Mum turns Poet.

First this time, I am afraid, a bit of sad news. Our gorgeous male Turkey, Tom, who you may recall had gone all moopy and down-in-the-dumps, has now checked out. After my last post he had a couple of reasonable days but then took a turn for the worst and on Sunday he didn't even want to come out of his 'bedroom'. I lifted him out for him to have some sun but he mooped some more and then seemed to go into a trance, lying on his stomach but with his beak and tail pointed skyward. I put him back into the shade but neither of us were very hopeful. No surprise on Monday morning to find him lying there stiff and cold. It's a shame - he was a lovely character and a fascinating bird to own and we will miss him.

Impressed by this bouquet from Shimizu
Flowers of Hastings Old Town's High St
delivered to Birthday Girl - Mum (89)

We have, of course, no idea what got him in the end but we have heard and read that birds which pair off with a strong bond can simply pine away if separated. Barbara (our hen bird) has been AWOL 3 weeks (we hope sitting on eggs). We are hoping that she does not return and get upset to find him dead like some kind of Shakespearean tragedy and "swallow the poison" herself. Flippin' birds!

The Roscommon Archers at Con's place. That's me centre
right in a red top, shooting.

On a far far lighter note, huge Happy Birthday to Mum (Pud Lady) who has gone all dizzy on this Birthday and filled her letter to us with Limericks. I include 2, for which many thanks, Mum. You had us smiling!

A smallholding lady named Liz
Saw that life should go on with a whizz
So she knitted and nattered, and pastried and plattered
and opened a bottle of fizz!

A sixty-ish smallholder, Matt
Opined he was quite certain that
Whether archery, drinking or just sitting thinking
He'd always know where he was at!

The club members let fly. You will have to believe that the tiny
red patch in the centre is my polo shirt. 

In my archery, big progress. With summer here at last the club moves its operation from the indoor badminton courts hall in Castlerea, out to the farm owned by Instructor, Con. Here is a piece of field well set up for it with a high bank all round to catch (most) stray arrows and Con has a shed full of 3D and 2D foam rubber models of animals (deer, boar, crows, rats etc) which we scatter about to give 3 firing positions and a good variety of targets (size, range and uphill/downhill angle).

Log stack 1

We get 2 good hours of varied , unfamiliar and challenging archery culminating in everyone standing in a line shooting across the diagonal at a model Ibex (big horny antelopey yoke) at a range of 115 feet (almost twice as far as the longest I had ever shot before (indoors)) synchronised like a Military attack. Nock! Draw! Loose! It was, to use that horrible word, AWESOME. Obviously, when you are shooting at that range you need to allow for the dip in the arrow's trajectory, so you aim high. How high? Which field do you want it to land in? came the response. Not as high I as I tried anyway as I watched my first arrow zoom over the bank and into the impenetrable shrub of brambles. Bye bye arrow. I lost 2 arrows that day but learned so much and thoroughly enjoyed myself. The plan was to prepare us all for a first outdoor "Field Archery" competition. Superb day all round.

The ducklings nervously approach this NEW water body.
They were quickly all in there and splashing about like they
were meant to do.

The ducklings have long since outgrown their cat litter-tray 'bath' and Carolyn has generously leant us one of her human-child sized paddling pools. We installed this in the yard, filled it and surrounded it with a ramp of my split logs. Liz scattered some cooked rice (current favourite food!) over the ramps and the lip and the gang were quickly exploring it and within an hour all six were in there splashing about, preening, swimming and drinking it like they were 'designed' to do. The cat litter trays sit abandoned and unloved, waiting for us to gather them up.

Still plenty of honey on this frame

Happily surviving the winter, too, seem to be our bees. Regular readers will know that we were not so fortunate last spring and lost our first (and only, then) colony to the damp and cold. One of the Longford BKA ladies generously gifted us a replacement colony on the one condition that we do likewise to the next beginner we find in need as soon as we have a spare colony to gift.

Log stack 2

That colony is still with us now and, when we cracked open the hive for a first look today it was buzzing with happy activity and still (or again) contained plenty of honey stores. We took off the insulated roof 'eke' so that the girls do not overheat and I cleaned the varroa count sheet so that I could get a good count (tomorrow) but there did not seem to be many mites on it even though it had been there all winter.

Finally a nice Birthday Card from Mum-in-Law (Steak Lady) who took it to Malta with her on hols by mistake and posted it from there.

