Here is the follow up to part one where you can see how the old hive is getting on building new queens and how the old queen is getting on in the new hive!

Article 29 – Education must develop the talents and personality of all children to the fullest.

Article 24 – every child has the right to a clean and safe environment.

We have been working hard learning how to inspect the bees.

We have learned about Safety equipment, tools and how to handle the bees gently.

We also know what to look for when we inspect the hive.

Yesterday we performed an artificial swarm with the bees to stop them swarming. This means that we now have three hives!

Here is a video to show you how we did it

https://vimeo.com/332558156

Article 24

every child has the right to good health. Governments should ensure children have good healthcare, clean water, nutritious food and a clean environment.

We performed a check on the bee hives today and we have some interesting news.

One of the hives is doing so well that we need to stop it from swarming.

Swarming is the natural way that bees reproduce. The queen leaves with half of the bees to set up a new hive and the other half stay behind and grow a new queen.

We don’t want this to happen because then we would lose all of workers who make all the honey!

We are going to perform an artificial swarm which is where we remove the queen from the hive and put her in a new hive with a few of the bees to look after her. She will then start to lay eggs and build up a new hive. The old hive will notice she has left within 15 minutes because they can no longer smell the queen. They will then start to create new queens. We will choose the biggest and strongest queen in the new hive to survive and hopefully she gets mated.

For a video on how this works click below!

Keep checking the blog in the next few weeks to see what happens with this process!

Today we opened the bee hives for the first time this year and were delighted to see that they are both alive and well

one hive in particular is very strong and full of bees so hopefully we will get a great crop of honey this year.

The bees have stored lots of pollen from the spring flowers.

they have stored lots of honey.

here is a video of what we did today