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Our Association Apiary Through The Year
This is the real picture of Our Home Apiary "Misty Dawn in June 2000" and also the moonlight apiary backdrop at our entrance. Apart from that, Martin never gets up early enough to take dawn pictures.
Apiary Visit
 22 Workers and Drones line up for a photograph after examining every colony in the apiary. Yes, the hives we are posing round are flying and fully active and, No, not a single person was stung through the entire day!

"Sorry about the quality of this picture but it was scanned from a 6x4 photo."
Sat 20th Jan 2001 The colonies safely tucked up for the winter. When it's cold like this the worker bees form a tight cluster layer on layer. As the bees on the outside of the cluster get chilled they move to the centre and warm bees move to the outside to replace them. To protect the delicate brood being reared for the coming season warm tempertures are needed. To do this bees eat honey and by flexing their wing muscles generate heat keeping the temperature at the cluster centre between 32-36C. Providing they have plenty of honey and bees they can maintain these temperatures even when the outside temperature is - 28C.
This has been a very strange year for beekeeping, this swarm came out on the 30th of June.
Here Maggie demonstrates how to take a swarm.
One quick sweep of the brush and nearly all the bees are in the box. It is put on the ground under the tree with its entrance open and within 15 minutes all the bees have found their new home. It is not often that swarms are as easy to collect as this one was.
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