TK Maxx. Always a favourite shop in Kent for household stuff
has now opened a branch near us. Happy Days. 

81%... but where to next?

There are some wonderful macro-photographers posting pics
to the internet, so (with permission) I will use this one of a
worker by Tim Hill to head up this post. Thanks Tim.  

Our little group of 7 candidates for the Intermediate Level Beekeeping "written practical" exam taken back in March in Longford all passed. I got 81%, so I was delighted personally but pleased too for the group and especially pleased that we did well for our group leader, the Longford BKA 'Sec', Elspeth, who worked so hard preparing notes and hand outs for our study sessions. We are all very pleased with ourselves. This post will mainly be based around this process, so if you are not interested in beekeeping then you might like to click on by.

L'Aimant (The Lover) 

These 'courses' and exams are an important part of what the Federation of Irish Beekeeper Associations (FIBKA) does and there are plenty of them. If studying and exams are your thing you can progress through the baby-slopes of the half hour, 20 questions 'Preliminary' paper, through three 'Intermediate' exams, up to three 'Senior' exams after which you can call yourself a 'Bee Master'. Onwards and upwards there are then routes into 'proper' academia, with degrees in apiculture and equally high flying qualifications in honey production and so on. No doubt this is all important if you fancy a career in the commercial beekeeping world and these FIBKA certificates would be recognised internationally as proof of competence. Most people seem to do the exams for fun or just to prove they can.

Most of these exams have to be 'sat' in the FIBKA home-base at Gormanston, near Drogheda just north of Dublin, but if your County BKA can field a minimum number of candidates, FIBKA allow you to run the exams locally and appoint proper invigilators and send the papers out in sealed envelopes not to be opened before the exam time and in the exam hall. Hence our 'Magnificent Seven' in Longford. So, we did our study-group evenings and we took our exam and now we are all passed, proud owners of Intermediate Certs in "written practical" (hive and colony management). The obvious next step would be for us all to sit the Intermediate level "scientific" paper (bee biology and anatomy, honey chemistry, bee pheromones etc) followed by undergoing an apiary practical test where FIBKA examiners meet you at your own hives and test your competence at any number of manipulations and tasks - finding the queen, identifying types of queen cell, splitting colonies to produce 2nd hives or colonies and so on.

'Rhapsody in Blue'

Instead, I find myself at a bit of a crossroads and if you will bear with me, I will now ramble on in a rather disjointed, philosophical manner whilst I try to get my head round the problem. As I said - feel free to click on by. There are bee keepers and there are bee keepers - we range from the almost obsessive keeper who, like a golfing nut, spends all his time and money on the hobby, buying all the latest gadgets and gizmos, different types of hives, expensive honey extraction equipment, fancy suits, hive tools and smokers, fancy fuel for the smoker, chemicals and medication.

'Joseph's Coat'

These keepers are into the hives at every opportunity cracking the hive apart to inspect the colony condition, tweaking, manipulating, killing baby queens if they do not want them, trying out all the techniques they have learned, attempting to prevent any swarming, squeezing every ounce of honey production they can get out of the bees. They frequently extract so much honey that their bees would not have enough resources to see them through the winter, so these keepers have to feed back sugar syrup or fondant to replace the 'stolen' reserves. The bees must get no peace but these techniques work at the required level, so they have gone into the canon and are accepted practice among the FIBKA experts. These are the skills at which you must show competence in order to progress through the exam-machine and to be recognised by FIBKA as an expert and 'Bee Master'. These are also the things you are told you "must do" at BKA meetings. Going to meetings and getting involved in clubs are right up there with all the practical stuff you are obliged to learn to get on in the beekeeper world.

Red campion

At the other end of the scale are a much more laisséz faire bunch, some of whom are content to have bought their hive and their bees to look pretty in the garden and they are happy to sit back in the sun-lounger, watching the bees fly to and fro, happily buzzing round the flowers. They don't need the honey, so they don't even extract it. Down towards that end are a more recent group calling themselves 'Natural Beekeepers', who are not quite so laid back, but are mainly driven by the need to be green and ecological. They have bees to support the local population of pollinators but they do not fuss and interfere with the colonies, they try never to use chemicals on their bees (varroa mite pesticides for example) - you will just end up with a colony of bees which needs man and chemicals to survive, they argue. Far better to let the bees 'learn' over time to groom off the mites.

Fruit scones from the baker's assistant.

