(S)warming to my theme....

Thanks for the comments and e mails about the bees. I thought I'd give a quick update as the saga continues.... A weekend inspection showed that the queens had gone in both of the new hives and in the stronger one they were making queen cells to replace her. As neither hive has any drones in it there would be no chance that  the new queen would reproduce so my husband destroyed the queen cells and our supplier sent us two mated queens in the post which I collected from the sorting office yesterday morning.

In the meantime we noticed this swarm on Monday evening, high in a cherry tree about 20 feet from the hives. To say we felt beleaguered at this point would be spot on. We thought my husband had missed the emergence of a queen before destroying the cells and they'd left one of our hives, but it is rare for swarms to follow a virgin queen. They are usually an old queen leaving a burgeoning hive and taking half the workers with her. At this point however, all we were thinking was 'could anything else go wrong?'

The swarm was so high in the tree that retrieval seemed impossible but last night my husband made some Heath Robinson contraption and had a go. By this time he'd established, after introducing the newly arrived mated queens to the hives that this swarm were not our bees at all, he'd managed to get some to go into a new hive. They were fanning at the entrance and he thought he'd succeeded but the queen can't have been amongst the ones he introduced as the swarm reverted to the tree pretty quickly.

 I've just taken this photo this morning and it shows the swarm still there. These bees are bigger and darker than ours and must be pretty hardy as we've had nothing but rain since they stopped here. What is the likelihood of a swarm coming here, in such proximity to our hives and at a time of such uncertainty for us?The odds must be long ones to be sure. Going to try again tonight to get this swarm into a hive. Looks like there will be another instalment to this story.....

Postscript : No Heath Robinson artefact required! Tonight, we happened to be on hand when the swarm rose into the air like a tornado and headed towards the empty hive. It was absolutely text book stuff and quite amazing to see it happen spontaneously. Probably shows that Nature's instincts are far better than human interventions!

Losing the resolve....

The first post of 2012 in January was all about resolutions. I'd bought some of  these little elephants and had a load of blank matchboxes so I combined the two and made a DIY Resolution kit. In the post I put forward the idea that I might make one every week for a year but admitted that I was a great starter and a poor finisher with things that require regular commitment like this.....nevertheless, I started well, made a few boxes with odds and ends that were close to hand on the desk top and started posting them here, week by week.None of them took more than 10 minutes to make. Consequently, they don't bear close scrutiny but it was a fun mental challenge, and I did pick one out weekly and try to hold the thought in the back of my mind as the days passed.  I was lucky enough to have a follower who kept encouraging me when I wanted to give up making the boxes, namely Jane, who managed to manoeuvre her way through my 'no followers' and 'no comments' barrier. Thanks Jane. You don't know it but without you I might have given up sooner, however, I have made it to week 26 and this coming Saturday will be my final box. I've run out of small things to use and also run out of enthusiasm for them so I might do something else for the rest of the year. Is anyone out there still successfully following their New Year resolution? If so, tell me how you're doing it please. It might inspire me to keep going for another 26 weeks......or maybe not....

Bees ,books and bugs

The day after our bees arrived I headed off to Stroud for a weekend workshop with the Travelling Bookbinder, Rachel Hazell, organised as part of a local book festival. The venue was the workshop of bespoke fabric and wallpaper printers Lewis and Wood who kindly left offcuts of both for use in our projects. We spent the first day stitching small sample books with wallpaper covers and I learned a couple of new stitch patterns that I had not tried before. It was great to just get away and play and see how someone with Rachel's experience puts a workshop together. She provided materials and ideas and showed us some of her own fabulous books whilst gently cajoling us into getting things made and stimulating our ideas.I ended up focussing on offcuts of fabric adorned with fish so I just went from there. I'm not sure if it was a trout or not but I made it so for my purposes! I've been working on it since I came home and it is now finished but I won't bore you with all the pages. These are a few as well as a small booklet I made using some of the wallpaper on offer, a mini envelope template and a copy of 'Little Women' Rachel provided for us to cut from.

