The Bee Journey continues…
As you can see I recently went out for my weekly inspection, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to write down some of the lessons learnings and behaviours of my colony. What has been a long and arduous process is finally coming to fruition and I feel in a really good place about the whole thing.
As you would have seen on my instagram I managed to collect a swarm from a neighbouring property a couple of months back and it’s been a whirlwind journey from that day on, in fact 2 days after capturing a small to medium sized swarm I was called again to another cast of bees that had situated themselves around the same location as my swarm catch, I took the two colonies and united them ( combined them together ) Being mid season this was a great way to increase the colony strength and ultimately improve their chances of survival over the approaching winter months. Whilst there are great positives to collecting and homing a swarm the draw back is the uncertainty of what you have, Bee’s have a range of issues from colony to colony that as a bee keeper we try to manage and without knowing the source of the swarm I was in a position where time and patients where my only options to learn the bee behaviour and keep an eye out for any issues. After several weeks it had appeard my Queen was poorly mated resulting in a spotted brood patten, there’s a few methods to rectify this issue and as it stands It looks as though the bees are dealing with it themselves with a superseder ( a term used to describe an old or dysfunctional queen being replaced by her daughter without human intervention to ensure the long term survival of the colony ) it’s great to finally feel like I have a rhythm with it all and to have already in my few months hands on experienced so much with this colony.
The more time that passes and the more time I put into the Bees the more life lessons I am taking from the whole thing. Bees are incredibly hard working, loyal, persistent, patient and overall incredibly self-sacrificing for their queen. They’ve shown me the value of doing things the right way consistently over time and they’ve shown me that you need the right tools to do a job properly. That final lesson can be taken both literally and metaphorically. We regard colonies as a superorganisms in which cooperating individuals overlapping generations support functions comparable to cells in a multicellular organism, essentially all honey bee’s play a role in the survival of the colony and without each other their survival would’t be possible.
After all else, it’s been great to shoot some different content and especially have a focus on wildlife which is a huge passion of mine. I think this played a huge role in why I got into bee keeping, I’ve always cared for wildlife and had an interest in animals as a child, that teamed with the media coverage of honey bee’s and the importance of pollinators it steered me into this direction and I couldn’t be happier about the situation.
I hope you enjoyed todays post and I would love to hear if you want more Bee content?
See you next Monday