These guys tend to be viewed sceptically by the 'experts' - weirdo hippies and eco-warriors. There is no real place for them in FIBKA although, to be fair, they do get a slot in the FIBKA magazine and the 'Natural' way does get air-time in the FIBKA conferences. Also I do not think they would meet the exam standards, so they are never going to make 'Bee Master' unless they can talk a good game on the day.

My 'crossroads' is because I am starting to baulk at the demands and advice to constantly interfere, examine, poke and prod, and I am much more inclined to watch them from outside the hive and, if they look healthy to me, leave them be. I know I 'should' be checking for varroa mites, for example, and treating with the latest 'drug' recommended by the experts, but plenty of feedback has come down to say that these chemicals can kill or damage the queen, make the bees abscond or, just as bad, not work anyway. The one we used last year, called MAQS is basically a formic acid fumigant which is so honkingly strong that you choke when you are out in the open air peeling open the packaging - you then stick the strips into an 18 inch cube enclosed box  (the hive) with little ventilation and expect it to diffuse right down into the capped larval cells to kill the mites without harming the bees. Hmmm. No wonder we beginners are confused and start to doubt the official view.

Mum turkey starts a new secret egg stash
down between the poly tunnel and the
caravan

I find myself not at all sure I want to be that kind of expert. My current tendency is to go with the Natural Beekeepers and minimise my interference and poking, and possibly to withdraw from the exam-taking path. One strong factor tries to draw me in again. Our 'leader' Elspeth, mentioned in the first paragraph is a Scot and comes from that generation of Scottish girls who were, rather appallingly, never allowed to do science at school. Girls would not need science, it was decided by the Scottish education authorities, so they were not let do it and Elspeth, at this later stage finds herself protesting this by her determination to learn the stuff and sit the exam just to show them. She was so good to us last time round that I expect there is not one among the other 6 of us who do not feel that if she can do it, then we all ought to damned well stand by her and support her through it. Come September, when we have to sign up or not, it will be interesting to see how many of we science-trained blokes are on the list.

I am sorry if that was a bit long winded, but it is a post that has been building up in the back-burners of my brain and needed unloading, venting onto this blog. Blogging as catharsis, if you like. One wise 'old timer' in our club, a beekeeper of 50+ years experience who has never taken one of these exams in his life, just smiles and says "It doesn't matter what you do in the end; the bees will do their own thing anyway!"

New garden strip all dug over. 

The main news to tag onto the end is that we have finished digging the new garden strip out front, so that can now get its membrane, fancy gravel and plants. We are also going to move the roses from the 'Rose Walk' into here. They do OK in there but suffer from the thug-weed 'creeping buttercup' getting in amongst them, so we have fun times ahead lifting them, root-washing them to get out all traces of the buttercup and then dropping them into the new site where, we hope, the weed cannot jump into bed with them.

Then today, on a run down to Roscommon town the car went sick on us again, which is a bit of a nuisance. It made some odd noises, ran hot for a while but then cooled down again, seemed to lose power so that we stopped to take a look under the bonnet (and turned the engine off, obviously) to find it smelling of very hot oil and smoking off some the oil that inevitably builds up on old engines. We had to get it recovered back to our garage in Lough Glynn where our excellent 'man who can' is now looking at it. We suspect head gasket or some other serious problem but of course (wouldn't you know it) when the guy fired it up after its nice cooling period in Roscommon and on the lorry, it fired up beautifully and ran as smoothly as you'd like. More on this story when we know what's what.

Reinforcements

The 'new' hive in place by 9pm. Note gaffer-tape and straps.

You'll probably have read of our recent bee hive disaster and you may have picked up on the fact that I was delighted to be offered help by a fellow member of our Longford Beekeepers Assoc'n (BKA). I was anxiously awaiting her call. Bees and equipment do not come cheap so I could hardly believe that this lovely and very generous lady was offering me a whole colony. Fair play to her, she had been "gifted" a colony back when she started up and feels that if she then gifts a colony on when she is established and asks that person to do the same, then the world of bee keeping will be a far better place. We'll call her BO'D on here (No, not Brian O'Driscoll!) and she happened to be inspecting her 6 hives with our good friend Elspeth (who showed us our first active colony last year as part of our initiation) when I phoned the latter in my distress at finding our hive failure. She volunteered the colony without hesitation. Thank you so much BO'D. We definitely owe you.

