Another fascinating session with our bees

It is with much pleasure that I can report the school bees are in and seem to be loving their new home. With huge thanks to the Parents’ Association, we have been able to procure a hive and get hold of a colony of bees.

With care and in time, we hope that our colonies will grow and we will be on our way to our own little bee farm! This week, the Beekeeping Hobby group undertook their weekly inspection of the hive. This involves opening up the hive to make sure that all is running smoothly.

It is important to the wellbeing of the bees that the queen is healthy and laying lots of eggs, so it’s always nice to find her during our inspection. However, because she can sometimes be a little shy and is great at dodging out of sight, we also stick to looking for BIAS – Brood In All Stages. If we can see freshly laid eggs in cells, some developing larvae in others and some brood which has been capped for the final stages of their development, we can be sure that the queen is around just from that evidence. During our inspection we also want to make sure that the bees have enough food and we want to check for signs of pest or health problems.

This week, we were delighted to find that the bees have done a great job of collecting nectar from our surroundings and all the new frames we had given them only a week ago are filling up nicely. It takes a lot of time and resources for the bees to draw out the beeswax cells from the foundation we give them, so this week we gave them a little sugar syrup to help them on their way.

Hopefully after half term we will be in a stage to add the second box with frames for collecting honey (called a ‘Super’). Before you know it we’re going to be needing some jars to start extracting and storing the honey. Watch this space!