8
« on: May 22, 2015, 08:03:00 AM »
This may just turn into a thread where I ask Woz advice a lot, but since at least a couple of other people are vaguely interested in bees, I thought might be a nice one to rumble along!
so I now have two hives, I got the first two years ago and was luck enough to get a (late) swarm given t me which survived the winter. My first bees were so gentle that I could work on the hive with no tools and no smoke and wearing flipflops, and I only got stung twice all year. The second year that hive swarmed and the new queen started to produce incredibly defensive little workers who reacted badly to everything from lawnmowers to touching the hive. Yesterday the hive swarmed again, so new queen time - lets hope this one is a bit calmer and we're back to being able to enjoy working with that hive.
Swarrms are amazing. when bee's swarm they're actually at their most gentle and calm and you can stand in the middle of it as they fly around you with pretty much no risk of being stung. I think when my first hive swarmed that first time was when I massively got the bug (as it were) because I immediately got a second hive last year, which also survived its first winter. So far so good.
But it is a hell of a steep learning curve. There are 70,000 bees in a summer hive and thats quite a lot of little lives to be responsible for, although they don't need a lot of worrying about thankfully!
did you find a BBKA Jason? How're you getting on?