The porter bee escape had almost worked. There were a few bees left in the super I wanted to take off, so I used a trick that works well for small scale hobby beekeepers who are only trying to take one super. I had a spare super with no frames in it in a wheelbarrow about 10m from the beehive, with a spare covering board over it. I removed the frames one by one from the super on the beehive, shook them to get the bees off, rushed them over to the barrow and put them in the empty box, then scarpered promptly with the barrow. I only had to evict one bee from the kitchen. Obviously if you are keeping bees on a commercial scale this is not tenable, but I believe professional beekeepers have other tools to help them, like chemical smoke to drive the bees down out of the supers.
I have just finished extracting the honey. It is dark and strong flavoured, as any crop here in later summer is. There are a couple of large chestnut trees in the wood, and chestnut honey is dark, so there's probably a fair bit of that in mine. I'm sure the honey was ready for harvest, as the bees had almost finished capping it, but after a day in the kitchen with the aga it was extremely runny, trickling down the outside of the comb as I cut the cappings off, and it went through the sieve almost like water, whereas the previous lot clogged the sieve and was slow to run through. This dark honey often stays liquid for a long time before granulating in the jar.
The inspection of the number two hive was inconclusive. There were two queen cells only, no eggs, and the bees had begun to store nectar in the brood area suggesting they aren't expecting more eggs to be laid any time soon. The bees were extremely buzzy, although they are normally placid, and I went through the brood box as briskly as I could while knowing the bees weren't going to give me the chance of a second look. I didn't see the queen and am not sure if she is still there, so I left the queen cells, as I don't want to drive this colony queenless. It was an inconlusive end to the swarming season, and shows how helpful the artificial swarming method would have been, if I hadn't messed it up last week.
The number three hive, that lost its queen over the winter and made a new one from eggs out of another colony, had built up strongly and urgently needed more space, whereas a couple of weeks ago they weren't using a third of the brood box. I went and fetched them a super, feeling very pleased with myself that I'd remembered a queen excluder to go with it, and then realised when I began a quick inspection of the frames that I was wearing the wrong glasses to see eggs easily. Fortunately it was good light and the hive has new clean frames, so I managed. The bees were very quiet throughout, which shows that the pissy behaviour of the number two hive was not just because it was a hot and fairly humid morning.
The swarm are still in their nuc box, and I gave them some more sugar. And that's the drama over for another summer. I can't do anything more to stop my own bees swarming without risking sending them queenless. I might pick up another swarm. There might be some more honey, depending on swarming, weather and nectar flow. But that's basically it for now. Next will be autumn feeding, varroa treatment and woodpecker-proofing, but that's not for a while.
In the garden I have been mostly cutting the lawn edges. There are a lot of edges in the back garden, just because it is a large garden. I keep them to a minimum by having a few big borders, not lots of little ones, and by keeping to clean sweeping lines and not niggly wiggly in-and-out ones. With everything else there's been to do, some edges had got very shaggy indeed, and as I trimmed I told myself I must cut them more regularly. It's a quicker job when they aren't too long. I use hand shears and not a strimmer, which no professional gardener would do, because I don't get on with strimmers. Can't start them, don't like the noise, don't want to risk chopping the legs off the toad population.
The treatment of the edges influences the mood of a garden. I try to keep clean lines, because curves that are pinched and wrong, and lines that are meant to be straight but wobble, are annoying. I'm not too worried if they get a little bit whiskery and romantic, because so is the lawn half the time. I don't mind a few shrubs growing out over the lawn and killing off bits of grass, as long as they don't impede circulation, because that looks relaxed and abundant whereas faced-up chopped off shrubs look depressing and car-parky. I remember being told at Writtle that in Regency gardens edges were deliberately left long (I haven't gone and checked that fact because it's late and I can't be bothered now). There was a garden in Essex, very fine in many ways but no longer open to the public due to the owner's ill-health, that had desperately sharp lawn edges. They were cut with scalpel precision and a neat gully carved between the lawn and border, and no plant was ever allowed to stray over the divide. It was a widely acclaimed garden done with skill and knowledge and with much to admire, but I didn't warm to it myself, and it was largely the edges that put me off. They were very...cold. I couldn't imagine walking around a corner and finding myself face-to-face with the god Pan in that garden.
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