Newbies

Last weekend we spent a few hours doing one of our favourite things - rehoming a nest of bees! These beauties had built perfect leaves of wax comb from the lintel of a bedroom window, between the glass and the shutter. The owner of the house wasn't that thrilled at having them there but, fair play, she didn't want any harm to come to them either, which is why she asked us to remove them. It was a fairly straightforward operation involving two ladders, a sharp knife, some frames and a number of elastic bands, and luckily the bees were calm and compliant. Given their colour, we think they are apis mellifera ligustica, or Italian bees - very orange (I prefer the term 'ginger', naturally...) and hard-working. They had been in situ for about five weeks but had already built six leaves of comb and were filling them with pollen and nectar. We spotted the queen bee in the centre of the nest and carefully moved her into the new hive, along with two leaves of comb filled with larvae and sealed brood. We then moved the other bees with the stores into the new hive too, and left them alone for a few hours.

We returned at dusk and were pleased to find that all the flying bees, the foragers, had relocated the queen and had gone into the hive; there were no bees left on the lintel. We scraped off the remaining wax from the shutters, put an entrance excluder on the hive, and carefully loaded it into the car. The next morning the bees awoke to their new home in our wildflower meadow here at 13 Bees, and soon adjusted to their changed surroundings. Welcome, Newbies!