The Bees

The domesticated Honey Bee out foraging for food

Our Apiary is located on our smallholding not to far from the historic town of Conwy, North Wales. Our bees collect and forage a wide variety of plants, trees and fauna from the wild as well as gardens in the area. The bees will forage within a 3 mile radius of their hive, and due to our location they get a very mixed and diverse supply of food. We live next door to a woodland where they have different types of trees to visit, the hedgerows around the countryside provide, brambles, ivy and elder flowers not to mention the clover wild flowers from SSSI sites and crops in the fields surrounding us. We are also close enough for them to forage the heather on the mountains above Conwy.

Bees love garden flowers, here they are foraging a geranium in our garden

The apiary - one  of the weekly inspections

Our bees are inspected on a weekly basis to ensure there are no problems in the hive, they have enough food supply and all is well with the queen. It is also necessary to check in case they want to swarm and if they need extra room to store the honey.

Re queening a hive

At one of our inspections, we found one of the hives had lost its queen, this could have been accidentally killed, or the hive could have swarmed. We decided to re queen this particular hive with a bought new queen from the Buckfast strain. The queens come in little plastic cages for transporting and they have 5 worker bees with them in order to feed the candy to the queen.

Here you can see the new queen been introduced to the hive for 24 hours before releasing. This allows the bees to get used to her and ensure she is accepted. Sometimes they don't like her and will kill her, thankfully she was released by them by eating the candy and all was well.

Hubby in his suit