Awaiting bees...

When our friends were visiting over Christmas and New Year time, we spoke a lot about bees.  Katy has set up two hives in Ecuador and so we were eager to exploit her know-how and get a hive of our own set up while she was here. Unfortunately thanks to New Year, the local Carnival, a bank holiday and the city´s aniversary all lining up together to mean Popayan is pretty much closed for business for the first half of January, we weren´t able to buy the kit we needed to get set up. Katy and her 2 year old daughter Luna did however scout the area for bees and having found plenty buzzing around, gave us the encouragement that we needed to make the decision to go ahead with it as soon as the bee Co-op opened again after the holidays.

 OUR BEE EXPERTS

Although a little stern to begin with, the bee lady at the co-op was happy to take time to explain to us newbies about what we should do to be responsible bee-keepers.  She sold us a hive (a national hive to those in the know) with beeswax sheets set up inside and we raced home to set it up in the garden. We had to order a nucleus which is effectively a little bee family to get started with but that takes about a month for the co-op to create so we have plenty of time to read up and figure out what on earth we are going to do with thousands of swarming, stinging insects in our garden! I bought a little book by the National Trust a while back so we looked that out and are now saving up for all manner of things like bee smokers, bee suits and all sorts of spatulas.

 THE BEE BIBLE - A LITTLE CHEWED

 SO FAR 16 FRAMES, 4 WITH WAX SHEETS

I cant say I fully understand the bee thing yet. It makes chickens seem very straight forward! I will make sure to post here as I go along because it seems very interesting.