Cav's Been Photoshopped.

Friday is not a good blip day, the bulk of our routine is centred on the weekly shop for ourselves and Mrs Merlin.

Anyway, today was a little different in that I had work to do at the apiary, my protégé had noticed just before going on holiday (doesn't he realise that, like gardeners, beekeepers can't afford to go away?) that his charges were intent on reproduction. A bee colony is classed as a super-organism, a single honey bee is not viable, the minimum population from which a colony can recover is probably about a thousand; it reproduces by swarming, a process that involves the queen leaving the hive and taking about half of the colony with her; she leaves behind the remaining bees and, most importantly, a number of pupating queens. The beekeeper's duty is to pre-empt the occurrence.

The time was appropriate to use the method devised by George Demaree 130 years ago; the general principle is to remove the bulk of the brood, that is the eggs, larvae and pupae from the queen and put it at the top of the hive, the queen stays at the bottom with the remainder of the brood while the honey stores go in the middle. The space that was originally occupied by the brood is now available for the queen to fill with eggs (at a rate of up to a thousand a day), that should keep the bees too busy to swarm.

This is not guaranteed to work; before swarming, the queen goes on a diet, she has to lose weight so that she can fly with the swarm; this means that she can't lay any more eggs until she has bulked up a bit. If the diet has begun, then the beekeeper has to create an artificial swarm instead - a story best kept for another day.

The operation kept me too busy to take a bee related picture but, as luck would have it, I noticed this magazine in the food emporium. I looked at the cover pic and thought, "Cav wouldn't carry a bike that way, he'd get chain grease over his lovely white jersey." Then I noticed the chain was on the wrong side of the bike; for what-ever reason, the publisher has chosen to print a mirror image of the original.