10,000 passengers in the co-pilot's seat? Blocks of wood to
hold the hive up off the seat, pallet straps and rubber
bungees to keep it in place.

It won't surprise you to know that there is a whole art and complex M.O. around moving bees about. I won't bore you with it all here but the main pointers are that you have to do it late evening after all the flying worker bees have come home, you have to seal up the hive to stop any escapes in the vehicle and you have to be so, so gentle. When I say seal it up, you have to, of course, keep it ventilated as there is a risk that the bees get angry, the colony starts to 'roar' and the heat cooks the bees. You can arrive at your destination with a sticky mess of dead bees and melted wax and honey.

One of three dogs badly in need of a haircut.  Poppy. All three
 got it today - so much dog hair!

So you keep the mesh floor and the standard roof, windows open in the car if need be, no heater running and your ear attuned to the slightest change of noise from the colony. The 'gently' thing is because a lot of the bees world is all about the delicate and calm vibrations of 'waggle dances' and quiet communication. They do not cope at all well with thumps, lurches or vibrations such as you might find, for example, on a car journey and it is the angry bees, leaping to the defence of their colony, which do the heating up.

Plum blossom starting so the bees' arrival was timely.

Frames of foundation hang in the hive rather like filing cabinet files and, if you are not careful they can "flap" from the top lugs, so you load the hive into the car with the frames aligned N/S so that braking and acceleration will not flap them, and then take all the bends and roundabouts and changes of camber really gently. If they flap there is a risk of bees (and the queen of course) getting squashed and squashed bees give off 'attack' pheromones. It all has to be nice and quiet and calm. Of course the commercial boys move hives around all the time, migrating from fruit trees to citrus to almonds or oil seed rape to heather, sometimes on 1000-hive loads on HGVs stacked on pallets, but they also have an army of jobbing beekeepers to keep it all under control. I just had BO'D to help me load and then me and the little Fiat for our journey home in the dark and a wheelbarrow to get me from car to apiary.

The piggies are settling in well and have even had a few
visitors tempting them with apples. 

It went OK as far as I know. There was no 'roar'. The bees stayed quiet and were quiet when I gently laid the hive on its stand next to my existing stand. I un gaffer-taped the floor/brood join and pulled the piece of foam rubber out of the entrance. The theory is that they will calm down and recover from the trauma of the journey over night, wake up and start sending out scouts who will quickly spot that they are in new surroundings. Roscommon, not Longford! They will therefore start the day doing 'orientation flights' (which young new bees would be doing anyway) and re-write their visual maps of how to get back to the hive as well as sussing out all the local resources (gorse, pussy willow, orchard trees, dandelions, etc).

These brasses were a gift from Diamond
just before she died and have now been
mounted in this lovely moose-skin leather
"frame" created by the superbly 'crafty'
Carolyn.

They have been set down right next to the old hive to rest the night. The plan is, within a few days, to move the frames and bees into the old hive; any of the 'old' bees still using it will hopefully be merged into the new colony to see out their final days. This will free up BO'D's boxes, floor, crown board and roof which I can then populate with brand new frames and wax "foundation" and give back to her to put back into her apiary to take one of her 2015 hive 'splits' or swarms.

Sophie Grigson brine.

So that is that, so far. We are back in the bee game.What else have I done today? Tomorrow is my birthday and though any celebrations will get postponed till Liz returns from the latest mission of mercy, one traditional mid-April event DID take place, the end-of-winter clip of the three dogs who were, by then, seriously shaggy. I do this myself. It's not beautiful or very highly skilled - I'd never be able to set up in business as a dog groomer, but I do relieve them of enough fur between the three, to make a fourth dog and this goes out onto the compost for the nesting birds to make use of. When we were cleaning out nest boxes in September in Kent we could easily tell whose fur had been used - the texture of Megan's coat was so hard compared to Haggis's fly-away wisps.

I also decided to convert some of last year's Tamworth pork into bacon/gammon (as in 'bacon and cabbage', not rashers). For this I was disappointed by the lack of recipes for brine in my two best pork books, and turned to the Gubbeen cheese-farm book given to us by Mazy. The Gubbeen people use a Sophie Grigson recipe for their brine and I was quickly able to track it down. As you'd expect this had the salt and sugar (plus salt petre if you are concerned that the bacon is not pink enough au naturel (we aren't)) but also, being Sophie Grigson, has me lashing in juniper berries, grated nutmeg, bay leaves, thyme, black peppercorns and cloves. She also says to add anything else that "goes with pork". It can only improve the shining hour.

