There’s the Queen.

I forgot to take my camera to the bee meeting today; not that it mattered, I was too busy demonstrating and playing mine host to take any pictures. Tam, was wielding a camera and posted a DVD to me which arrived today (Tuesday); he had converted his pictures into a movie format slide show, complete with a sound track (illegal) of Louis Armstrong singing “It’s a Wonderful World.” I strongly suspect that the dear old fella doesn’t know how to copy files from camera onto his computer, he certainly doesn’t know how to attach them to an email. That said, we’re very fond of him and help him whenever we know he has problems with his bees; his biggest problem is that he doesn’t like to ask help. All the pictures are screen grabs and so you must forgive the quality.
 
The blip is of El Presidento, aka Janes11, showing the queen to the young lady in the very small bee suit. In fact, while I was explaining to the more experienced of the group my philosophies, what I was doing and what I was finding, EP was grabbing frames from me, parading them around to the less experienced and showing them the interesting bits: eggs are the first thing to look for, they tell you that the queen is both alive and well but, at half a millimetre long and at the bottom of a hole (the wax cell), they’re rather difficult to see; then, if you can see the queen, that’s a bonus.
 
The extras show what happens if you stand in the flight path of the bees and what beekeepers do best: stand around drinking tea, eating cakes and gossiping. It was a good meeting, although I do say so myself.