Highs & Lows

To be a beekeeper is to roam the hinterland between seer, gumshoe and gambler. You read the runes, stir the entrails, stare slit-eyed at the conflicting evidence, toss the dice and hope your luck will hold

This colony was toying with us - the Joker in the pack. Not quite swarming, but not to be trusted, guilty of suspicious behaviour. We decided to try to provoke a reaction: rearranged their boxes to separate the queen, at the bottom of the pile, from her brood, at the top, inviting the colony to respond

Today we went back to see how the cards had landed. So far, we are still in the game: the queen, fearing she has lost her brood, has settled down to consistent egg-laying. In the brood-nest, fearing they have lost their queen, the bees have raised queen cells - for all the world like a swarming colony. We have fooled them, for now at least, into making a choice

Today we took out the frames with those queen cells and put them in a separate box with some nurse bees where, hopefully, they can be reared to maturity. We unshuffled the pack of boxes back to a conventional, unified arrangement, and hope that we can all now settle down to a less risky life (but we will keep a close eye on them - they could be bluffing!)

I took the picture to show how big hives can sometimes get. As well as the two boxes I have described for the queen and brood, this one has four boxes for honey. In parallel with the excitement of swarms and queen cells, there is a nectar flow going on, and a good week in prospect for the bees to exploit it. We have given them plenty of space in which to stash any new loot

All has fallen well here but, in our other apiary, the strongest colony has contacted an infection called 'Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus'. They are disabled, staggering over the combs like shell-shocked troops, and dying in large numbers. I have seen it before, it is possible for a colony to recover, but this is a particularly nasty case, and even if they bounce back, we can forget about the honey crop I was hoping for, after their roaring start to the season. Hard luck