Ah well, enough from me. I'll be the one anxiously checking that there are bees coming and going from that new hive tomorrow morning. Happy Birthday, me.

The Sun Doesn't Always Shine

I was delighted with this shot of a 'buff-tail' - scruffy
gear and a huge dose of luck!

Not a good day today. The abridged summary will read "Hive disaster, vet called to lame lamb" but you'll probably expect more detail than that, so read on. I'll get to those two stories eventually. First, though, I was delighted with this picture of a buff tailed bumble bee (Bombus terrestris) on flowering currant (Ribes sanguinum); probably the best bee picture I have ever taken. The bee was amazingly co-operative and the camera gear had a huge dose of luck thrown in.

Flowering cherry buds opening.

This is my trusty digital Canon EOS but I could never actually afford the digital extension-rings at the change-over, so I had to buy, 2nd hand, a pre-digital 50 mm 'prime' lens (the digital lenses do not fit the bayonet front fitting of the old rings). This came cheap because the auto focus drive on it is almost dead. Sorry story? As long as everything stays still while I manually focus, it does OK as a 'macro' set up but I struggle with busy bees, who are always on the move. The flowers are usually also blowing about in the breeze, so in 99 pics out of a hundred you do not get a crisp sharp focus. My bumble bee must have been the 100th one, she stopped for a good drink at that nectar and the breeze just eased for the few seconds while I tried not to get too excited and actually press the shutter-release.

Just showing off now. Primrose with early morning dew.

Our little amazing run of hot sunny days brought out the Ribes on which the lucky bee sat, and Ribes is one of the signals we bee keepers locally use to tell us that it is now OK to open hives and do the first Spring-time inspection. Over the winter we have come to know and get friendly with another local bee keeper (we'll call him T-McC for the sake of argument) and as we are all beginners we set up a reciprocal arrangement where we go and help each other, advise, give moral support and generally blunder through these early experiences trying not to do much damage and keep our bees alive.

Lupin leaves

The sunshine had T-McC on the phone suggesting that we should be doing our Spring-time inspections NOW and inviting us over (yesterday) ; we would do his yesterday and then ours today. So far so good. Bee suits and wellies were loaded into the car and off we went. In short, that part all went really well. The colony at T's was buzzing with health and we were delighted to be able to see healthy brood frames with eggs, young larvae, older (sealed over) larvae/pupae and a million bees coming and going with pollen. We even found his queen, who had been helpfully marked by his supplier with a dop of white paint on her thorax. Job done, we re-assembled his hive and sat down in the sun on his patio for a cold drink. A raven soaring in the thermals over his 'drumlin' put the icing on the day, and Liz seeing the first swallow of the year on the way home added the cherry.

T-McC cracks open his healthy hive.

At this stage, you might guess from my opening remarks, it all went a bit downhill. T was due back here at 2:30 pm. I had an inkling from the sheer numbers of bees around his hive yesterday, that all might not be so good here, where if I see 12-15 milling about, I'm lucky. On the way in, we showed him our 2 new lambs and even we could see that all was not well with the smaller, darker one (Thelma) who seemed to us to be a bit 'lame', struggling to put any weight on her front feet which she teetered around on, in high tip-toe mode. We were thinking 'lame' so foot issues, but T, who grew up on a farm in Cork, spotted that the lamb was arching her back and raising her tail, looking generally uncomfortable, so diagnosed possible constipation and advised us to get the vet.

Our own hive is not a pretty sight - dead mouldy bees (top left)
and empty brood (dark brown) with mouldy cells (bottom right).

Liz went to summon Aoife (Rhymes with Deefer) while we moved on to smokers, hive tools and bee suits. With the vet called, we adjourned to our hive and promptly set about our main disaster. Our hive is, unfortunately, 95% dead. The queen has died, so there is no new brood, no eggs, no larvae, no sealed up cells of larvae, no new emerging workers. There is a ton of unused honey (the crinkly white cells in the pics) but all the brood-nest (dark brown) is empty and cleaned out ready for egg laying. There are a few clumps of dead bees all mouldering and one or two cells of mouldy (?) pollen. We have well under a thousand bees and though some of these are bringing back pollen. All in all a depressing sight and a disaster for the hive. The new bees will live out their little 6 week lives and then fade away.

