Where are the bees going?

Posted by Jon on Oct 20, 2010 in Beekeeping, Wildlife | 4 comments

I’m making the most of the current fair weather to get a long list of pre-winter jobs done around the house whilst pondering on the question, where are my bees?

I know it’s the time of year when the colony is reducing in size, and my local beekeeping friends have been telling me that their bees are all over their ivy. Living in a crumbling pile of stones as we do, ivy is plentiful here – but not a bee in sight, only wasps.

A week in September….

Posted by Jon on Sep 21, 2010 in Asian Hornets, Beekeeping, Moths & Butterflies, Wild bees, Wildlife | 0 comments

Oops – a whole week has flown by and no update, so I thought I’d show you what’s going on in our garden as September marches to a close.
The bees are still out gathering pollen and the hives have been very busy with the current hot weather, although the days are noticeably short with all the bees tucked up by 7pm when the temperature starts to drop.

Late Summer Bees

Posted by Jon on Sep 12, 2010 in Wild bees, Wildlife | 4 comments

There’s a definite autumnal feeling to the days here as they start to draw in and there are fewer insects around.
At the end of August, we watched our red-tailed bumblebees (Bombus lapidarius) from the nest in the middle of the lawn grow up and leave home – the queens were huge, struggling to get their bulk off the ground for their maiden flight. The much smaller males sunbathed on the nearby stones living up to their French name Bourdon des pierres (stone bumblebee) before heading off into the distance.

Surprise, surprise

Posted by Jon on Sep 6, 2010 in Beekeeping | 4 comments

….as Cilla Black used to say in my youth. Just as we’ve finished bottling our honey for the year, we went out in the car and found two huge fields of sunflowers only a short bee flight from the hives! On closer inspection, it turns out that these are a special sunflower hybrid called Alterna from Pioneer seeds (part of Du Pont) that help farmers gain more cash from their fields by adding in an extra crop every 2 years. By getting three crops through their fields every two years, the farmers obviously gain, but I have to wonder at what cost to the soil and the local environment?

Garden sightings

Posted by Jon on Aug 18, 2010 in Asian Hornets, Beekeeping, Wild bees | 1 comment

It feels as though autumn has arrived all of a sudden – wet grass and cool winds in the mornings with grey skies. This has definitely slowed down the beehive activity (although they are enjoying the huge plum crop this year) so my thoughts are turing to honey, but I’m hoping the sun may come back for a while and give them a final burst of activity first.

Whilst I ponder, here are a few of the sights in our garden over the past few days….