Our First Look in the Hive 2014: And Finally Me in a Bee Keeping Suit.

Over 10 Degrees Celsius at Last.

We have been aching to see inside the hive for the last month or so. I hefted the hive (the process of assessing the weight of the hive by lifting one side) It seemed a lot more maneuverable than it was last year and I cam promise you there has been no weight training going on in the interim.

What has happened in the interim is that I have acquired a bee keeping suit that fits a little better. It's still not an ABBA moment but at the very least I can bend down to pick up a dropped hive tool which is a significant improvement. 

You can't really see much here except me in what looks suspiciously like a babygro on the left hand side. I'm still using two rubber washing up gloves worn on top of each other to compensate for a lack of proper bee keeping gloves. Alex has proper long leather gauntlets but he's very kind and doesn't laugh.

We had planned to open the hive in the morning but when I checked the temperature it was only 8 degrees. The wind was blowing and it looked like threatening rain. Also, I felt like hell, so I went back to bed. The sun came out in the afternoon and as it pushed a balmy 14 degrees C Alex turned up to take me through the process. We smoked down the hive and took off the super and crown board. Underneath the bees were active but not overly upset at our intrusion. There was no agressive flying and the bees just fell to the joyful job of munching on honey.

Here you can see some bees enjoying the excess that they've built to fill up the spaces. We'd already scraped a fair bit off. You can see that most of the bees here are quite dark apparently this means they are winter bees. Some of them have been flying out for supplies and bringing back their golden pollen treasure hoards.

Here you get a better idea of how much they've built to fill the spaces between the frames.

This picture shows a frame propped up against the side of the hive while which gives us space to look at another without any unfortunate bee squishing. You can see the new honey built around the central section. It is common for the queen to lay her eggs in a rugby ball pattern through the middle of many frames. This means they are at the centre of the hive which is the warmest and the worker bees build honey comb around them in order to but insulate and provide stores for the new brood and the queen.

And here I am proudly and joyfully holding, not dropping, a comb full of honey and covered in bees. It's a strange thing to know all those bees could suddenly decide they needed to protect themselves. But here they are, chowing down on good old honey. And did I mention I wasn't panicking?

The net result was that the hive was clean, industrious and had supplies. The workers are already bringing back pollen and nectar for the year ahead and the queen has commenced spring laying. As long as the weather doesn't suddenly run headlong into an unexpected winter we should be able to avoid feeding them and be able to start putting on supers to collect the honey.

Watch this space.

Happy Hunting

Katherine