Among all the exciting things going on that have been keeping me busy and away from Hive has been... a Hive!
Yes, I have bees again. :-)
Last year my son and I built a beehive and started off a small colony from a new nucleus.
The colony thrived at first and we even had a visit from a cousin enthusiast.
Unfortunately that colony did not last the winter (we think because of cold, but possibly they needed more food). We opened the hive one morning for a routine check having determined a few days previously that they could do with some fondant, only to find all was quiet and still, everyone dead in the hive.
This year we are the happy carers for a new colony, so we went to collect the new nuc box and spent the morning building a platform for them.
We let them out for a forage and to allow them to fix on their new surroundings and location. Then we went back up to the house with the old hive for a good clean.
The old hive is now ready for its new colony, so tomorrow we will perform the rehoming.
I hope your nexr hive is more successful than the last.
Thanks! We hope so too. I used to have bees (a couple of hives) from 2006 to about 2014 or so. They were surprisingly easy to keep and low-maintenance, completely disease and pest free. Then we lost the first hive suddenly one winter and the second hive the next. We still are not sure why. So the restock last year was a bit tentative, with us not knowing for certain if the new hive would succumb to the same cause. Fingers crossed for this year's hive.
Just as a footnote - some years beekeepers suffer a 50% colony loss rate (not all years though). So we are likely to start a second colony very soon and try to get 100% survival rate.
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