on the underside, I popped the marking cage over the queen like putting a glass over a spider. There I inserted the sponge covered plunger which stops her escaping. The marking cage is designed so that as you move the plunger down to the mesh coated end, the queen is forced down until she is against the mesh and can be marked. In my panic and excitement I pushed the plunger down until her underside was trapped against the mesh. there seemed little point in marking that so I pulled the plunger back and gave her the freedom to turn round so I could try again.
The beekeeping world has adopted a standard rotation of the colours blue, white, yellow,red and green so that by marking the queen, it not only makes it easy to spot her but it is possible to say when she was born as well. Last year's colour was yellow and I had dutifully bought the appropriate marker pen so I took it in hand and tried to dab it on her back. Truthfully I didn't do very well, too scared of damaging her I think, and some of it landed on her wings as she moved as I didn't have her pressed securely against the mesh, again too scared of damaging her. Some people clip the queen's wings to restrict her ability to leave with a swarm. I can't imagine how I would ever manage to do that. Fortunately the beekeeping world is divided on whether it is worth it or not so I don't have to.
So very pleased with myself, I now have a queen bee with faint traces of yellow markings which may well brush off in the hive. My next manipulation (apart from still trying to find and mark the queens in the other two hives) is .to move a frame of brood from hive 3 to hive 1 to try and equalise things a little. Hive 3, bless them is going amazing well given the late cold winter and has brood on 9 frames. Although I would like to use the Demaree method of artificial swarming to make a couple of nuclei and increase my number of hives, I would prefer to leave this until mid to late May so in the meantime reducing their colony by 1 frame will actually give them more room in the hive to expand and delay swarming.

Spring is here, Spring is here!

I woke early this morning. I'm not sure what time as I don't currently have a clock in the bedroom (maybe I unplugged it to plug in the incubator) but it looked early, the sun was just coming up and the birds were tweeting away at the dawn chorus. I came downstairs to make tea and put some washing on, normal morning stuff and then went outside to let the chickens out, which is also part of the routine.
It was so nice out there, fresh and green in the early sun that I wandered around the garden, (I managed to cut the lawn for the first time this year on Wednesday and it was looking good). I took the opportunity to pin down a loose floor in hive 3, I always forget when I am suited up and during the day the guard bees don't like a hand messing around the entrance to the hive.
Then I followed temptation and slipped onto the valley. It looked very beautiful in the early sun, clouds of blossom covering what I'm guessing to be ornamental cherry trees.Hopefully a good source of pollen and nectar for the bees. I wished I had brought a camera but this being a spur of the moment visit I didn't even have my phone. From a bend in the path I caught a fox staring at me, no doubt appalled by the candy striped dressing gown and check pyjamas. They may be a menace to my chickens but I would love to see cubs. I returned home and checked the time- ten to six.

Can't Even Boil An Egg......?

Well, normally I can of course, if I don't decide to take curtains upstairs and then check my emails whilst I am there and go on ebay and bid on a rabbit hutch for the quail to live in and then return downstairs pretty pleased with myself to find an unpleasant smell in the kitchen, a pan with no water in and one burnt egg.

No great problem, egg is still edible and pan will clean.

I actually wanted to give you a quick update on the quail. Last time I mentioned them I was worried about Una, the one I hatched, she was not moving and I was scared she was on the way out but incredibly she has hung on. Most of the time she lay on the bottom of the brooder but she carried on eating a little and a wee later is still with us and looking a little stronger.

She is nowhere near the size of the other two and not even the size they were when I bought them three weeks ago but I'm beginning to hope that with time and patience she may catch up.  I don't know what is wrong with her, whether it is due to her being born late or if she caught a disease or if there is a genetic weakness (I was worried that her legs didn't seem strong enough to hold her up) but decided just to wait and see what happens. When I get a cage to put the others in, I think I will separate them from Una. She will be on her own then but they do keep treading on her which can hardly help. 

The other two quail, Tim and Goldie (or whatever the name will be) seem fine and healthy and regrettably male. At least I think they are, lack of experience and nothing to compare them to makes me doubtful. Still if they are female they should start laying in the next few weeks which will settle the matter.