Novice Beekeeper

Today's principle task was to participate in my first cut out of a wild bee colony. Leading the extraction was my bee mentor Warren Bee and his neighbour, also experienced extractor, Dave. Well, the colony was hiding in a wall in an abandoned dairy building. Two things straight up to assault the senses, the smell of rear poo (and dust) and a vast number of dead bees. In a north facing wall below the kitchen sink, these bees head cooked in hot weather. The process was to remove all the internal fittings and linings, remove comb and suck up as many bees as possible. Good comb was saved for honey extraction, old comb was trashed. Sucking up the bees was done using a little vacuum cleaning drawing bees through a filtered hive box especially designed for the job. It took about 3.5 hours. I never got stung, so I liked them all. Hopefully, of those that survive this process, they will have a brighter future than their old buddies. PS. As it happens I went to my mentor's yard ...

I took my first tentative steps back into beekeeping in December 2019. As anyone on the world would recall, this was the worst summer on record in Australia. We had raging bushfires everywhere, on the back of am extended drought. We humans were doing it tough, but the bees were probably suffering more. Living on an acreage, I had no intention of ontrpdicong bees until the heat settled and the trees began recovering. Fortunately, my mum lived on Newcastle by the beach, so I had a Plan B. I was actually buying this first hive for my sister, she'd done a short course on beekeeping and is my mother's primary carer. She needed a break, but not wanting to load her with more work, I planned on tending the bees and let her enjoy their company and may be some honey. I searched Gumtree for bees and discovered several locals flogging off "nucs" for around $200. A "nuc" is a baby hive, usually a single  small box with just  5 frames. (Most hives have either 8 or 10 f...