26/05/2026
Yes, that is a 6 foot plus tower of bees and honey.
It takes a lot of work to manage the bees, you can't just get a hive, put a couple of supers (the box where the honey is stored) on it and harvest the honey at the end of summer.
Weekly inspections are a must, whether it's 12° and cloudy, a bit rainy or 30°+ like it was today.
You have to think ahead, not what they are going to do tomorrow, you have to think, what is going to happen in a weeks time, maybe two.
Making sure there is enough room for the queen to lay and there is plenty of space for expansion.
1 frame of brood will make almost 3 frames of bees, thats about 5'000 bees, so things can get out of hand quickly if you have 4 or 5 frames of brood about to hatch, especially if you have a queen that is a prolific layer.
Hive manipulations are done on an almost weekly basis, swapping brood frames to give more laying space, adding supers to clear nectar from the brood frames up into the super frames so they can store honey, if there a swarm cells in the hive, the swarm impulse has kicked in and the only way to stop them swarming is to split the hive by removing the queen with some brood and some bees. The original hive then thinks it has swarmed and will make another queen, but now you have 2 hives.............if you started the year with 2 hives and have to split every time they want to swarm you could go from 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 and so on.
My favourite manipulation is the 'demaree' split , moving the whole brood box of bees and brood above at least 2 supers and then putting the queen into another brood box under the supers, the bees think they have swarmed when they haven't, so you get an extra few weeks before the swarm impulse kicks in again(in theory), but you get more bees to collect more honey and you don't need a separate hive to do so, just a lot more lifting....never complain at heavy supers. 😁
So in a nutshell there is a lot of time and effort stopping your bees flying off with your queen into someone's chimney with half of your honey( the bees that are going to swarm fill their stomachs with honey to take to their new home), leaving you queenless and setting you back a month before you can get back on track again. The bees do have a habit of hiding queen cells, so accidents can happen.
I had a great day today, albeit a hot one, finished off by a delivery of 2026 spring honey to Miller's Farm shop, honey that was harvested from the Apiary I have on the Millers land. Enjoy! 👑🐝🍯🍯
