The Peppercorn, The Secret Garden and The Gangster Queen

Strange goings-on, dear readers, strange indeed!

Are you comfortable? Well then, let me begin ....

First off, it has been a month of direness, confrontation, stings and more stings. This embattled beekeeper has learned just how agonisingly hard it can be to Make Honey.

Every visit to Itchy Knee and San-Shi has grown shorter and shorter, and I have grown more fearful. It has been terrible to feel frightened, hopeless, defeated, powerless. I have felt completely unable to cope; at times I simply wanted to sneak down to the hives in the dead of night and kill the bees with the dreadful formula of a Cup of Petrol (it's the fumes wot does 'em in), and not tell anyone. Just leave beekeeping, give up, admit defeat.

But every time I thought about doing it, what stopped me was the thought of those valiant little creatures, who fight all the odds to survive and thrive in spite of everything, including my rough handling, and how unfair it would be to sacrifice them on the altar of my pride and frustration.

And there have been times when I have been extremely rough on them; I've crushed wild comb under the roof in frustrated anger, I've hurled a crownboard off in fear, I've flung a Queen Excluder on from a distance, all because I've been so afraid.

What pulled me up short was the afternoon I took to sort out my Hive Records, and looking back through the past 13 months, it was unbelievable to view my records from last summer - each visit was calm, every hive inspection a joy. I was always surrounded by industrious, busy bees, too distracted to sting me, too calm to care.

THAT, my friends, was a harsh reminder - making it all too clear to me just how bad things have become.

What to do?!

Well, once again, it has been The Human Hive Mind of the beekeeping fraternity that has come to my rescue and together, we have resolved to do two things ...

• Move my beehives out of my garden to a more appropriate "Out Apiary", and
• Kill the Queen that's caused all the trouble

For it is She - The Gangster Queen - who has made enemies of my bees!

In the past few weeks, some quiet negotiations have found for me A Secret Garden, in exchange for the fee of :

One Peppercorn

I can say no more. The rest is Secret. Verily, I have become A Beekeeper. (They say that beekeepers become so secretive about the location of their hives, that some have died of old age and left no clue as to the whereabouts of their beloved bees, who are left to become feral foragers, freed slaves, creatures of the wild once more.)

And as for The Gangster Queen - well, suffice to say, this weekend we are planning Regicide.

By killing the Queen, and merging the two colonies under the reign of The Old Queen (who, for heaven's sake, was only born last summer!) we should be able to bring the little blighters back to the sunny nature of the past summer gone.

Yes, some of these things are sad and even my Housemates, The Flatties, will be sad to see them go. But go they must, because I want to see my next door neighbour's daughter playing games in her garden again, not on her front porch, in fear of the bees and of being stung to death - however unlikely that might be.

So let us draw a veil now, dear readers, over these images of sadness and violence, and let us move on to Better Things!

Mystery Solved?

Well, no wonder Itchy Knee was grumpy. The Queen somehow got stuck inside the Honey Supers, above the Queen Excluder, and was laying beautiful brood up there.

It could only have been me, klutzing about, that got her stuck up there ....

No wonder they got grumpy.

I wonder if things will improve now ....

The H.E.M.T.

Sunday's Bee Trading was huge fun. The best part was renting the Honey Extraction Machine Thingy (H.E.M.T) to take it home with me at the end of the morning. It's time to extract some honey - whooohoooo!

So I went down to the hives today with a clear list of tasks:

Itchy Knee:

• Check to see if the colony looks "queen-right", and if temper has improved.
• Do that Brood Super inspection I didn't get to last time.
• Place extra Crown Board complete with 2 Portis Bee Escapes between Honey Supers 1 and 2.

On San-Shi:

• Check to see if colony is "queen-right".
• Add brood frames to make up for the ones that have been missing so far, so that "bee space" is now correct in the hive.
• Ensure colony is growing well, and make doubly sure it has room to grow.

Well,

• Itchy Knee does not look queen-right anymore. Brood is decreasing, I didn't see a Queen (I've never seen this new Queen), and there are no early rice-grain eggs.
• I think I made a fatal error - I destroyed an uncapped Queen Cell filled with larva and Royal Jelly, but there's still a Play Cell.
• There just seemed to be too many frames of honey - perhaps they don't have a Queen, are running out of things to do, and are just bringing in honey now. As a temporary stop-gap I took one frame out, and put a new framed sheet of foundation in, but this is not the long-term solution.
  
• I didn't achieve the Brood Super inspection, other than inspecting underneath for QCs.
• I did manage to put the extra Crown Board in place.
• Temper is extremely, extremely bad.
  

San-Shi - bless them - are wonderful. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

• They were busting out all over with honey-rich wild comb, so I broke that off, and gave them 2 new frames to starting drawing wax out - bringing them up to their full complement of 11 frames.
• I inspected every frame and there were 3 empty Play Cells. Left 'em alone.
• I saw all stages of brood, including lots of early stage rice-grain eggs. She's been laying in the last 3 days.
• At least 5 frames of brood now; maybe I need to super them soon. (Time to buy yet another super!)
• Above all, they were calm, calm, calm, happy and not fussed by my intervention at all. Bless 'em!

So in a day or two, I go down to Itchy Knee to check that all the bees have escaped from the top Honey Super, and I take it off the Hive. I then spend the evening in the kitchen, exploring the delights of whizzing full honey supers round and round in the H.E.M.T. Once that's done, I take the "wet" emptied Super frames back to Itchy Knee and replace them in the top Super.

I am thinking that I may take 1 or 2 frames from San-Shi and put them into Itchy Knee's Brood Box. If it's properly filled with a mix of early rice grain eggs, capped brood, honey and young nurse bees, it may save them. From this frame they can rear a new Queen if they do not have a laying Queen anymore, as I am beginning to suspect.

I will do that at the same time as I replace the Honey Super filled with empty "wet" frames. This encourages the bees to clean the comb and, all being well, refill the existing empty comb with even more honey, for another possible Honey Harvest later in the year.

As I write, I'm wondering "who am I really writing this for anymore?" But in a way, instinctively, I do know; more than anything this blog has become an extension of the minute details recorded in my Hive Notes - a narrative for me to understand the unfolding story of each hive on a broader scale so that, with the wider view gained from a distance, I can plan the way forward.

I write this with a throbbing left calf, stung good and proper, to remind me to be a humble and respectful Bee Farmer, to pay attention to the bees, and to consider that it may be the bees of Itchy Knee who are suffering more stress than anyone else right now.