Radio New Zealand - Te Reo Irirangi o Aotearoa

7 - Hive check-up

Last week we merged a swarm of bees with my original colony, and all went well thanks to Frank Lindsay - he's a commercial beekeeper who guided me through the process and I only got stung once.  Now there is a risk when you merge a swarm with another colony - the danger being the new kids in the hive don't like the resident queen and 'cook' her to death by creating a ball of bees around her and literally cooking her with their body heat – nice!  Life and death in the beehive.

So today David Carleton and I are opening up the hive to check that our queen is alive and well and see how the bees are getting on with producing honey. There’s lots of blossom about at the moment, from clover, to black berry and rengarenga, there’s even still cabbage trees blooming.

I've found myself wandering down to the hive most evenings, it's been neat to see the bees returning laden with white and yellow pollens, they seem so busy and organized. There's been a few bumble bees harassing my girls at the entrance of the hive - the bumble bees are after their honey and they'll rob the hive given half a chance. The guard bees parry the bumbles away; they end up looking drunk and precariously fly home.

After the hive check up I'll ask bee man Nigel Raine if bumble bees and honey bees are related, plus Nigel’s researched the bee’s ability to communicate the location of pollen supplies – with a brain the size of a grass seed, a waggle dance tells the other bees exactly where to go…wish I could do that.

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