December: Ewell Yule

We were delighted to be offered a stall at this year's Ewell Yule event.  With the high street closed to traffic and lots of local businesses "doing something special" for the evening as well as the living advent calendar it promised to be a great evening.

First to make our stall suitably festive, bunting and tea light candles in honey jars seem to do the trick...

We set up our displays of local honeys...

Don't our 10 local honeys look gorgeous? who could resist tasting them?

September: Nonsuch awareness day

Although September is often the end of the active bee keeping season it isn't quite yet the end of the being busy for beekeepers...

Autumn brings the opportunity to meet and greet our public and sell them some honey.

Today's event was all about raising public awareness of all the activities that take place in Nonsuch Park...

We set up our stall bright and early...

and stacked the table high with honeys....

Six different local honeys to taste....

The Bees wax candles were popular....

We attracted the attention of dignitaries from across the ages....

Everyone seemed to like what they tasted !

September: The things we do for bees...

It all started with a small hole in a garden wall about 2 years ago, which looked like a safe place for some bees to hang out.  Fast forward to 2015 and the family living there are concerned about the state of the wall and the brickie who agrees to fix it would like the bees removed before he starts work ( can't say I blame him!).
So its just a case of finding someone who is brave (a.k.a. daft) enough to try to get them out of the wall...

It doesn't look that intimidating does it?

Just a little tap or two to get a few bricks loose...

Ah.....maybe they don't like that so much...

Thankfully the mortar is very soft so the bricks come out quite easily....unfortunately there seems to be rather a lot of wild honeycomb behind them...

 

 

We set the bricks carefully to one side....

 

And got on with digging the wild comb from the cavity inside the wall...

 

They were pretty big pieces of comb, most of which was full of honey...

Eventually we found some that had brood in...

And were relieved to find the back of the wall cavity...

The problem now...was just how far the colony extended to the sides. Leftwards we appear to have found the edge..

But rightwards....that seemed to go on a way up and on to the right...

It was time to scoop as many as possible into the box, and tip them into the hive...

 





Unfortunately that meant that that we also got rather a lot of brick dust in with the bees at the same time...

What a good job we can tie most of those frames of honey into another box...at least they'll have some clean food to keep them going in their new home...

Meanwhile a closer inspection of the wall and a quick committee meeting started to strongly suspect that there was either a second entrance to the colony in the wall or a completely separate second colony...

 

There was definitely no sign of the queen, nor any bees scenting and fanning to indicate the queen was in the hive...

And rather too many bees still hanging around on the wall looking like they want to go back home...

 





There's nothing else for it, we are just going to have to clear as many bees off the grass as we can...

 

Make the cavity in the wall as inhospitable and obnoxiously smelly as we can...

 

 

And pop the roof on the hive and hope that as many as possible can be persuaded to move in overnight...

The things we do for bees eh?

June: A swarm worth a silver spoon?

We do the best we can at Epsom Beekeepeers to deal with all the swarms we get calls about in the Epsom area.  Some are in more unusual places than others.

This call was about one in a compost bin, there was a young family trying to renovate a house and take care of an 11 week old baby.....and the builders couldn't get on with the work because the bees were getting in the way.  Mostly calls about bees in compost bins are about bumble bees.... but we're nice people..  we'll come round Sunday morning to check it out...

Certainly seems quiet enough...but there are a few honey bees buzzing about...

 




Ah! - there you all are...

There's actually quite a lot of bees in here, they've been in here long enough to draw several sections of honeycomb and there is a queen laying eggs.  There are quite a few sections of brood in all stages of development....

 

 

There's nothing else for it...we'll just have to cut it out one piece at a time...

Checking each piece over carefully to try to find the queen....

We couldn't find her and the bees did seem to be rather determined to return to the compost bin, repeatedly clustering on the side....and me.  They did seem to like sitting on me....

 




We smoked them, and sprayed them and eventually enough of them were in the box...

 

 

For us to declare "job done" and take the box away...

But that was only half the job.  There's no point rescuing bees from unwanted places if you don't put them in a place they are wanted.  So ...back to the apiary...

First assemble all the hive parts to keep the bees safe and sound...

And then, rather like children unwrapping and laying out all the toys that Santa left, we opened the box and sorted through the pieces of honeycomb, looking for the best ones to put into frames... 

 

This is definitely a job where four hands are better than two....squishing odd shaped pieces of honeycomb into frames and capturing them there with elastic bands...

 

 

There was still an amazing number of bees in the box, more frames were needed...

and the board to walk the rest into the hive...

 

Now if only we could see the queen....

 

but there's quite a few bees to look through...

Here's a bee's eye view of the way home....

and a bee's eye view of the apiary...

The bad news is that the battery then ran out on the camera.

The good news is that just after it did,we spotted the queen and popped her safely in the hive.

What a great way to spend three hours on a Sunday!