I like my lawn to buzz.....

Tony thinks I'm cracked.
'Look at it' he exclaims, looking across the lawn '... it's full of clover'.

Spot on there pal. Job done.

I know that most people will choose a monoculture of grass as their ideal lawn. Moss killer. Worm killer. Weed and feed. Shaved closer than David Cameron's face. Well, that's not my idea of lawn heaven. I garden for biodiversity: I like my lawn to buzz.

These photos show you why.

Today, our recently reintroduced honey bees were very evident on the clover. But also carder bees, red-tailed and white-tailed bumble bees were also stuffing their pollen baskets.

Kris gifted us 'A Sting in the Tale: my adventures with Bumblebees' by Dave Goulson and I'm reading it at the moment. It's as stuffed full of interesting bee facts as bombus pascuorum's pollen basket. Here's one:

• A queen bumblebee may use her own weight in sugar each day to incubate her brood of baby bees which necessitates her visiting up to 6000 flowers.

I predict several re-readings of this new natural history classic.

Our bees need as much help as we can give them: I'm glad the lawn is buzzing.

honey.....

The plight of the honeybee has been written about quite frequently over the past couple of years.

Veroa mite has killed most 'wild' (or feral) populations of honeybees and changing land use has removed many of the flowers that bees need. Add to this the contentious issue that is the use of neonicotinoid pesticides by farmers that attacks the bees' central nervous system and you see why they have a problem.

We were delighted, then, when our dear friends Linda and Trev first took up beekeeping and then placed their hives in the corner of our site we now call 'The Cordwood Apiary'. There are now four colonies of honeybees although, due to technical, beekeeping jiggerypokery, they are housed in eight hives of various sizes..... It has been explained!! Linda blogs about her bees on 'Bees and beyond' and it's fascinating to catch up with the work needed to allow bees to thrive.

But it's the honey we're interested in!! And it's surprising to know that despite an appalling April, there is now honey travelling from the Cordwood hives to the jars of 'Trevor's Honey'. Early nectar sources include the nectar collected from locally abundant oilseed rape, but there is a natural hiatus in nectar production after the initial spring nectar flow so further honey extraction will probably stop for a while. If conditions are right, there is then a high summer flow, so another harvest is eagerly awaited later in the year.

I'm now an official (unpaid) agent and carry jars of said honey if you want to buy some!!

water

One of the best ways of attracting wildlife to the garden is by providing water. And if your garden is too small for a pond, you can still help the thirsty.

Any shallow container will do.

Here we have used part of a broken terracotta plant pot. We all know that birds use the water for drinking and for bathing. But many other creatures depend on the water we provide. The footprint (right) is from a grey squirrel that we had disturbed as it drank.

A greenhouse tray placed in the sun and filled with pebbles and then topped up with water has proved irresistible to honeybees that constantly buzzed too and fro from the water filled tray and their hives.

Honeybees need water for their own survival, but they also need it to dilute stored honey before feeding it to their larvae. The intense activity today suggests thriving colonies.

Honeybees also spread water on the surface of the honeycomb to cool the nest by evaporation on hot days.

An absorbent carpet had become puddled with dew and rainwater and was equally attractive to the bees. Slightly less attractive - but effective!

These containers do need regular attention and require topping up during periods of dry weather.

honeybees in february

The weather forecast suggested heavy rain on Wednesday followed by very warm temperatures later in the week. The much needed heavy rain did not arrive but thin and measly showers came in its place.


The bees were happier with the sunny weather. Here's one of the hives with its anti-woodpecker wire cover. The bees pass through the mesh easily and were doing so yesterday afternoon when we visited.


Trev showed me how to 'heft' the hives - lift one edge to judge the weight of honey remaining inside. This is a crucial time of year for bees and depleted honey reserves lead to weakened colonies. All three of the Cordwood colonies felt heavy when 'hefted' and a quick look inside each hive showed that the lozenge of 'fondant' resting beneath the metal cover had not been depleted. Fondant is given by beekeepers to supplement honey reserves should these prove insufficient.


The bees were returning with pollen - sometimes orange. Pollen intake indicates that the hive contains 'brood' - bee larvae. The source of this early season pollen could have been garden flowers such as snowdrops or cyclamen coum. Or it could have been gorse flowering in the quarry heathland nearby. Our new woodland garden is not established enough to provide bee sustenance but I was pleased to see a bee nuzzling into one of our newly planted Christmas Box (sarcacocca confusa) flowers.

The main omission on our site is water. Insects and birds need supply of water and we need to build this into our garden schemes.


An encouraging start to the new bee year.

honeybees in winter

Our cold spell continues.


And up at Corwood, the beehives shiver.

Here you see the hives wrapped in a protective mesh coat to prevent hungry woodpeckers hammering through the sides of the hive in winter to get a tasty and nourishing meal of bee larvae and honey. Devastating for the colony and expensive for the beekeeper.

This cold weather seems the antithesis of everything a bee should need ... but at this time of year, this is exactly what they want. Within the hive, the bees will be clustered into a tight ball, conserving heat and saving energy. They do not hibernate but become torpid in cold weather, slowing their metabolism.

Apart from woodpeckers, the enemies of bees in winter are damp and mild weather.

In damp weather, disease can take hold and weaken the colony, sometimes fatally.

Mild weather encourages the bees to become active, going out on unproductive foraging flights and exhausting their food stores of honey that will be needed to kick start the colony when spring arrives properly.

