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Read Apiaries
Welcome to Read Apiaries.
Like most UK beekeepers (there’s about 44,000 of us) I keep Honey Bees
It’s great our honey is so popular, but given the colonies don’t have any surplus yet this year that we can safely remove (we always let the bees have what they need first), we’ve now sold out I’m afraid. I’ll post on here as soon as we have some more.
How do Honey Bees clean their antenna? Probably not a question you ever thought to ask! ![]()
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Answer: They have a little circular notch on their front legs that they can draw their antenna through to clean it:
Well the weather is warming up finally, and the honeybe colonies have noticed. Had our first swarm call of the season yesterday. ![]()
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In the video the swarm has been knocked off the tree branches into the skep. Now we wait for all the bees still flying to go into the skep.
Well, this spring is a bit different to last year isn’t it. The colonies are ok, but they are using what nectar there is coming in and there’s no surplus for stores. It’s just been too cold for the flowers – so non of our colonies have any buffer store and certainly nothing building up for us humans to take. There’s even reports of some colonies starving, the national bee unit have just issued an alert.![]()
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Let’s hope it now starts to warm up.
Pleased to report that all our colonies have made it through the winter. On our first full inspection all the hives still had their Queen and were busy raising brood (new bees). There was some pollen and nectar starting to be brought in. A bit too early to say if we will have a spring crop as the spring flowers are only just starting to appear in volume – we will keep you posted. We do still have some honey left from last year. ![]()
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And just for a random addition: I spotted some Honey bees collecting water from a damp wall, filmed in Madeira recently. Must be a colony somewhere nearby.