Our apiary
For several years, we've been keeping colonies of Western honey bees at our apiary. It's situated within roughly an acre and a half of native Wiltshire woodland. Trees growing in the wood include oak, ash, field maple and silver birch. The wood is itself situated on a farm rearing cattle and sheep grazing on wild grasses, flowers and herbs. The same natural environment provides an rich environment for our bees to forage from.
There are now five strong colonies which, all being well, will grow to a few more in the coming season. So far we've been fortunate to see very little disease even though we've started from swarms that we've found. Generally speaking, the colonies have been thriving.
We practice beekeeping for its own sake. Rather than focussing on production of honey, our aim is to establish and support honey bee colonies, as well as developing our own methods as we work with the bees. However, in the seasons when the bees have produced more honey than they need, we take a small harvest to share around. Throughout the beekeeping year, friends and family occasionally come to visit the apiary and help us out with inspections or other jobs that need doing.
Recent updates
13 April 2024 · Le charme des abeilles.
Every now and then we get out the nuc hive and try our luck at catching a swarm by putting some drawn comb in it and using it as a bait hive. Two years ago I even made up my own artificial pheromone from shop-bought essential oils. Truth be told, I've never been at all successful, but why not give it a try if you have empty hives in the house doing nothing? A few weekends ago, I spent many hours sorting through the majority of the bee equipment I've collected here, finally constructing everything still in flat-pack form. Among the collection was a tube of le charme des abeilles, a scented paste that Thomas Apiculture claims will attract and direct swarms to a trap hive. The nuc is now out in the apiary, with le charme des abeilles spread over the entrance and a few old drawn-out frames. Time will tell whether any bees move in.
6 April 2024 · A few surprises.
Although today was the warmest day so far this year, the wind was gusty. Undeterred, we fired up the smoker and got out to the apiary. The goal was to check whether the bees had enough room and to determine whether their stores were enough for us to take a little. In the end, though, we dealt with a few surprises left over from winter.
In one hive we came across two tree wasps, successfully killed by the bees. Also in there was a huge spider with her egg sac. The lesson here, then, is that entrance blocks are required and should be installed early. In the next hive we found the bees doing well but also evidence of mould and frames that were in need of replacement, so we substituted seven of them for some newly-constructed ones. All the interference was upsetting the bees, so we called it a day at that point and spent the rest of the afternoon at a nearby country pub.
31 March 2024 · Secrets of the smoker.
So far the Easter weekend has given us two days of really good weather. We got out to the apiary at a point in the day when it was 13°C and sunny. Dan got there first and shouted back at me that there was a lot of activity in front of every hive. A couple of weeks ago, Dan expressed concern about the state of one of the brood boxes, so today we constructed clean frames and put them in a new brood box and replaced the whole section. While putting the hive back together, we had a look at some of the frames from the upper brood box, the one we hadn't replaced. Brood was abundant and in all stages. A healthy, active queen was wandering over the comb. They were surprisingly docile and it felt a lot like those sunny, unhurried, relaxed inspection days in the woods that I remember from last summer had already returned.
At the house, Dan had cleaned up some rusty old ammo tins that we bought in the local army surplus shop. The plan was to use them as smoker boxes. Their rubber gaskets mean their lids have an air-tight seal and so they keep the smoky odour in. We've always had what we considered bad luck with our smoker, with it going out within minutes of us setting out to the apiary. It turns out we were doing it all wrong, and there's better ways to light a smoker than to just point a lit blowtorch at some wood chips. Today, as an experiment, we lightly packed some dry grass into the fire box, lit it, and then slowly added wood chips. The smoker lasted for hours and we barely needed to use the bellows.
17 March 2024 · All five colonies have survived the winter.
Today was the first day of the year when the sun came out and the temperature went above 15°C. Spring has been a long time coming around here, so we spent the much of the afternoon touring pubs and beer gardens in the local villages, before finally heading back to the apiary to see how the bees are.
Our woodland bees have quite a few potential attackers, so the hives were covered in anti-woodpecker chicken wire and fortified with mouse guards. We removed both from each hive so we could take a look at what the winter had left us. As the headline says, all five colonies made it through the winter. We have three strong colonies, and two weak but viable ones. No colonies showed any immediate potential or need to split. None of them were exactly overflowing with honey either, but we'd left them with a lot of honey in autumn which we assume they've been using up in preference to the trays of fondant. Dan noticed signs of dysentery returning to one of the colonies but now sunlight and warmth has returned to the wood, we're hoping to see less evidence of the damp in the hives that causes dysentry.
The first inspection of the year often comes with some trepidation, given all the ways honey bee colonies can succumb to the harsh northern European winter. It's been wet and, at times, cold. To see they are starting the season healthy and with a good chance of getting stronger is great.