New Bees!

Yes, it's absolutely true - on Friday morning I got a text from fellow Bath Rugby fan Mark, to say that his neighbour had a swarm in the hedge in his front garden.  This, obviously, was too good an opportunity to miss, so I grabbed a bee jacket, nucleus and secateurs, and headed over.

Well, he was absolutely right - a lovely sized swarm, nicely located at waist height in a cotoneaster bush.  Mark was happy to take photos while I got to work:

With the nucleus in place below the swarm ball, I grabbed the secateurs and started cutting:

Here are the bees after I'd shaken them off the branch and into the nucleus:

Put the frames in:

Roof on, and wait for the stragglers to walk down into the entrance:

Then I closed the entrance block, popped them into the boot of the car, and drove up to the apiary to place them in their new home.  And here they are - happy, and flying about:

So the happy news is that I now have bees, and The Southdown Apiary is now a proper apiary!  I must admit I was feeling pretty pleased with myself now that I've caught a swarm and can call myself a beekeeper again.

I have the apiary laid out so that the hives are on one side, and the stack of spare boxes (spare supers and frames) on the other, with the nucleuses (nuclei?) at the far end.  So, satisfied after a successful swarm collection, I was walking back out of the apiary past the 'spares' stack, when I noticed the boxes were out of alignment:

My guess is Joel's dog, Iris, had been sniffing around and had knocked the boxes slightly out of kilter.  But then I noticed some bees buzzing around one of the mis-aligned corners.  I wonder...