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.

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 Swarm in May

Exciting news this morning, for me at any rate, I received an e-mail inviting me to add my name to the Leeds Beekeepers Association swarm list. This is a list of volunteers who are prepared to drop what they are doing and go and rescue swarms from gardens, shops, buildings wherever.
The requirement for going on the swarm list is that you have had at least 12 months beekeeping experience so I couldn't apply last year. Nevertheless I did get to deal with a swarm, when my own hive decided to swarm. I had already lost a swarm in May when half the hive took off and settled at the top of my neighbour's 60ft tree, all I could do was watch it in frustration whilst devising wildly impractical plans for trying to reach it. After a few days the scout bees had found a good site for a permanent home and the swarm took off never to be seen again.
As my initial nucleus of bees had cost me £100, I didn't like this, so took action to prevent them swarming again by splitting the remaining hive into two. Neither of the two new hives had active queens and the theory goes that the first of the queen cells to hatch in each hive will kill any other prospective queens and then on a fine day fly off, get mated and then return to the hive to spend the rest of her life laying eggs whilst the colony builds up around her.
So I was quite annoyed when my by now very small original colony decided to swarm again. Fortunately they landed in a hawthorn tree in my garden:

However I was not totally unaided, Oliver wanted to help:

Here again the theory says that bees are at their most docile when they are swarming as they have no hive to defend and they are in fact unable to sting as they have gorged themselves so much on honey in preparation for the journey that they cannot get their stingers in to the right position. Be that as it may, when I went up the ladder with a clothes brush to sweep them into a box, I was wearing the bee suit and I did still get stung on the hand. It was such a terrible summer last year that I don't think my bees had any honey stores to gorge on.
Once I had the queen and most of the swarm in a cardboard box, I tipped it up on a sheet below the tree and left it propped up for the bees I had missed, to come to find the queen.

 Then at night when they were all quiet and had stopped flying, I took the box down the garden to the spare hive and emptied them into it.
After that it was a waiting and wondering time, hoping that the virgin queen managed to get mated and start laying. It is recommended that they are disturbed as little as possible during this time, so I used to go and sit on a stone near the entrance to the hive and watch the foraging bees coming into the hive. If I could see pollen on the back legs, I felt reassured as pollen is used to feed newly hatched bees although it is stored as well. Oliver would come and join me watching bees, hence the photograph at the top of the blog.
Well, I was lucky in that by the end of the season all three hives were queen right, that is mated and laying. They were all small in size and amount of stores as would be expected given the poor summer so I fed them with a sugar candy I'd cooked up, rather like making crystallized toffee. All I can do now is cross my fingers that they make it through to spring.