At the Hive Entrance.

It’s only 5 weeks until our protégés take their Bee Master exam and today was their first opportunity to look at the practical side of it. There’s a lot to learn and not much time.

We had a meeting to discuss the timing of both the start of our courses and the taking of exams before the trainees arrived for their session.

Our courses have been starting in the autumn, it’s a good time, you get familiar with the principles of feeding and disease control without the scary side of opening a box containing fifty thousand creatures trying to defend both the store of winter food, and the larvae that are going to provide the bees that will bring the colony through to the spring; this defence instinct is combined with weaponry and a group intelligence sufficient to kick the crap out of a timid novice. It comes as a surprise to realise that, while an individual bee is pretty stupid, an entire colony is quite bright.
In the spring, when you eventually start looking into a hive, there may only be ten thousand bees without much to defend and, if you chose a nice day, most of the residents are hard at work out in the fields. Ideally, the tyro would have eighteen months from first seeing a colony to taking the exam; this forgets the reality that he wants bees - and he wants them now; while we want him to obtain locally bred bees from us and our policy is to supply those bees only to qualified beekeepers, he is likely to go for the immediacy of imported bees from a commercial supplier.

In the practical part of the exam, the beekeeper has to open a hive and show confidence and competence while explaining, unprompted, what his is seeing and doing, and - it starts here at the hive entrance. So what can he see?

The queen was alive and well up to seven days ago as a bee is arriving with a full, yellow pollen basket from which food will be made for the larvae; the pollen is probably from the gorse that’s in flower in the area, it is the right colour.

Bees are also arriving with no visible load, they are, presumably, carrying nectar; there is a puddle in the apiary that they will go to if they need to dilute stored honey for consumption and there were no bees there, so they must be consuming income and not savings.

In spite of the small entrance, there is no congestion so there aren’t a lot of bees in the colony. Bearing in mind the weather and the time of day, not to mention the behaviour of other colonies in the apiary, all available bees should be out foraging and the entrance should be much busier than this.

There is old staining on the front of the hive (which needs cleaning off) where bees have been incontinent during the winter. They seem to be ok now, but with the long wet winter this sort of problem is common.


These nuggets of information weren’t picked up by the students, so there’s a lot of work to be done. We have put about twenty five through the exams in previous years with none of them failing to pass with distinction, so it’s too soon to give up hope. I'm sure that we will have a group of happy bunnies in five weeks time.