My belief that I had caught the dark bees at the last inspection before they swarmed may have been premature. I felt uneasy before opening the hive, seeing only lackadaisical activity at the door, and no signs of foragers bringing in pollen, and my suspicions were further aroused as soon as I lifted the crown board from the top super, and saw that they'd brought in virtually nothing more since last time. Although looking on the bright side they hadn't taken what was there. There were no eggs or uncapped brood in the brood box, but three of what looked worryingly like emergency queen cells. An emergency queen cell looks almost like a normal queen cell, but a bit smaller and build out from the comb at a slightly odd angle. They are made when a colony finds itself without queen or queen cell, and hastily converts a larva originally intended to be a worker bee into a queen. They may or may not produce a good and viable queen, depending on the age of the larva chosen.
I left them to it, putting a clearer board underneath the top super to clear it of bees, in preparation for taking the honey off in a couple of days. I shall be sorry in a way if I've lost them, since they are tough little bees with a great will to live, on the other hand they also have a powerful urge to swarm. This is their third season with me, and if I succeed in harvesting one half full super of honey that will be the first crop I've had from them. They turned up as a late swarm, and last year they were just starting to look as though they might do something halfway useful when they swarmed again, taking the contents of their super with them. I am puzzled there are still so many bees left, however, and not really quite sure what is going on. The books and lectures make it sound so much more cut and dried than it seems half the time in real life, like those neat pruning diagrams in books that look nothing like the burgeoning mass of vegetation that greets you when you go out into the garden, secateurs and saw in hand.
The golden bees are still not preparing to swarm, and have suddenly started trying much harder. Both supers were almost full, and they were storing nectar in the brood frames, whereas at the last inspection they'd done next to nothing in two weeks. I gave them a third super, hoping the temporary lack of space for stores wouldn't trigger them into swarming when they hadn't yet.
On the edge of the deck in the back garden I found a female stag beetle. I didn't touch her, and the next time I looked she had dropped down on to the grass. The sighting was very close to where last year I found a dead one, which a naturalist friend of a friend identified for me as a female which had probably laid eggs, given the wear on its hind legs. Adult stag beetles don't live very long, after spending years as grubs. In fact, they mate, lay some eggs to make more grubs, and that's about it. I reported the sighting to the friend's friend, who thanked me for the info but said she didn't keep records, and the people to notify were the people's trust for endangered species. I duly did so, and expect to see the friend's friend at next month's wildlife fair at the Chatto Gardens. This will be held on 21 August, and I see that the beekeepers are still not included in the details of the event on the garden's website, although we are supposed to be going.
While inspecting the bees I saw a hornet on the grass, and stamped on it. Hornets prey on honey bees, and are to be discouraged around the apiary, although I know they have their useful place in the ecology of the countryside. How human beings attach values to nature. Be a hornet and a threat to my bees (a wild species but treated as livestock) and I will stamp on you. Be a stag beetle and I will stare at you reverently, and start sending out e-mails about you to comparative strangers.
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