Mr Green got us a fish eye lens for the iphone, so we can get up close a near to the bees!

First of all we found BEEYONCE super easy because of the white dot. We watched her, expecting her to lay eggs, however, we think she has stopped laying eggs now and is getting ready to relax over the winter. She will start laying more eggs in the new year.

We also got up close footage of the pollen which the bees store. This is their only source of protein and fats.

Finally, we have some up close footage of the bees running around.

Finally, The Primary 3 children were creating the last food for the year that we are giving the bees. They mixed 2 litre of water with 2 KG of sugar and then we went out to feed them!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Well done!

Today was Roald Dahl day and we had a Grand Master Witch and George so they decided to make a potion for the bees!

They mixed 1 Litre of water with Sugar (plus some mice, children’s snot, toe nails, toothpaste and belly button fluff!)

Hopefully the bees don’t end up the same size as the chickens in George’s Marvellous Medicine.

Today we were able to find and mark BEEYONCE.

John, our bee trainer, was able to help us find her because he is a very experienced beekeeper and then he trapped her and marked her with a white dot.

Finally, we applied a treatment of Apiguard which is a varroa treatment. The gel contains a chemical called “thymol” which the bees don’t like but doesn’t harm them. They carry it out of the hive, killing the varroa mites which live on their bodies along the way. Hopefully this will kill most of the varroa mites in the hive and ensure that they can make it through the winter.

This week P6/7 were taking their turn to clean the feeder for the bees and to clean the floor of the bee hive.

Next week we will be treating the hive for varroa mites and we need the floor to be perfectly clean so that we can count how many mites fall in a week.

we fed the bees a sugar solution made of 1kg sugar and 1 litre of water.

It has been very wet recently so they will not have had much food from the flowers!

This morning we removed the board from the bottom of the bee hive to inspect for varroa mites.

This is how the board looked!

The varroa mites are very small but they have a distinctive shape and little legs which poke out the front.

In total, we counted about 30, which over a week makes for a daily drop of less than 5.

This is okay, however, we will still give them a treatment of “Apiguard” and count the amount of mites that drop then.