Our first beehive

Well, we’ve got bees! After years of saying how much we would like to get them, researching various bee hive designs and looking at the cost of a colony to start us off, we took the plunge. Although, we really took the plunge just by buying the beehive, painting it and building it a base. The bees took a while longer to arrive, because we were waiting to receive a wild swarm for free.

Across the UK, there are local ‘swarm catchers’ and three years ago, we met one randomly (he ran an oven cleaning business when he wasn’t catching bees!). He kindly said that if we wanted a swarm, he would keep a look out and could potentially get us a swarm in June/ July when hives normally swarm.

However, if you haven’t noticed already, the weather this year has been pretty dismal and that has a big impact on beehives, their strength and their desire to swarm (where part of the hive leaves to start a new colony).

We already had hives ready so decided to try a few local swarm catchers/ bee keepers to see if they could help or at least, sell us some bees. We got lucky finally in late august, and a secondary swarm (quite small, about 5-10,000 bees) was delivered one sunny evening to their new home.

Since then, Peter has been very dedicated going down the road to check on his bees (complete with a very fetching outfit and smoker). I’m currently in charge of making their sugar water (to help keep them fed as natural supplies die back for autumn/ winter) - but hope one day soon to help tend them too (a little bit tricky with a baby on you, so it might have to wait till spring).

It’s amazing to see them building comb already and doubling in numbers since they settled in. Now we have to cross our fingers and toes that they survive the winter and we can look forward to our first honey harvest next year!