 Rachel is spending this year travelling the globe delivering workshops in places like Shetland, Stockholm, Napa Valley and Venice. I know Stroud does not sound as exotic but I was lucky enough to be part of a great group of people for the weekend and I had a really good time despite bad news from home. After the required 24 hour period my husband opened the containers of bees to lift the frames from them into his hives. Sadly one of the boxes had been trashed in transit and there were about 250+ plus dead bees and larva in the bottom of one of them, dead or dying, drowned in their own honey supply. It was tragic news and we still await a compensation response from the carrier. One hive is thriving but the weaker one is struggling. There is no sign of the queen so she may have been lost in transit although they can sometimes be elusive. We have to monitor the hive to see if new brood is being laid. If not, then the tell tale signs are there and a new queen may have to be introduced unless the workers make a new one. At the moment we are monitoring the situation and keeping out fingers crossed !

 .... and because I've written about the books and the bees from my post header I just want to add a few bugs in the shape of these wonderful enamlled plaques made by my friend Sue as part of her MA degree show. The left hand one with the red dot is now mine - or will be when the show is over - and another is going to Cathy of Menopausal Musing as we met up with Sue in Bristol on Monday and had a look at the degree shows at U.W.E.

There were some fabulous things on display and I enjoyed the Graphic Design, Drawing and Printmaking shows. These wonderful etchings were produced for the MA in Multi-Disciplinary Printmaking  by artist Wendy Rhodes who writes a great blog that I follow. I am always so envious of her drawing ability and the etchings had some gorgeous, dark and inky  luscious marks in them. It really was inspiring and I came home promising myself I'd check the dates of the degree shows close to home and that I'd finish that book from Stroud and get on with some drawing projects of my own that have been languishing for a few weeks now!

Making a beeline....

We've got to that time of year when everything in the garden is looking very lush and all those breeding birds  are rushing about trying to find enough food to feed their nestlings. Our garden is full of nests with robins, great tits, song thrushes, blackbirds, goldfinches and swallows all 'doing their thing' at the moment and watching all this new life happening around us is magic. The warm weather coupled with the rain in April has sent flowers off to a racing start so the air is redolent with the continuous sound of bumblebees. All those years of selecting plants specifically for their nectar giving properties for insects is beginning to pay off but not everything in the garden has been rosy. Regular moth traps have delivered much lower numbers than expected at this time of the season and as moths are an indicator species it does give me slight worries. After all, bats need moths in the food chain and I have noticed a significant absence of them so far this year. Even the couple who have roosted in our roof for many a season seem to have disappeared. Even butterfly numbers have been low  here this Spring but the main reason for my post has been to write an update on our bees!  

During the terrible wet winter the beekeeper I'm married to  lost his hives. They tried to keep going but it was just too wet, so we thought long and hard about re-stocking before ordering 12 frames from a specialist supplier, but my husband is passionate about his bees so I also knew, deep down, that it was a no brainer. Then we had that glorious warm weather in March followed by the wettest drought in April and the news came through that everything that had started thriving had been put in jeopardy by the rain and the return to cold weather. It has been a saga but the bees were finally organised for delivery today. By the time they arrived via courier, they were hot and bothered. The noise that came from the boxes seemed to unnerve the delivery driver and the runny honey that had seeped out of the boxes all over his floor were a sign that they needed to get settled in quickly so the beekeeper set to work, freeing them from their temporary home. 

 They need to settle and then get out and start to forage today before he moves them into their respective hives tomorrow. So far, so good. The weather is cool and not too hot so I'm hoping all will be well. They've now gone quiet but all around them is the noise of bumblebees so I'm glad we've got a big enough garden to fulfil their needs for nectar and pollen at the moment.

 Up in what is meant to be the herb bed, the foxgloves have gone berserk but they are beautiful and absolutely teeming with bees climbing up their trumpets and flying off with pollen laden legs. My prayer flags look a bit sad don't they? It's amazing how much of the indigo dye from the vat we trialled has already been washed out by the poor weather and the wind is certainly giving them a hammering. They now sag a bit, and when you go up there a little bit of limboing is required to get past but I am not moving them. The foxgloves are in every form of white, pink and magenta imaginable. I remember thinking it was madness to leave so many of last year's seedlings in the ground but they make the bed look magnificent while everything else is building up.

Let's hope our bees settle in well and start to explore the nectar potential of the foxgloves and everything else out there, If they breed as well as the birds have this year our hundreds of bees will be thousands of bees in a very short time. I hope they get a good summer under their belt so the chances of winter survival are improved. Watch this space as I have my own outfit on order and am being schooled in beekeeping this summer so that I can get closer to take photos etc. I wonder if I will make a good mother.....