Meet my bees

Okay, you can't see them yet but I'll hopefully be able to take some photos of them soon. They arrived today, much earlier than expected. Until today I had been working with an old bee colony from a past experiment. However, it was very old and almost all male (which can't be used in any experiments), so a new one was ordered on Monday for me to use. 

On average, it takes one to two weeks for the colony to arrive. They get shipped from outside of the UK and it takes a while to prepare them and get them sent over. The colony before this one took a whole month, so we were a bit worried that this one would take ages too. Instead, it was the opposite, arriving only three days after ordering! Although it's great that I have them, it did mean that I had quite a stressful day setting up the arena that the bees will forage in. They are now settling in and should be ready for experiments from Monday (not that I have had time to plan any yet!). None have left the box yet (which is how they are transported and contains their hive) and ventured into the arena (where the experiments are carried out) but we think that might be because they're still too cold from the journey over (they are transported at very low temperatures to reduce activity) so hopefully they'll perk up by tomorrow. If not, I'm going to have to find a way to warm them up!