It’s just over a week since I collected my bee swarm and installed it in my hive. I am totally fascinated by these creatures and spend ages just sitting by the hive watching them flying in and out.
As the sun reaches the hive the activity is amazing, dozens of bees hanging in the air queuing to get in and others popping out of the bee holes and darting off in different directions.
I could spend all day out there just watching them. Every so often there’s a loud buzzing sound and a drone bee comes back, these are the males and they are bigger and louder than the worker bees.
I’ve joined two bee keeping groups to learn about bees, a conventional group where I have learned how traditional beekeepers handle, manipulate and care for their bees and a natural beekeeping group that do it a bit differently, with very little intervention.
After much consideration and two years reading and learning I chose the latter route, but already I’ve got stuck between the two camps.
Natural beekeepers don’t usually feed their bees allowing them to use their own food reserves (honey) to sustain them through the year and through the winter. They harvest small amounts of honey ONLY if there is a surplus, enabling their bees to use the food they have made for their own uses. The theory is that this food contains everything the bees need for good health.
Conventional bee keepers feed their bees at various times in the year, taking a large proportion of the honey for themselves.
When I got my swarm it had no reserves as the bees simply fill their tummies with honey and go off in search of a new home. My hive is a new hive, so there were no food stores in there either.
My conventional beekeeping mentor encouraged me to feed my bees but my natural group believe that if a colony is strong enough it will gather what it needs and survive, after all they’ve been doing that for thousands of years before we started intervening.
Additionally traditional beekeepers provide their bees with foundation on frames, this is a flat sheet of bees’ wax, which the bees draw and add to, to make brood comb and honeycomb. It gets them started and makes sure that the build straight comb. Natural beekeepers don’t do this. They prefer to let the bees make their own comb. My hive is also a totally different style and size to a conventional hive. It’s a top bar hive, that we made from recycled pallet wood. It cost several hours labour and about £30 in extra materials, a conventional hive would cost around £200.
My mentor, who wants the best for my bees, helped me put one sheet of foundation into my hive. But because my hive is a different shape and because most foundation sheets are wired, she brought me a sheet of naturally dyed, pink (!) candle wax, which was fitted into my hive.
Already my bees have been drawing this into comb, so I now have pink broodcomb in my hive! What’s more the cheeky things have been chewing it up and plastering it around, I fear I will have the plague of the pink honeycomb for years to come. What it does mean though is that my queen bee, who I haven’t yet met, will be able to start laying again very quickly and that my bees can also start building new comb, to their own specifications in the rest of the hive! Watch this space!
