One nice sunny day while Mr B was sailing (crawling) across the Atlantic, I caught F climbing into that crazy space suit.
She’s never done that before. I’m not convinced she knows what she’s doing. This clearly needed close supervision so I followed her up the garden. She took the lid off my bees and she hadn’t even got the smoking tin out of the shed. By now I’m sure she has no idea what she’s doing. She even pulled the big gloves off when she couldn’t untie the strap that holds it all down!
“Dumb woman – don’t you know about the ‘sting in the tail’?”, but she wasn’t listening to me.
A plastic box thing went in the top with some honey inside and some white gooey stuff on top. She said “It’s bee food.” I’ll forgive her for being dumb because she did lift me up so that I could look through the holes in the top board. Some bees wandered out to look at us too.
That was just before it got really, really cold.
With the weather warming up again lots more bees are coming out each day. They are coming back to my beehive with bright orange pollen in their shopping bags. Mr B is back now, and he says that bringing pollen in will make the queen bee start laying eggs again.
I haven’t seen the queen bee yet but apparently she’s bigger than the other bees. She flies for mating shortly after she emerges as an adult bee, but stays indoors the rest of the time. She’s the only one laying eggs, and she makes the smell (called pheromones) that keeps all these bees together and allows them to identify one another as belonging to the same colony.
Mr B says I’ve lots more to learn about the queen bee but that will do for now.
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