Today we got a special delivery from Mr McMullan Snr in Belfast.

We opened it with the Primary 1s

The parcel contained:

• blue gloves to help protect our hands when we work with the bees.
• Award winning Furniture polish made from Mr McMullan Snr’s bees wax
• Some of Mr McMullan’s melted bees wax.

We are going to melt down the bees wax further and make our own crayons. We can then use these in the literacy area of the learning zone to make invisible writing!

Thanks Mr McMullan Snr.

We also had some really cold shivering bees today who got caught in the rain and couldn’t fly!

That’s nearly it for the year for the bees.

Hive 1 has enough food and enough bees so should survive the winter.

Hive 2 has now had “bombee dreams” added into it along with the other bees from the nucleus colony and has nearly enough food for the winter.

We need to feed hive 2 and give it one more inspection next week when it isn’t too cold to make sure they have enough bees.

Here are a couple of cool slow motion videos of the bees from yesterday!

Yesterday we were able to find our two new queens and get them marked with a yellow pen.

Yellow shows that they were born in 2017. Next year is red.

Our two new queens are called “Beeyonce 2” and “Bombee Dreams”.

Last week we also took our first honey crop from our bees!

This was a great learning experience for all the children.

The honey will be on sale to the staff of the school first this week and all profits will  go to the Qhubeka charity, which provides bikes to people in Africa in exchange for community work such as collecting litter or planting trees.

To find out more visit http://qhubeka.org/

Here is the last remaining queen cell in our old hive.

Fingers crossed she hatches in the next few days and we have a new queen.

Carbrain Primary 1s took what they had learned from their visit to the bees and used it to make beautiful bee information texts.

They learned a lot and even spelled my name correctly! Thanks again for your enthusiasm!

Today we had visitors from Carbrain Primary school to learn about our busy buzzing bees.

We showed them all the equipment that you need to stay safe when inspecting the bees and made up some food for the bees to eat.

The primary ones watched as we performed an inspection of the new hive and it is full of bees! We are now going to out a super box on the top so that they can start making some delicious honey!

The bees in the old hive are still quite grumpy so we didn’t open it. Hopefully the new queen will hatch next Friday and they will calm down a bit!

We have had a bit of a mare!

The queen in the old hive either never hatched or has died since she hatched.

She could have gotten injured when she was out on her mating flights or she could have gotten lost or eaten by a predator – we will never know.

However, we know that there is no queen in the old hive! This means the bees are unhappy.

We have taken a frame which had eggs and larva in it from the new hive and put it in the old hive to see if the bees will grow a new queen. Watch the video to find out what happened.

There is a massive mystery with the new queen. We don’t know where she is!!! We have watched the video of the bees opening the cell and can’t see her anywhere!

At assembly today the children brainstormed in house groups to try and work out what has happened to her. The children came up with some very clever theories for what has happened.

We need to leave the hive undisturbed until next week before we can take a look and see if she is there so come back next week for a further update!

Today some of the p7s were applying their measuring skills to make up sugar syrup for the new bee hive. This will help them to build new wax to store honey in. This process takes a lot of energy so we feed them to make it quicker for them.

Yesterday, we were inspecting the hive and I noticed that the bees were all surrounding the queen cell and chewing away the wax. This is what they do when the queen is about to hatch and they help her to escape.

Watch the video and see what happens! There is a huge mystery at the end…