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As Autumn draws near, we have enjoyed getting the last of the season's honey from our bee hives. How blessed are we all that we can enjoy the hard work of so many little busy souls?
Mind you we have paid for the privilege just a little with the many vicious stings from one very aggressive hive! Advice is that one should re-queen hives that are overly aggressive, especially if the queen is getting old. Re-queening has been a whole new interesting journey in our 'bee' learning. (We are relatively new in the world of bees.) To re-queen one must first 'seek and destroy' the old queen. Sounds a bit ghastly and fairly easy, but looking down into thousands of buzzy bodies looking for just one special one- slightly slimmer, longer, with shorter wings etc. etc. proved almost impossible. Until we were saved by an experienced and knowledgeable friend. Her expert eyes spotted the elusive one for us. That bit being done, one has to hope that the queen bee breeder person actually has a queen available. It is apparently latish in the season for getting queens.... We were fortunate and our new queen, complete with a distinguishable bright pink dot on the back of her thorax is in her beedom laying lots of hopefully more friendly bees. Who knew that queen bees are marked according to the they were born? I guess pink is as good as red! BY TORBAY BEEKEEPERS · SEPTEMBER 11, 2016 The international queen marking colours code was created to allow beekeepers to mark their queens using a code which all other beekeepers, wherever they were in the world, would understand. The colours are used to show which year the queen was born in, they also help to enable beekeepers to spot the queen when doing a hive inspection. Year ending in Colour Mnemonic 1 or 6 White Will 2 or 7 Yellow You 3 or 8 Red Rear 4 or 9 Green Good 5 or 0 Blue Bees? |
