Sunday 30 March 2014

A week of waiting patiently for silly bees

I left the bees like this last night...


































I was hoping that as the light faded and the warmth of the day disappeared that they would decide a night on the floor in front of two perfectly lovely hives wasn't a good idea and they would gradually shift themselves into one of the other hives....

The morning after showed me that they'd had completely different ideas about the best place to spend the night....


































OBVIOUSLY the lattice fence is THE place for all the best bees to hang out....

And there they stayed...


































In fact they stayed there all week!!!!!

I snuck down the garden most mornings, wondering how they were managing to survive as the overnight temperatures were getting incredibly close to freezing...

And pretty much every morning they were sat on the fence...

 

I thought the frost that bowed the daffodils and coated the kit I'd rather lazily left outside might have finished them off ....

 




But no...they were still there hanging on the fence....



They were even defiantly starting to make some wax.....as though living on a lattice fence might actually be a sensible and long term option!

Silly bees!!

New advice from the apiary was sought.  Clearly there had been a queen in the hive...not a viable laying one you understand but certainly one giving out enough pheromones to convince a reasonable number of VERY SILLY bees that she was worth protecting in the middle of that huddle somewhere.

There was nothing else for it ..if they were still there on Sunday they were going to need to be swept into a box, gone through very carefully to hunt out that queen.  Then, and ONLY then I would need to kill her and then try to unite the remaining workers with one of the other hives.

They must have heard me thinking through how I was going to do this...

Part way through Saturday morning ..they upped and flew away!

Leaving behind only there smallest signs that they were ever there...

 

I wonder where they are now?....

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