One and a half hives

Progress so far :

• we received a swarm from Richard, Hive A. This seems to be growing steadily with eggs and larvae. We have not seen the queen live, but have identified her in photos later.


• a second swarm from Richard went into the top bar hive, but absconded. The remnant did not survive


• the third swarm in in Hive C, and appears to be queen less after 3 inspections. We have multiple eggs per cell, the odd drone cell and brood.

Our initial plan was to take a frame of brood from Hive A and put it into Hive C, but we did not want to weaken Hive A. We have now just purchased a fertilised buckfast queen from Scotland and are going to introduce her in the supplied cage.

Rayburn

The Rayburn

We plan to install a rayburn solid fuel cooker in the kitchen for a number of reasons.
1) we want an alternative to electricity if the mains goes off
2) oil and solid fuel are getting more expensive. Solid fuel ( wood, coal ) is locally sourced.
3) we have a spare coil in our cylinder for a log burner/cooker.

To help us, we found that there was an existing flue next to the place in the kitchen that is ideal for the Rayburn.
This position happens to also be next to the hot water cylinder and therefore the recommended gravity feed should work.

I bought a second hand Rayburn Supreme solid fuel cooker in Matt black from EBay for £350, and had it delivered from Lincolnshire using the wonderful Paletline for £55.

On inspection, it needs a good clean, new firebricks and a little rust removed around the flue box. I need to test the boiler before we install it, and fire up the whole unit before we spend too much money on it.

Inspecting the flue coming into the kitchen shows that it contains a 4" liner, and this is concreted into the top of the chimney. I can either use the 4" flue and adapt it to the 6" Rayburn, or preferably install a 6" flue. I hope to go for the latter option.

The intended location for the Rayburn is currently occupied by a kitchen cupboard. This will need to be moved, and holes opened up for the plumbing.

The hot water is going to be a gravity system, where the hot water from the Rayburn naturally rises into the cylinder. I will need to add a header tank and cold water feed together with overflow.

Hive A after two and three weeks

The opening of Hive A

We were told to wait a couple of weeks before opening Hive A after the bees had been delivered. This was the first time we had opened a hive on our own, although we had been chasing the bees from Hive B around the garden, so were getting quite confidant.

Week 2

We lit the smoker before closing our bee-suits as advised, then took the roof and crown board off exposing the frames of the brood box.

You can see from the above photo that the bees are using one side of the hive at the moment, slowly making their way towards the centre. One of us used a camera whilst the other used the hive tool to remove the frames and hold them up to be photographed. We carefully kept the frames over the hive to avoid losing the queen.

Quickly looking through the frames we identified honey, capped brood and pollen. I might take a magnifying glass next time. We did not see the queen, eggs or larvae.

Carefully putting the hive back together, we left it in peace for another week.

We we able to examine the photos of the frames at our leisure, here are some below.

We could now see eggs, larvae and even our wonderful queen. We need to mark her some how.

So, Hive A is good, but Hive B seems to be dwindling.

Week 3

Jennifer was away, but Jack ( our youngest ) helped me examine and photograph Hive A. Again, we saw eggs, larvae and brood in the photos together with the queen. Wonderful.

However, Hive B seems to have swarmed as only about 30% of the bees are left, getting less every day. Sad,as this is the top bar hive.

Hive (B)

We were given a second swarm on Friday the 20th of June. Again they came in a skep and we expected them to behave similar to the last bees, where we remove the basket, and the bees remain on the roof of the skep waiting for us to thump them out. However, these bees were a little different, over the last few days they had built quite a lot of comb at the top of the hive and filled it with nectar. Moving the skep around had detached the comb and soaked the bees with nectar. They were not happy.

Anyway, we dumped the bees into the top bar hive and as there were so many bees mixed up with the comb, we dumped the comb in too, intending to remove it at a convenient time later. It was evening, so we left them alone.

Saturday, they seemed content to come and go, although quite a few seemed to be hanging around outside the entrance. Around lunchtime, I noticed a lot of bees flying and saw a swarm on one of the young trees we had plated in the orchard.

I phoned my bee mentor, and Mike gave me some ideas on how to capture them. It was not easy to collect all the bees from the trunk of the small tree, so I used a cardboard box with a slot to brush them into. I probably collected around 40% in the first go and put them onto a board in front of our spare national hive. I collected a second lot, but they seemed to be flying rather than walking into the hive. They eventually all moved to a new swarm in a log pile.

We dropped the majority of this swarm into another box and dumped them back on the slope into the national hive, and they still seemed reluctant to enter. We tried manually putting some in via the top of the hive and putting some of their comb inside. Eventually they got the hint and they started wandering in.

They did not all go in and the tide of bees soon turned as they all wandered back out and formed a swarm under the hive.

We had taken our beesuits on and off quite a few times now, and chasing this swarm was not fun anymore,

This time we were able to get the whole swarm into a box and drop it into the newly cleaned top bar hive. This is where they have been for 4 days. They have formed a cluster under the top bars, but I cannot see any comb building going on. Hopefully they are busy within the cluster.

Bees

We have our first bees!

We spent three months from the beginning of the year on a beekeeping course run by the Cambridgeshire Beekeepers Association, followed by building two national hives (fromflat packs) and one top-bar hive (from scratch).

Yesterday a local beekeeper contacted us, saying he had collected a swarm and asking if we wanted it.

We did :-)

Weed Control Fabric

After last year when the weeds became too much for us, we have tried to minimise the weed area using weed control fabric. We seem to have acquired two types, one was cheap polythene from Tesco and the other was thicker matting from a garden centre.

The thicker matting seems to be better at letting water through, and will probably last more than one season.

The above two pictures show onions and peas

The problems we have seen with weeks control fabric are :

• holding the fabric down with wind and chickens moving it about

• weed still growing under the fabric and lifting it up in the middle - how to remove these weeds

• how to remove the root veg from under the fabric once they have grown

over the winter, I really should have covered the ground in mulch and tarpaulin to stop the weed kicking off. Maybe next year

Peas And Tomato Plants

Today we planted out the pea, deciding that it was still too early to plant out the beans. We are experimenting with weed control plastic. There seems to be at least two types of weed control fabric, cheap this polythene with small holes and thicker cloth-like fabric that probably lets water through slightly better.

We have also put some wire fence above the peas so that they have something to grow up.

The peas and runner beans were grown from seed inside the conservatory, and planted out on the 15th of April.

We have also grown a selection of tomato plants from seed and they have now been planted in the middle bed of the polytunnel. Hopefully we will have no more frosts this year, but if we do, the polytunnel should maintain the raised beds above freezing. We have some fleece just in case.

This is a quite old picture of the inside of the polytunnel, the washing machine has now gone and it's all been tidied up a bit. More photos to come.

All this work in the garden is just what I need when recuperating