A lesson in beekeeping

September dawned bright and clear. My longtime good friend, Sarah, is training to be a master beekeeper in Yorkshire and offered to share the benefit of her bee knowledge with me. As the pictures show, I had the whole immersive experience, handling frames and allowing the bees to land on me. Those gloves would not have stopped a bee sting but I discovered that only some of the bees sting (not the males) and then only in difficult circumstances, when they're under attack for example.

I saw the queen bee, a different shape and size from all the other females and easier to spot because of the coloured dot on her back, put there by the beekeeper for easy identification. The males are a different shape from the females and when a new male emerges from his wax cell the adult bees assist him into the world - his genes are their genes and they want to give them the best chance of being passed to a new generation. The most exciting moment was watching an imago, a fully grown worker bee, emerge into the world, struggling to be free from the wax cave where she had spent her time as a larva. The other adult females ignored her completely, if she wasn't strong enough to fight her way out she would not be much use working alongside them in a very short while. That's the life of a female bee, you're born, a few minutes later you go to work, after six weeks or so you probably leave the hive to die quietly by yourself. Unless you're the queen, that is. She is fed and pampered until she's big and strong enough to start laying eggs, then she flies to mate, and starts to lay eggs, hundreds and hundreds of them. Her lifespan is longer than your average worker bee, she can survive the winter and go on laying eggs into another year. It's a fascinating world to glimpse inside although we couldn't lift the trays out for long, there was a cold breeze blowing.

It was a wonderful experience. #43 of 70