To bee or not to bee?

We've been busy little bees this week... no sooner had we got back from Vienna (still can't tell you what we did there because we'd still have to kill you) than we were off again (locally) on a two day sustainable beekeeping course. We think we'd like to keep bees.

We now know a bit more about queens, workers (female, do all the work) drones (male, only useful for mating) and hives, of which there are lots of types.

We also tried on bee suits. Actually not so much 'tried them on' as 'wore them when we met the bees'.

Can you tell who it is yet?

Very fetching, eh? We may be looking at mutual Christmas presents here...

With the hives, you can have uppy downy ones...

or long vaulting horse ones...

We're going to be natural beekeepers. No, that doesn't mean we do it with no clothes on (that's a TOTALLY different kind of beekeeping) but rather that we won't interfere with the bees - we'll just let them get on with what bees do, because they're really rather brilliant at being bees all on their own.

We'll build a hive over the winter (maybe two) then wait for a swarm needing a new home in the spring. We'll then pretty much ignore them for the rest of 2017, just checking that they have enough honey to eat before the winter and, if we're lucky, we might have some spare honey to harvest the following April. We'll plant the right kind of plants (dandelions - YAY, we can grow those!) and cultivate clover in the paddock.

We've decided we'll go for the long vaulting horse type of hive.

Only ours are going to be slightly re-designed...