Tuesday 15th July

The bees are still making use of this excellent weather and bringing in loads of nectar and pollen. The colonies are full of bees and, in the colonies I’ve inspected, queens are laying and there are frames full of brood waiting to hatch. All looking good.
This Wednesday we shall not inspect the brood boxes, there is no need, but we do have two supers full of honey which we can harvest. One is on the veg patch and the other in my apiary. Both supers need to be cleared of bees and the bee free supers transported to my kitchen. We have purchased a stock of honey jars from FoD BKA that I shall pick up from their apiary on Thursday evening. Next step is to extract our honey. We will do this at Brooklyn House unless anyone else wants a sticky kitchen. It will probably take a couple of hours. Perhaps we could do this a week on Wednesday, ie 23rd July, in the evening?
Last Wednesday our new colony of Buckfast bees broke their vows of docility and made a nuisance of themselves attacking those who were peacefully gardening at the rear of the hives. This is not good. It would seem that the bees were not on a flight path back to the hive after foraging. They were possibly “guard bees”in colony protection mode. We need to monitor the behaviour. The extreme solution is to move the hives to an area where this behaviour is of no consequence. But we can only do this in the winter. Another possibility is to put some trellising / fencing at the rear of the hives.