The Cottage Smallholder

  Bill Turnbull’s interest in honey bees was tweaked when a swarm arrived in his garden and was removed by a local beekeeper. A few years later he took a local beekeeping course and was not daunted by his first painful stings. He had arrived for a practical beekeeping session straight from a TV studio. Read More »

  I much prefer Easter to Christmas. There isn’t the same pressure, generally the sun is shining and there is true evidence of spring. The daffodils are out, the tulips and bluebells are just a breath away from flowering. The new leaves on the trees are that bright, squeaky clean spring green. The birds wake Read More »

  One of my earliest activities as a novice beekeper was also my scariest few hours. I had been helping out on the Cambridge Bee Keeping Association stall at a country fair. One of my co-helpers suggested that I might like to collect a free new colony from his apiary after the fair. “That’s if Read More »

“Are you sure that they haven’t moved from number 11 to number 10?” “Of course not. Can’t you see the gentle flow of bees to and from number 11? The ones in number 10 are a much bigger swarm. Just listen to them.” We have renamed our small apiary “Downing Street”. Here in the UK, Read More »

Today’s article is brought to you by Danny (that’s me – seems weird to be referring to myself in the 3rd party). Fiona is unwell as per the previous post, but is recuperating rapidly.The big news is that a swarm of bees arrived in one of our two vacant hives. Both our old colonies died Read More »

This morning was clear and crystal bright. When the Min Pins and I tramped to the chicken run we were stopped in our tracks by the loud buzz from our apiary. Hundreds of young bees were making test flights in the crisp sunshine. They do this to orientate themselves to the hive before making their Read More »

At lunch time I stood and worked out the logistics of moving our new colony. It’s sitting on top of the old colony at the moment. The flights of the worker bees distracted me and I watched them flying in and out of the hive. Imagine the biggest airport in the world and then multiply Read More »

“There have to be three elements for the bees to swarm: a queen, flying worker bees and honey stores. If you remove one of these elements, they will not swarm.” Mike was striding down the garden towards the hives. Despite it being a showery day we were going to divide our colony in two as Read More »

I was devastated when we lost our two colonies of bees a few weeks ago The garden was so quiet without them. I used to have a horror of flying insects (especially those that sting) but somehow the bees have buzzed underneath my skin. When they were gone, I realised that I had grown to Read More »

Our local Bee Inspector, Lindsay Sampford, arrived this morning to transfer the new bees into our old hive. The new colony comes from an area that has ‘resistant mites’. These are Varroa mites that are resistant to the older treatments of Bavoral and Apistan strips. This means they have to be treated with Apiguard (available Read More »