Down at the apiary
Members get their heads together to help with the work. There’s quite a lot to do in the spring, as the queen increases her production of brood. Beekeepers must check the health and strength of their colonies and look for signs of disease.
New, clean brood frames must be prepared early and a very important task is to look for early signs of swarming, so that the bees are not lost! The members check for the first stages of queen cells being built by worker bees. If a new queen hatches, the old queen will leave the hive taking a large number of her family with her. Several queen cells can be built and more swarms could leave home if not prevented.
Sometimes the bees outwit the beekeeper, and, if they have not yet found a new home, can be found in a nearby tree! They tend to prefer high places. If they can be retrieved, they are collected and transferred to a new hive. This is their way of increasing the population. If bees leave their hive, there will be no honey that year for the beekeeper.
In this picture, some of our younger members assist in catching and boxing a swarm.
New queens are marked with a coloured spot on their thorax, to show in what year they were born. A different colour is used for each year.