Happy Anniversary!

 July 13^th 2011 marks Bee Credible’s first anniversary as beekeepers.  Just a year ago we put our first bees into the top-bar hives – not even the louring skies and intermittent rain could dampen our excitement on that evening.

Although there have been one or two setbacks during the year – not least the bees’ insistence on building comb across the bars rather than along them - both colonies survived the worst winter weather for many years and are still going strong.

During the year we have added five more hives and, with the success of the Bee Spoke Bid we are ready to expand further – adding more hives and getting more people involved.

So, charge your glasses with some suitable honey-based concoction and make a toast to the bees and a year of success for Bee Credible!

Hive inspection, 2nd july

Some of us

Just before

Hive inspection

Two weeks ago the group purchased a new five-frame nuc of bees for a national hive. The nuc came on frames with foundation but our intention is to keep these bees without foundation, so the brood box was filled with empty frames.

Today was the day to open up hive and see how they are doing.

Fantastic! We saw the Queen. And then we lifted a frame without foundation and to our delight the bees had built new comb within the frame, including a small teardrop shaped extension

We then moved on to check one of the top bar hives. In theory bees should build comb along the bars in a teardrop shape.

And sometimes they do this by the book

However, the bees don’t always read the books

And, for reasons best known to themselves, decide to build across the bars.

This is something we have encountered in all of our top bar hives and we are working to modify our top bars in order to rectify this. It doesn’t appear to be a problem for the bees, but it does hinder hive inspection.

THANK YOU

Bee Spoke Todmorden has been awarded The Jubilee People's Million award.

A massive THANK YOU to all those who picked up the phone and voted for the bees.

And a big thank you to all the project partners and people of Todmorden who pulled out all the stops to promote the bee spoke project.

http://www.peoplesmillions.org.uk/2011-finalists/yorkshire/bee-spoke-todmorden