Yesterday we inspected the bees at the lake, these are the hives that we moved not so long ago. Moving hives is a bit like moving all the students in one school to another school where everything is different. The bees need time to find their way around, first they have to re-orientate to the new location. We placed sticks in front of our relocated hives so the foraging bees don’t just take wing and get lost because they don’t know the new hive location is, instead they take the time to have a look and get their bearings before they go out.

Then they have to investigate the entire area in a three Km radius from the hive, they need to find where there are sources for water, nectar, pollen and tree sap, this would have been tough on my bees because of the drought, I haven’t seen a dandelion for AGES so I was worried that they would be starving. Plus it’s a really windy location which will also affect the bees.

BUT! The hives are doing very well, they had plenty of stores, we saw nearly every queen, they all had brood (baby bees in cocoons) lava and eggs, they looked quite happy! We put varroa strips in the hives for their Autumn/Winter treatment and put two of the hives up on vented bases which should make them even happier, it was good to see the bees doing so well at our new home!

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Bee brood or babies!

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Pollen, bees feed their babies with this.

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Cross combing, when bees build bits of comb in weird ways!