This update comes a few days later than it actually happened, but you’ll forgive me when you hear all about it.
Last Sunday (the 8th) I popped down to the hives to check their food stores and get a sense of how they were growing. Because they’ve been in place now for a few weeks, I’d expect to see some growth happening. I was hoping to see the bees spreading out from their original six frames to the 7th, 8th, 9th if possible.
Spreading onto the frames costs the bees a lot of energy. Though we provide them with a foundation of wax to build on, they need to add to that to make the cells that they are born from. Making wax is time-and-energy intensive, and the bees secrete tiny amount of it at a time. In summer, they’re also foraging a lot and storing as much as possible and feeding many thousands of bees at once. I imagine it’s a bit like those days where you have to work, get to the gym, cook dinner, feed three kids and the dog and also paint the guest bedroom… before 9pm, when your next door neighbour is arriving with a bottle of wine for ‘a chat’.
I was on my own at the apiary on Sunday, with Jim still building his tan in Australia, so my photos from this check are fewer and definitely less professional!
Every visit to the apiary starts the same way. I inspect Hive 1 and then I inspect Hive 2 (and 3, and 4, you get the idea). I never go about it a different way because it’s such a habit. So this inspection started the same way.
I cracked the roof of Hive 1 and was pleased to see the girls doing well and flying strongly. You can see in the photo below that they’ve spread out a bit from the six frames they started with. One frame toward the bottom of the photo had new wax built on it, but even though you can see them in the top frames, they hadn’t done much with those yet. I had expected them to grow a bit faster, and resolved to give them some extra feed to help them along.
I found the Hive quite hard to inspect, because the guard bees just kept flying at me. You can see them in the first photo on this post, trying to find their way through my veil, bopping me over and over again.
An experienced beekeeper will tell you that sometimes, it’s best to retreat rather than to attempt to check a hive that’s a bit aggressive. I know this myself, but in summer, when a hive can swarm quickly and things can get weird pretty fast, I try to commit to weekly inspections.
Inspecting Hive 2 was my first error. As soon as I cracked the roof I knew they didn't want me there, but I pushed on regardless (like an idiot). My second error was not bringing my smoker.
Smoking the bees is a longstanding tradition. Some keepers do it every time they open a hive, some only do it for aggressive bees, some never do it at all. For the most part, I tend to not bother because the bees don’t often need it, but a keeper should always be prepared… and I had left my smoker on the floor of the upstairs hallway at home. Oops.
Bees don’t like smoke. They run from it, which gives the beekeeper a little time to delve into the hive, check some frames and make a retreat. Without it, I had no way to push the bees back.
And that was how I got stung on the forearm, right through my suit, while I was holding a frame of bees in my hands.
If you’ve read my earlier posts, you’ll know that the best thing to do with a sting is remove it as quickly as possible. And that was my third error. Because I had the frame in my hands, and didn’t want to drop it or damage it (or get more stings!), I ignored the sting in my arm to lower the frame carefully back into the (thriving, incidentally) hive.
And that was how they managed to sting me at least twice more on my arm and my hand.
If you’ve never seen, and never had, a bee sting, you can see one of mine from this trip below. You can see the little red dot where the stinger went in, and you can see the spreading irritation.
I persevered and finished my inspection of Hive 2. They were growing a little faster than Hive 1, but I felt they also deserved some extra feed, so I took a note to return with sugar syrup and I left the apiary still wearing my suit, carrying all my stuff through the churchyard with a very unhappy face!
Notes to self:
Get one of those cool suits that bees can’t sting through!
Bring your smoker, you idiot!
Retreat when you need to!