Bees at the Bottom of the Garden (Part 1) – How it Began

After four years as beekeepers, this autumn we extracted our first honey – about 38lbs of it. Not a huge amount by comparison to others but we were very proud of the 70 honey filled hexagonal jars sitting on the dining room table. We don’t claim to have done the hard work to get this honey, it was all down to the bees and if I’m completely honest, a lot of luck.

My journey as a beekeeper officially began in August 2012 when I got my first nucleus of honey bees; I was excited but also nervous about the prospect of dealing with thousands of bees! I’d done a two day Beginners Beekeeping course run by the Manchester and District Beekeepers Association (MDBKA) who are based in Heaton Park, Prestwich, but there was still a huge amount I didn’t know that I would only learn from experience.

After completing the course I went to the apiary in Heaton Park on a Monday night to gain some practical experience in the hives there. This gave people who had done the beginners course an opportunity to work alongside experienced beekeepers for a few months to gain a better understanding of how to keep bees throughout the year. As well as managing the hives, these evenings also covered other skills including hive maintenance, building frames, honey extraction and microscopy. I really enjoyed it all although the microscopy made me a bit queasy when I had to pull the head off a dead bee with a pair of tweezers to check for a specific disease!

I didn’t get my bees immediately after I’d finished this, there was so much to learn, so much I didn’t know and I wasn’t 100% sure whether keeping bees would be for me. My Grandad used to have bees and I’ve got vague memories of white hives in the garden – the traditional kind of beehives that people always imagine when you say you’re a beekeeper.

It took a while but eventually I decided to go for it and my father-in-law very kindly bought me my first bee hive and my first bees. I did consider naming the Queen bee in his honour but calling her ‘Roger’ wouldn’t really have been fair! I got my first nucleus of bees from Ian Molyneux, a Regional Bee Inspector and Apiary Advisor. I first met Ian when I spent time in the apiary in Heaton Park, he is an incredibly experienced beekeeper and has over 170 hives of his own. I’ve had all of my bees from Ian as I know they’re healthy and have a good temperament. Having bees with a good temperament is incredibly important because as Ben and I have found out from very recent experience, having angry bees makes hive inspections very unpleasant!

All of my hives have started from a nucleus – a nucleus is a small colony of around 4,000 to 5,000 bees with a queen, eggs, larvae and worker bees. Throughout the year, the bees increase in number with 50,000 to 60,000 in the hive when it’s at its busiest.

It was quite late in the year (mid August) when I started with my first bees and it was really important that there were enough bees in the hive to get through winter and that they had enough food. This meant that any honey in the hive would be for them and that I’d have to wait! I worked hard managing the hive and adding food (sugar syrup) if the bees needed it and I was really excited when they emerged as a strong, healthy colony in the spring.

As a brand new beekeeper I was particularly proud because there’d been a lot of people across the country who had unfortunately lost their bees that winter.

The colony continued to grow and as a beekeeper, it’s my job to make sure there’s enough room in the hive for this to happen. When the bees need more space, another box called a ‘super’ is added to the hive. It’s like another level being added to a building and the bees can spread out into it and fill up more frames with honey. One thing that’s likely to happen if there’s not enough room is that the bees can swarm; the Queen leaves the hive and takes a large number of bees with her. There are signs that this is going to happen and this is one of the things I’m still trying to learn to spot properly so I can manage the bees before they swarm.

When a Queen leaves, the bees will ‘create’ a new Queen who under the right conditions will mate with drones (male bees) before returning to the hive where her role is to lay eggs for the rest of her life. After a swarm, there aren’t a lot of bees left in the hive and the new Queen needs to build up the number of bees again. If there’s no Queen in the hive, the rest of the bees won’t survive.

My first bees swarmed one Sunday in June (2013) and we saw it happening. Ben said something didn’t look right and he was right! We watched in awe and amazement at the swirling cloud of bees as they hovered, circling above the hive. The noise was incredible – a loud humming as thousands and thousands of bees flew away with their Queen. Initially they didn’t go far and clustered in a tree in the garden below ours. Sometimes you can catch the swarm and get them back into the hive but we had no chance this time. The bee’s temporary residence was too high for us to reach them before they disappeared to a new home.  Ben went down to speak to the neighbours who lived below us and they said they’d never seen or heard anything like it. It was quite funny because Ben ended up in their garden again the next evening when of our hens, Ruby, got stuck in the adjoining hedge but that’s another blog for another day!

In July 2013 we did a hive inspection and were relieved to find eggs and larvae which meant there was a new Queen and that she had mated. We just had to hope she would lay prolifically and that the number of bees would build up over the next few months so there were enough to carry the colony through winter.

Over winter when the bees weren’t flying we (very carefully!) moved the hive higher up the garden so it would be in a better position – we put it in the part of the garden where the sun stayed on it until the end of the day.

Spring 2014 arrived and the weather had been quite mild but we hadn’t seen any of the bees flying from the hive. We left it for a week or so but had a  gut feeling that the bees hadn’t made it through the winter. When we opened the hive up it was awful – it was a bee graveyard. Despite having had plenty of food, none of the bees had survived, the colony hadn’t been big enough.

I was devastated and again began to wonder whether beekeeping was for me, what if this happened next time? I spoke to people in the MDBKA and asked their advice, they’d all been through and didn’t think I should give up. I was still unsure whether to get more bees so the hive sat empty and desolate for a few months.

Things changed unexpectedly one evening. The decision whether to keep bees again or not was made for me when I got phone call from Ben saying he’d found a huge colony of honey bees when he was walking the dogs in the woods………(to be continued!)

If you want to read the rest of our beekeeping journey then use the ‘Subscribe’ link in the side menu to follow my blog and you’ll never miss a new post!

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