The hives have each had a feed of sugar to supplement the honey stores, but so far, this hasn't been touched.

With luck, the cold weather will keep the bees dormant for several more weeks until the early spring flowers and their nourishing nectar will begin to show.

preparing for cordoned apples .. and improving the apiary

Steadily working through the never ending list of jobs.

I've set my sights on creating a cordon fruit hedge that will separate the orchard from the planned vegetable garden.

We already have ten cordon apple and pear trees at our allotment and hope to transplant these in the coming weeks while the plants are still dormant.

I'm working across the twenty two metres of the line of the planned hedge with my mattock, removing roots and creating a wide band of cleared earth.
Halfway there!! Hope to finish this part tomorrow.

Next week I hope to dig out post holes, concrete tannalised posts in and I might even get to digging a trench that will be lined with compost and a little well-rotted manure, ready for the transplanted trees.

Trev's job list is different and he's clearing  away rampant hedge in the apiary area at the top of the site. The brown earth shows how far across the neglected hedge had encroached.

This wider, cleared area will allow Linda and him to do some technical jiggerypokery that he did explain about artificial swarms. Apparently you can prevent bees from pouring energy into swarming and setting up new colonies by this practice.

You'd better watch this space or follow Linda's site 'Bees and Beyond' for more clarity over the coming weeks and months!!

honey bees in may

We currently have one hive on site. Linda and Trev are the beekeepers and did a routine check yesterday. The bees were remarkably calm, allowing those of us who were unmasked to approach the hive to within a couple of feet for a close look at what was happening.

The colony has now doubled in size to around 20,000 bees. At its maximum it will have a population of 50,000. Observation of bees entering the hive suggested around half were returning with filled corbiculas - or pollen sacs.

The colony is still building itself up, and so no 'supers' have been put on as an extra storey above the hive for the bees to  fill with honey. The energy of the bees needs to be directed to building a thriving colony. Pollen is the food given to the bee larvae: pollen entering the hive suggests lots of baby bees or 'brood'.

Here we see a frame being inspected.


The upper, white cells contain honey and have been covered with a wax cap.



The orange cells in the middle of the frame contain protein rich pollen that will be used to feed the larvae.


This has been a exceptional spring with blossom continuing unbroken from February. Hawthorn blossom is ending but our lime trees are fragrant and will be a good source of nectar for the bees. Lime honey is highly prized.

It has been a good year so far to be a honey bee!

a second swarm

Now seven weeks at least since rain.


Blossom billows from hedgerows and the temperatures are in the early twenties.

Perhaps this explains the exceptional behaviour of the bees. The original hive had one swarm which was collected successfully and (after one attempt at abscondment) is now settled in its own hive. Very surprising then, when the original hive produced a second swarm 'as big as a football' according to Trev.

So, the area set aside on site for hives was hastily brought into action and here, our intrepid beekeepers and without ceremony, bang the cardboard box holding the swarm so that the bees fall into their new home.

Too early to say how successful this new colony will be, but the site appears perfect for their needs.

Follow Linda on bees and beyond.

swarm

March was the driest for fifty years. April , famed for its showers, has been almost as dry. The weather at the weekend was reminiscent of high summer. No nasty frosts have turned up to spoil the party and so trees heave with blossom.

Little surprise then that honey bees should venture out to swarm in such fine weather.

So, here's the result - two hives where last week there was only one!

Congratulations to Trev and Linda for catching the swarm in time. Follow their story on Linda's blog 'Bees and Beyond'.

late bees on phacelia

Linda reports very active bees over at Bees and Beyond. Her hive is rammed full of bees with lots of evidence of young bees - a good sign that the hive may survive winter and get off to a vigorous and productive start in the spring.

We are in mid October and the sun is getting paler and the nights cooler. This is the time of year when gardeners are tempted to tidy or think that the gardening season is over.

As our first early potatoes finished in June we sowed phacelia. This is partly because we hate bare ground but also because we wanted to provide a food source for bees in the autumn.

Today was a mixed day with sunshine and showers. But through it all, the phacelia was alive with honeybees. Pictured could be one of Linda's bees on the phacelia flowers today.

'I love it when a plan comes together' Hannibal Heyes - The 'A' Team.

honeybees

The allotment is filled with thriving plants. And borage thrives like few others and is glorious at the moment.

We encourage borage seedlings to grow around the edge of plots or in the mass of the potato haulm because few plants are as attractive to bees as borage.

There has been a lot written about the fall in the number of bees. Both bumble bees and honeybees have witnessed a decline.

But it looks as though our friend the honeybee is fighting back!

From my quite unscientific survey today, honeybees are thriving. They were most active in the morning sunshine and borage was their main destination.

Over at bees and beyond Linda gives an account of her first bee hive. Our allotment is well within striking distance for her bees. Are the bees I am seeing from her hive? We know of no other bee hives locally, so unless there is a maverick bee keeper who is keeping his/her activities quiet, or there is a colony of wild bees locally - they could be hers.

helping honey bees

A recurring theme of this blog is the decline of insects. A tour around our small garden on a sunny summers day in June recorded seven bumble bees. Our garden is stuffed with simple flowers guaranteed to get bees busy.

Over on bees and beyond I'm waiting with excitement to read Linda's story of the arrival of her first colony of bees.

She has had her queen 'Birgette' arrive and a small colony of attendants.

Over the next year, with luck and good husbandry, the colony should grow to 50,000 bees. That's a mighty lot of good pollination, pots of delicious honey and swarms of fun too.

Follow their story.