Hive of activity

A ball of honey bees is removed from Val’s buddleia

- Val Bourne

SUMMER came late to Cold Aston this year, as it probably did for many you. One of the first warm days here caused great excitement, when a football-sized clump of honeybees took up residence on our buddleia one afternoon. Fortunately, we have two beekeepers in our village and they came to our rescue. They donned their bee suits and began to snip away at my buddleia and, very slowly and gently, lowered the teardrop-shaped ball of bees into a brood box, also known as a nuc.

Smoke, which subdues the bees, was used sparingly, and every manoeuvre was very slow and steady. Who knows, perhaps the smoke calms beekeepers, too? We couldn’t see the queen bee, because she was in the middle of the cluster, but she was probably a newly emerged virgin queen. We also learnt that our football-sized clump wasn’t a prime swarm. A prime swarm, apparently, contains some 20,00030,000 bees, and it occurs when one already mated queen leaves with half the workers.