Bees

Hive 6 is back in a good mood, which is a great relief! Something must have upset it last week, as I didn't get a single sting today. There's still no sign of drone brood. I wish I understood more about the reasons why they do or don't produce it. I didn't have my camera unfortunately, but I potted patches of brood which were being uncapped, with the pupae sitting there looking at me. that's a good sign. It's known as 'hygienic behaviour', and suggests that this particular colony is good at detecting larvae with something wrong with them. If we can breed strains which detect varroa mites in cells and deal with them, we'll be well on the way to breeding a bee that can handle them without chemical assistance.

Hive 4 has a good patch of drone brood coming as long, but not as much as I thought. I'm always optimistic about these things. I need them to have a good big patch or patches capped over by the end of the month so I can raise a couple of queens. I didn't see any evidence of hygienic behaviour, but that could be because they haven't yet got enough bees to spare any for the job of removing sick larvae. Time will tell.

I repotted a Trillium recurvatum which I planted in 2005. It started germinating in the spring of 2007 - they tend to come up over several years - and it now has fat little rhizomes up to two inches long. They need a lot of patience, but it's worth it in the long run. My interest goes back about ten years; I was given several bin liners full of unwanted plants from someone's garden. They were a treasure, mainly Trillium kurabayashii, Cyclamen hederifolium and snowdrops. Some other species were stolen by a neighbour, but I still have those.

Bees

Both those hives seem to have settled down. The first swarm to arrive - now Hive 6 - has a broodbox brimming with bees, and has reached the stage where its temper is beginning to show. The bigger the colony, the more older bees there are going to be in the hive, and these are the ones that sting. Yesterday they got up my arms and under my veil - a habit I loathe - and stung, so I won't be raising queens off that one unless it turns out to be a one-off. They don't have any drone cells that I can find; swarms often don't produce many in their first year for some reason.

The other one - Hive 4 - hasn't had so much time to build up, but it does have drone cells appearing. It's got a slightly bigger broodnest; 8 frames as opposed to 7. In a couple of weeks I should be able to start raising queens.

The wren's bringing beakfuls of insects into the shed, so the eggs have to have hatched.

Bees

Last week, as the temperature warmed up, I found mobs of bees round one of my empty hives. I get this every year, and assumed a swarm was planning to move in. Sure enough, I went down on Saturday, and there they were in residence. They look like Carniolan hybrids, which tend to be swarmy, and can be bad-tempered. They'll be easy enough to requeen if the other hive pulls through. Meanwhile they're more than welcome, and so far they're perfectly well-behaved. This is an annual event, so I think there's someone not too far away who keeps losing swarms!






















A patch of comfrey in full sun has wilted in the heat, but no doubt it'll soon recover. I've got a barrel full of comfrey from an unlettable plot at the other end of the site, which will soon rot down and provide evil-smelling liquid manure.















The peas are growing like mad. These are the first I planted. No sign of buds yet, but they'll soon be forming.















The lilac is covered in bloom this year. It varies a lot from one year to the next. A red rose I planted underneath has grown right up through so I'm hoping for a good show this year. I should have moved so as to keep the apple brach on the left out of shot, but it was so bright I couldn't see the image on the camera screen. Should have used the direct vision viewfinder!

Bees

Today I found my one surviving colony almost dead from isolation starvation. On May 15th!

They had clustered on the brood, as might be expected; bees very rarely abandon it. But they were a couple of inches from the food, and it must have been too cold for them to be able to bridge the gap. I spotted that no bees were flying on a mild afternoon, opened it up, and they were obviously very weak. When I pulled some frames, I found bees that were obviously dying. The queen was still alive though, so I doused them with sugar syrup. That started to wake them up, and by the time I came home, a few were beginning to fly. The weather's getting warmer, so they should be OK now. It will have set them right back though, and I'm not expecting any honey this year.

I've planted out more peas; Latvian Pea, Irish Preans, Lancashire Lad, Victorian Purple Podded, Commander, and Clarke's Beltony Blue, and started a few more in pots. The beans are looking a bit sorry for themselves, but they're OK. Some of the sweet corn was finished off by the frost, but 35 out of the original 60 I planted are alive, with more to come. Not all the seeds germinated, but I'm not complaining. It'll give me some nice early corn, and spread the season a bit.

Deadouts

Hives 2 and 5 have died out. I can't see any obvious reason; neither had touched the candy I gave them, though both were very short of stores. They don't show the normal signs of starvation, so it's not isolation, when a cluster can't move over to food in cold weather. The overwhelming majority of my losses involve first-year queens, so it has to be something to do with the queens. They weren't mated in bad weather, or when there was a shortage of drones, so it's a mystery. Losing half my hives is a major setback!

Oca

This is the oca I planted last spring, sprawling all over the place. It doesn't do much until midsummer, then starts spreading. It's a South American root vegetable; the tubers swell as the shoots die back, so I won't be lifting it till all the top growth is dead, in late November or December. It's about my one success story this year, so I'm looking forward to it!

You probably remember that Hive 5 used to be very large, and nasty-tempered. About half the bees had a yellow stripe, and it was full of drones. I had a look yesterday. All the bees are black, and extremely quiet on the comb, just like Hive 4. I can only imagine that the queen, raised from an egg laid in Hive 4, avoided mating with drones from her own hive, and mated selectively with Hive 4 drones. These may have shared a mother with her, but will have had a different scent.

Hive 4 has lots of honey in the broodbox, so no worries about that one. I'll give it a gallon of feed with Fumidil-B in it, for Nosema, and that's all. Hive 1 is fine, but it doesn't have so much honey stored, so I'll give it candy just in case. It's a lot better off than any of the hives were this time last year, though. Hive 5 has some drones, so there's something for the new queens to mate with. I'll check them out next week and see what's happening.