Buying bees

‘Plan Bee’ is progressing well.

We’ve been diligently attending the beekeeping course with the Aberystwyth beekeepers association. The lectures are good and we’ve been making new friends too. The coffee and cake is always a bonus as well. Morgan comes along with us at the moment, he sits there and plays on my iPad, but seems to be absorbing some of the beekeeping information too.

My parents are coming to visit next weekend and will be bringing our two brand new bee-hives that my Dad has built for us. We haven’t seen them yet, but hopefully they’ll be just the job.

And, to add to the excitement I’ve just got off the phone to a couple of local beekeepers and have ordered two ‘nucs’ of bees. A nucleus is essentially a small colony of bees, housed on five frames, with a queen, a whole load of workers and some stores and brood. It will provide us with a small, but hopefully healthy colony of bees to add to our hives that will grow with us throughout the year as we get used to working with them.

We thought we’d support a couple of local beekeepers by buying a nucleus from two different sources. It’ll also give us two colonies with different characteristics as far as the bees are concerned so well be able to compare the two.

The nucs should be ready around the middle of May, but in the meantime there is entry to do to prepare. The hives need painting and putting into position, we need to buy brood frames and super frames and put them together and we need to continue attending the course lectures.

Hopefully in just over a couple of months though we’ll have two happy, healthy colonies of bees at the bottom of the garden.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.