Bees in the backyard

I'm glad our gate was open yesterday because in walked Bob, the bee keeper. I looked up local beekeepers on the web and Bob was set up in the mountains behind us, so I called and told him about our swarm. An hour later he was there with a hive and smoker.

Bob has been keeping bees since he was a teenager, I guess he is around my age, so that's a mighty long time. When you have a swarm of bees, the person you want is someone with experience and common sense. Hanno and I stood back on one side of the garden fence while Bob strode right up to the bee swarm, with no protective clothes on or even the smoker. He had a quiet presence about him and as he worked he explained why bees swarm and what he was doing with them.

Bob said that in Spring, when the queen bee recognises there is another queen in the hive who will soon challenge her, she encourages the bees to eat as much honey as they can and then follow her to establish a new hive. They might have come from a hollow tree as there is some bush clearing happening near us, but most likely from an established hive.

This is one of the drones checking out Hanno's watch. The drones are the male bees that mate with the queen.

The swarm will search for a place that is safe and secure and then the worker bees will set off looking for a place to set up a new hive. If the swarm isn't captured by a bee keeper, it will usually set up in a tree hollow or the roof cavity of a house. When they move to a smaller space they're much harder to capture. Luckily our bees were still happily sun bathing on a small orange tree in our vegetable garden, working with them would be fairly easy.

Bob bringing in the capture hive.

Instead of knocking them all off the tree, Bob wanted the bees to walk onto the hive frame.

Clicking on the photo will enlarge it - Bob had a lot of the bees on the frame.

After patiently holding each frame for the bees to go on it, he was confident the queen was in the hive when the bees started flying in to the hive. Then he put the top on the hive.

When the bees started swarming again, Bob put on his protective hat to stay safe.

After the lid was on the hive it was just a waiting game. I offered Bob a cup of coffee but instead of waiting for all the bees to go into the hive, he asked if he could leave the hive there and come back at nightfall when the hive was settled and quiet.

This is how the hive looked most of the day. The queen was safely in the hive again so the worker bees started the housekeeping, preparing the cells for new eggs to be laid. Bob said this was a priority and they would work on that until everything was right. When they were sure the hive was right for the queen, they would start foraging for pollen and making honey again.

Bob returned when the sun was setting - a true man of the land, he goes by sun up and sun set, rather than by a watch. After he'd checked that most of the bees had settled in for the night, he came in for a coffee and a chat. He told us that he has his many hives set up all over the mountains and bee keepers pay to rent the land their hives stand on. His job is to go around checking that the hives are working well and no one has interfered with them. We told him he could keep some hives at our place but he said it was a bit too far from his other hives. Luckily for us though, he's the secretary of the local bee keepers' association and he said he's sure there are closer bee keepers who would be happy to set some hive with us. We said we didn't want to be paid - we'll prefer to barter the space for a few jars of honey and a bit of wax.

I'll be very happy if that happens. Not only will we get pure raw honey it will also give us all the bees we need to pollinate our plants. And I really like the idea of having bees working away in our home. It may be a romantic idea but I think that bees need all the help they can get right now. There is trouble brewing in the bee world. Colony collapse disorder and virus diseases threaten them so if we can offer a safe haven, I'd be happy.

I'd love to hear from anyone who keeps bees. Please tell me how you started and what's involved in the keeping of bees. Or are you like me and have wanted to keep bees for a long time? If one of the bee keepers does keep hives here, I'm not really sure what we're in for. I doubt we'll have to do anything, except be their guardians but I am excited about the prospect of having bees here and knowing more about how they produce honey.