This blog will follow the flights, flows and foraging of Embercombe's honeybees.
We currently steward 3 topbar hives and 2 dadant hives.
Embercombe is a landbased social enterprise in Devon, UK existing to 'touch hearts, stimulate minds and inspire
committed action for a truly sustainable world'.
We run courses for beginners.
2013 courses will be in April, May and June.
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Tuesday 17 May 2011

Swarming time

As expected, May has brought us swarming adventures.

Our first swarm of the year came from a topbar hive in the garden called Light (we assume...). Although we had done a split*, it seems the swarming impulse remained and they swarmed. I found them clustered on an apple tree in the garden.

When bees swarm, a group of bees and a queen leave the hive in a big swirling mass and settle in a cluster nearby. From here, they send out scouts to look for a suitable new home.
Cluster on the apple tree

moving into the skep


It is at this stage that they are easiest to catch, so we got Jo's grandfathers skep (a beautiful 100 year old woven beehive). We then bashed the tree to knock the cluster into the skep, and left it propped open for the rest of the bees to climb in...





... A couple of days after re-homing the bees in a hive, they were gone... so we must have done something not quite right! Beekeeping can be such a rollercoaster of emotions. The joy and wonder of finding the first swarm of the year, watching them climb into the skep... and then the feelings of loss on finding them gone. I just hope they have found a beautiful wild home.

But the rollercoaster goes on, and the same day (so it could be the same bees!) a swarm was found high in the treetops in the woods. Hanging on the topmost branches of a lovely old oak was a beautiful big swarm cluster. This stayed for a few days through rain and sun until sunday. During the sunday while the 70 or so people on the friends weekend were eating lunch, a swirling mass of bees moved up the valley towards the top of the site...
we walked up following the swarm's slow pace, and ended up in the top apiary, where they headed into an empty dadant hive left there since the colony inside had collapsed.
the swarm moving into their new home



*Split: Otherwise known as artificial swarming - once a colony has started queen rearing, to split off a few frames of brood and stores from the main colony, along with the existing queen or some queen cells, creating a new colony. This tries to capture the swarming impulse and means we don't loose the bees.

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