Introducing Elizabeth....

You may remember a fortnight ago the bees from one of my hives swarmed and caused a huge excitement for a Friday afternoon?

Well in the last fortnight I've been trying very VERY hard not to go into the hive and see how they are getting along, simply because...well...its better to let nature take its course.  The newly hatched queen needs a few days to mature and then she has a window of about 5 days where she needs to fly and get mated.  Ideally with about 12+ drones.

So the bee keeper needs not to disturb this process and simply hope that the weather is good enough for queens and drones to fly.  If all that goes smoothly and to time about a fortnight after the swarm is hived there is a glossy new queen, measuring new wax cells with her legs and beginning to lay eggs in the bottom of them....

And look who I found today...

surrounded by a classic circle retinue of workers...

Look at those glorious long orange legs...

Ladies and Gentlemen.... the new Queen .....Elizabeth.

Glorious Sandown

After the grotty job that started my Sunday I was hugely relieved to have booked a ticket for the national quilt show at Sandown.

Looking back at my photos of the day there's a few clear themes coming together that I'm sure will start to influence the stuff I do...

I do love a wholecloth quilt....

And its cousin...the welsh inspired strippy quilt...

Exquisite applique....

Some ideas for using collections of fabrics ....got a number of large collections of remnants that would benefit from some of these ideas....( 'im indoors may be glad to see the stash shrink)

 

Super bright rainbow colours.....plenty of ideas here for fabrics that might be produced at next months planned dyeing day...

But the absolute, jaw dropping, gob smacking, most gorgeous quilt at the show is this one....

This is Seneca by Ferret 

Is it a quilt? is it art? who cares?! Its stunning!!

Look at the fluffy tail! - the reflection......all done with stitches and thread

Hung on the end of the run of stands that wolf watched every quilter walk past, and I swear he thought all of us was a potential meal!

So where are the bees? - part 3

I've thought quite long and hard about this blog entry.
Should I or shouldn't I?
Because this one is quite distressing.

One of my hives of bees has been quite simply full of revolting, aggressive, nasty bees.

Now the normal advice for aggressive bees is to "re-queen" them.  Quite simply remove the producer of the nasty bees and introduce a new fertile queen bee in the hope that her powerful pheromones will naturally calm them and within a generation or two all the nasty bees have died out and lovely new calmer ones have hatched to fill their place.

Trouble is I tried that some weeks ago ....and if anything their temperament has deteriorated, and to add injury to insult it seems as though anyone getting stung by them gets a really nasty reaction -especially me - two batches of antibiotics for cellulitis in 6 weeks was definitely undermining the fun of bee keeping :(

So when we opened a hive down at the apiary and witnessed three queens hatching ( yes THREE!) I jumped at the chance to bring one home and attempt to re-queen my nasty hive.  Two very experienced bee keepers even offered to help.  What could possibly go wrong?

We couldn't find the nasty queen - that's what went wrong.

And the bees showed their true nature. Despite two of us flooding the air with smoke to calm them for every frame removed from the hive 10 bees must have run onto Pete's hands and stung him.  Thank heavens for heavy leather gardening gauntlets.  I wish I'd taken photos ...but frankly I was too busy covering Pete's hands in smoke.
That's 10 bees for every one of 22 frames.... and we went through the hive twice.....you do the maths....

So by now you'll be appreciating that the answer to the question "do you really want a hive like that in your garden?" was an easy one to find.
The tricky bit was what to do with them and how...

I diligently searched the internet for humane ways to kill a hive of honey bees.... the step by step instructions are really quite easy to follow..

At dusk when all the flying bees re back in the hive...

1. Block the entrance and seal with gaffer tape, and tape up the gaps between the boxes - aim to make the hive airtight...

2. Block the feed/ porter holes in the crown board, I used an old pillowcase...

3. Put a pad of cloth (another old pillow case) and a wad of newspaper on the varroa board under the hive - it helps catch drips of petrol and reduces air flow..

4. Unblock one feedhole and drip in a  jam jar's worth of petrol

5. Reblock the hole

6. Put the roof on and leave for 24 hours

7. Remove all the frames, clear out the corpses...

and believe me a big colony is a lot of corpses....they were jammed up against the entrance... lets not think about how hard they were trying to get out as they died...

and then ...just when I thought it couldn't get any worse I discovered that some of the bees trapped at the bottom under the bulk of the bodies were still alive...

So how do you humanely dispose of nasty bees that are writhing and half poisoned by petrol fumes...

You finish them off as fast as you can with a blow torch...

So there you have it.  My lowest point thus far as a bee keeper.  I feel a strange sense of guilt at feeling so relieved that they are gone, and I really do hope I never have to do anything like this again.

So where are the bees? - part 2

Two swarms of honey bees in 4 days is no fun for anyone  :(

When the phone call came at 4pm that yet again there was a swarm of bees in a neighbour's garden my heart sank right down into my shoes. 'im indoors had agreed to 3 hives at the bottom of the garden.  I'd already created a fourth two weeks ago in an effort to stop my biggest colony from swarming... that plan had clearly not worked and I'd introduced hive #5 only 4 days earlier from my first swarm...

Still first things first....find the swarm and work out how to get to it...

Oooh-err it looks like quite a big one...

If in doubt borrow a second ladder from another willing neighbour and brace your first ladder with it...

Then remind 'im indoors that if the box of bees falls on his head without his bee suit on he won't be a pretty sight in the morning (!)

 

The things that poor man does for love...

Once the bulk of them are in the box, hopefully with the queen... the others fly in to join them really quite quickly...

Now to find a proper home for them...

Hook, hook, hookity, hook I

Oh boy!
I'm in the groove!!!
or more accurately I'm hooked!!!

A generous donation from a knitter who is having to part with a large stash of knitting wool she can no longer manage has enabled me to be completely indulgent, practising this pattern I have long admired and creating a useful blanket for a needy child.

It started like this...

240 chain stitches in batches of 14 waiting to be rippled...

 

It takes a few rows of the mountains and valleys of the ripple to really develop and the texture to grow...

You'll have to forgive me whilst I gloat a little about how much I can do in one evening...

And in what almost seems like no time at all...two balls of wool have become a whole baby blanket of lovely ripply flecky texture...

I guess there's nothing more to say other than Ta-dah!!

So where are the bees? - part 1

In the box of course!

Its at times like these that I wonder how many working mums that get to arrive home from work after a particularly tiring week (did I mention a 5 day course, 2 hours homework every night and 2 exams?) and find their husband has retrieved her bees ( thank heavens for helpful neighbours) from a garden 3 houses away.

Sadly I missed all the excitement of the actual capture.  I'll leave you to imagine the faces of the people around me on the district line as I took the phone call relaying the news of he previous hour's activities at home...

But there really is only one thing to do with a box full of bees.... and that's persuade them to go into a hive...

See-  it really is a box full of bees!

Some of them might need a helping hand...

That's a fair few bees...

They are obviously my very well behaved bees - they start running up the wax foundation straight away and making themselves look very much at home...

Phew!