'I'm a Queen bee, baby, buzzin' around your hive!'

Keith rang me the day before yesterday to ask if I still wanted to join him when he went to inspect some of his bee hives today.  I had asked him some time ago if I could come and take some pictures to record some of a working day in the life of a beekeeper.  Keith said that he wouldn't be too pressured by time and the weather was good, so how could I refuse.

He took over the family's honey production from his father about twenty years ago and has been building it up ever since.  The family owns the Stancombe Beech Farm Shop just outside the village of Bisley in Gloucestershire where I have been taking pictures for many years.  Keith hopes to create a website for the honey business and I have offered my photographs to illustrate the whole process of keeping bees and how the honey is prepared for his customers.

We drove to three sites in the Severn Vale where he keeps groups of about twelve hives in small fenced enclosures to prevent badgers getting at them on the edge of farmland.  Keith has lots of these sites dotted all over the county by arrangement with farmers, so caring for them all is a full time business.  Today he wanted to check on the queen bees in each hive and whether they were likely to swarm soon.

I knew very little about how bee colonies work, so I feel very privileged to have Keith explaining the intricate details of their life cycles and what he has to do at the different stages.  I was given a fully protective beekeeper's suit so that I could get up close when he took the hives apart and did his complicated checking on the amazing life to be found inside.

I will assemble a range of pictures showing the details and put them on a Flickr gallery soon, but I have taken rather a lot of pictures which will need careful selection.  I have chosen this picture showing one of the queen bees with the remnants of a white marking that Keith painted on the back of its body last year so that he could easily find it in future. In other hives he found new queens which he briefly removed to check them before adding a new white marker and then replacing them in the hive.  You can see that the queen has a much longer body than the workers, and the drones, and is usually surrounded by a group of attendants who look after its every need.  In fact the queen is unable to do anything other than produce eggs relentlessly.  I now want to learn more about the complexities of the bee hive and how its organisation is managed by the colony.

Some of my pictures were of the beautiful patterns and wonderfully varied colours of the pollen in the honeycombs.  Other parts of the hive have new cells with tiny white grubs of bees growing in them.  Keith pointed out several cells where we could see the bee breaking through the seal of the waxy cell with its mandibles and emerging into the wider world.  I might have blipped that as an image but there were so many wonderful sights to choose from.  I will try to upload the Flickr gallery as soon as possible.

So I must thank Keith for such a wonderful and fun day, and I just wish I could remember everything he told me, but I can't!  Soon I will film the next part of the business, which is the separation of the honey from the combs that is done back at the Farm Shop premises, and then the packaging of the honey into the jars.  But that will be a few weeks away.


Here is my new Flickr gallery showing some of my pictures of Keith working with the bees.  I hope you might enjoy this glimpse into the inner workings of bee hives, and the work of the man who looks after them.