Copper Bee Apiary

A garden apiary in Whittlesford, Cambridge, UK - honey bees and their beekeeper Hilary van der Hoff.

Queenlessness Revisited

Regular readers (hello Mums!) will be keen to know the status of the Disc Hive, following the untimely loss of Queen Gretchen.

So here's the news: WE HAVE A QUEEN!

A quick look at the central brood frame told me all I needed to know. There was already a large patch of sealed worker brood on each side of the frame, and unsealed brood too. Hooray! The bees have made things right all by themselves, without (or perhaps despite) me.

May Queen Honey's reign be long and prosperous.

Our buzzing house

The Virginia creeper growing on the front of the house is dense with honeybees. The flowers are small, and it's only because the plant buzzes so loudly with bees that I notice it flowering at all. I wonder whether visitors notice the humming of bees around the front door. 

July forage

July is a good time of year for foraging honeybees. Stourbridge Common and Ditton Meadows are within 200 m of the apiary, and the bees are busy there. Here's what we found them foraging on:

Thistles

Thistles are a source of abundant nectar, if the scent of honey in the air around them is anything to go by.

Bramble

It seems early this year - July blackberries! In the second picture (click on the image to expand it), you can see a full pollen basket on the worker's leg.

Himalayan balsam

Spot the honeybee

If you can find the honeybee in this picture, you might be able to see that the back of its thorax is white with pollen from the plant. The bees enter the flowers, stay inside for a couple of seconds, then reverse out.

Copper Bee Apiary

Our house has a leaking roof. I bought the house over 10 years ago, and noticed the leak in the roof soon after. It still leaks today. Rain comes in. Every so often we attempt a repair. Then from time to time we get professional roofers in. No success yet.

Anyway, one day in early June 2015 I was sat thinking about how nice it would be to have a new roof. Perhaps we could redesign it. Perhaps we could have a vaulted glass roof, to let in light so that I could grow a grove of lemon trees in the sitting room. Or perhaps we could have a flat roof and I could put beehives on it. Or a green roof. Or...a copper roof. I very much like copper rooves. I like the metal copper. On the gin terrace, where the apiary began with the first hive - Cedar Hive - being set up, there is a copper rain chain hanging from the gutter to channel rain into a copper oxide glazed bowl beneath.

Imagine, a copper roof, with beehives on it. This was the germ of the idea for a name which, after some thought, became Copper Bee Apiary.

We don't have a copper roof on the house, and the old sloping tile one continues to leak. But I discovered that Thornes sell a copper roof for a beehive. To date, two of my hives have these: Copper Hive and Disc Hive. You can read about the individual hives here, including a photographic time-lapse of the oxidation of the Copper Hive roof.

Writings, images and sound recordings are by the beekeeper unless otherwise indicated. All rights reserved.

Logo artwork © 2015-2020 Susan Harnicar Jackson. All rights reserved.