Garden Photos and Bees in May

As it’s such a nice day I just couldn’t resist lunch in the garden. Not the best time of day for photos but here are a few photos from the garden anyway.

The bees were certainly busy. Not just our honey bees but all sorts of other bees too. It’s always nice to see the wildlife enjoying the garden as much as we do.

Talking of the bees, I checked on ours yesterday. The hive containing the queen cell seems to be doing OK. The queen has hatched anyway and there aren’t any other queen cells. I couldn’t see the new queen though, nor was there any sign of her in the form of eggs but I wouldn’t expect that yet. Hopefully she’s off mating and will soon return and start laying so that we have a nice new colony with a happy healthy 2019 queen.

The hive with the original queen in wasn’t quite playing the game though. The queen was still there and seemed fine, but there were two queens cells as well, one of which was almost sealed. Clearly they are still feeling swarmy and I don’t think there’s much I can do to stop them. I destroyed the two queen cells to give me some time but part of me feels that I should just let them get on with it. Yes, we would lose the queen if they swarmed, but a new one would have time to hatch, mate and start laying if they did it now. It is still only May after all.

The trouble with this is that we have been pretty unsuccessful in getting new queens to mate and start laying in the past. There’s little to convince me that this won’t be the case again this year, so losing a laying queen would be quite a loss.

There’s not much I can do other than keep an eye on them and hope for the best.

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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.

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