The New Girls Have Arrived!
Sooo good to see the new girls out and about this Spring! After the loss of all hives early in Winter, (horrendous number of wasp attacks and wet Autumn days?),...
Sooo good to see the new girls out and about this Spring! After the loss of all hives early in Winter, (horrendous number of wasp attacks and wet Autumn days?), new bees arrived a week ago. It was an anxious time transporting a deep hive (14x12 National) full of buzzing bees in the back of the car, from deep in the Dales to their new home, but "St Emilion" were keen and bringing in "egg-yolk yellow" pollen within a day.
There's not so much rape seed around the apiary this year, but enough to hopefully give them a good start and us some early harvest soft-set honey. We'll try to split the hive and grow our own queen early too, to give us some insurance against another series of wasp-attacks. We're awaiting more colonies and they'll go in the normal National hives, again to be split as soon as we can, and that should bring us up to almost full capacity by the end of the season, fingers crossed.
In the meantime, there's still last year's soft-set honey on the shelves at Mocha and in the honesty "sentry box" at 26 East Road, Melsonby - we're card-friendly too, with the new Sum-Up machine in the box!
Steve, Melsonbee Honey