Alternative title: why choose the easy route, when there’s a whole slippery K2 you could scale instead …

This bee keeping journey has taken a WHOLE new twist. It’s found a mountain range and decided to don crampons, helmet and axe, and climb, rather than journey smoothly around and onwards. Here’s me holding on the coat tails of mother nature’s billowing and omnipresent cloak, eyes tight shut, hoping things will play out to a happy end, in spite of my good but ultimately misguided intentions.

The story so far…

The Old queen flew and took half the workers,

The remaining workers, jobless and bored filled the entire brood box with honey,

We all waited, and waited…. no new brood appeared; workers kicked around, guzzling nectar and honey like a bunch of daytime drunks waiting for the next lockdown,

We introduced a new beautiful, curvaceous Slovanian queen… they all seemed to fall in love with her (we certainly did!)

New little eggs appeared, slowly filling up the emptied brood frames; we got excited! (no Slovenian queen spotted but slight niggling doubt pushed aside as, hey, there’s new eggs, so she’s surely just hiding…)

And then this….

A couple weeks ago I strolled down for my weekly ‘hello and how are you?’ taking in the warm dried hay, the scent of mallow and a blue sky decorated with swooping, feeding swallows… all very halcyon, tranquil in heart and mind. Flipping over and zipping up the hood of my bee suit and giving a gentle huff of the smoker I began to remove the layers of the hive down to brood chambers. No Slovenian queen to be seen anywhere.

Feeling somewhat unsettled, I did one more search…and there, sauntering around on frame no. 2, was a HUGE bottomed queen, blonde, brassy, beautiful and a worker bee’s equivalent to Diana Dors.

Oh you fickle worker bees! Stroking, fluffing, feeding this swaggering new queen.

And OH you murderous tart! Why didn’t you show yourself earlier?! AND WHERE DID YOU HIDE THE BODY?

It’s been 2 weeks since I found the new queen, and we’ve both calmed down a bit now, she and I.  She’s busy laying, and to be honest I’m just wholly relieved that she’s there. In terms of the dark fist fight that I missed, the strongest queen won. So I’m thankful that I have such a tough young queen, because she’s the one who’s going to take the brood through the approaching cooler seasons.

Meanwhile, my crampons and helmet have been removed, but left nearby… just in case.