I braced myself and decided it was time to check out Darren’s hives. I’d showed him mine so, you know, it only seemed fair.
Like most of my friends, Darren is more manly than myself. He likes making fire, snowboarding at speed and wears chunky, S&M style wrist jewellery. He likes BIG hives and aggressive bees. He likes them aggressive as he believes they make more honey.
His garden extends into an allotment. He describes himself as a low intervention beekeeper and I knew what he meant as we hacked our way through undergrowth to reach his hives. It was actually quite magical when we got there, not least because his hives towered into the lower braches of the trees … one of the hives was on a triple brood box and full of bees!
Every frame was bursting with bees and filled with eggs, brood, honey and pollen in near perfect form. As we got to the 33rd and final frame in the brood we found the Queen that he had marked last year. He had found her last year, picked her up by her legs and marked her with Tipex. I can’t even pick up a daddy-long-legs by the legs.
The visit re-established my bee-keeping inferiority complex, but it was a useful session. I now know what eggs look like, how to see them and what a Queen looks like. She’s a lot longer than the other bees.
Some beautiful wild honeycomb in one of Darren’s hives:
A bumbleebee on the wild honeycomb:
A busy brood box (one of the triple brood box colony):
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Spectacular comb! That looks like the Bombus Hypnorum tree bumblebee, or the Neapolitan icecream bee as I like to call it.
Picking up the queen by her legs sounds risky, think the thorax is usually recommended, as if your big manly hands damage a queen’s legs the bees will quickly decide she’s gone faulty!
What a lovely sight, I can almost taste the honey. I live in Qatar where the temperature soars above 45 degrees. We have beautiful seas and rolling sands, there are plants and birds so there must be bees, I think that I may go exploring to see if I can find any.
I can see you hanging from a rope, 10m off the ground, smoking a wild hive, dipping your hands into the honey …
Makes my mouth water too. I will definitely try to produce wild comb next year.
I love that picture of the bumblebee on wild comb, she must have thought all her summers had come at once. The honey looks delicious, yum.