A lovely neat "brood pattern" surrounded by honey
but unfortunately no brood! 

These things happen. Where ever you have livestock, they say, you have dead stock. Bee keeping is not meant to be easy. We are lucky to have the Longford Bee Keepers Association (LBKA) at our backs to help us out with advice and, rather beautifully today, someone willing to pass us some replacement stock - a queen and some living brood to get us started again. The answers to our calls for advice and help have so far mainly centred around the queen and brood nest falling victim to cold and wet, possibly because we gave them too much space by adding that 'super box' before it was needed. and even adding the first one back in August before the brood box was bursting at the seams. We have inadvertantly created a drafty "chimney" with colony all up the middle but empty 'edges' so that the smallish, new colony was unable to keep all the space warm in that recent cold snap. You live and learn.

Lovely heavy frames of honey - we guess the girls won't
need it now!

So we were sitting out front on OUR 'terrace' discussing the disaster and the day (T was feeling a bit of 'survivor guilt' he said) when with beautiful timing, Charlotte (our much esteemed sheep and lamb expert) and Carolyn blew in. We were quickly able to round up Polly and her twins and to stash them in the 'shed' to await the arrival of the vet. Charlotte had a good check on the problem lamb (Thelma) and could see no real cause for lameness (no dodgy feet or stiffness or heat at joints, no swollen or tender places). We also needed to check she had a bum-hole (sometimes this does not open properly) and was not 'scouring' (diarrhoea). All clear, we just had to wait for the vet.

These frames should be covered in bees - there are a hundred
here if you are lucky. It's not a happy story. 

Well, to cut that story short, Aoife has now been and done her finger-tip stuff. The lamb's bum opening is not properly formed, so is tight with stray tissue inside and she is struggling to pass 'matter'. If T had not spotted this, she would have gone downhill fast over the next couple of days, said Aoife (so many many thanks, T!). She is now on frequent liquid paraffin and jabs of pain killer and anti-biotics (to 'cover her' as she had a high temperature), the plan being to "soften her up" as well as relax her so that she can start unloading and be a lot more comfortable. Poor little mite.

Not a queen to be seen

So all in all, it has not been a good day but, hey, these things happen. The sun did actually shine and we worked our way through the bad stuff. Thank you very much to all those who were there for us or on the phone, on the Facebook group and elsewhere. Special thanks to a lovely lady who might just be able to re-stock our hive with a new queen and some willing workers. More on that later. They say these things always come in threes. I went to check on the hens last thing and found that the broody Sussex had abandoned the nest, presumably as a result of our rather rude impostion of a 'yow' and 2 lambs, then a vet, on her solitude. Ah well, now off into the Western 9 pm 'half light' to catch Thelma again (who we'd let back into the field on the vet's advice) for her last-thing dose of liquid paraffin. It's not going to be easy now that mum (Polly) has sussed that sometimes when you get bribed into the shelter, it is not just for ewe and lamb nuts! Good luck you amateur sheherds.

Bee-ing Practical

Ireland's Royal Canal

Easter Saturday and we wake up to lovely weather and a few bits of good poultry news. While I'm still doing my 'feed and release' walk about, Black Feather hops off the eggs and goes for a walk allowing me in, at last, to gather the extra eggs again. She had gone from an unconvincing broody who we had thought would fail this time, to sticking like glue. I don't like to chase her off, so I was waiting for a chance to gather up the more recent, undated eggs to bring her back to the 12 we want her to incubate. Blondie, our new Guinea Fowl survives the night and in fact wakes us up with her strident calling from first glimmer of dawn - her temporary hutch is just below our window and we sleep with the window a-jar (not for long!). On that first walk about I also find Henry and Min at her run talking to her through the wire, the first sign that they want to know her. Later we discover a stash of 10 chicken eggs in the woods, all different as if 10 different chooks have all contributed one.

Fetching attire.....

So far so good, but today is really all about bees. We must visit our friend Elspeth in her gorgeous lock-keeper's cottage for our first practical training session around her hives. We had been a bit nervous of this. We have read and heard that you can be an expert bee-keeper "in theory", reading all the books and scoring top marks in the written exams, but that you might then still freak out when faced with a buzzing 35,000 bee hive and surrounded by potential stingers. A small proportion of people also show a bad allergic reaction to bee stings, which can lead to anaphylactic shock and be life threatening.

Liz examines a brood frame.

We 'book experts' were therefore keen to get hands-on and see if we could cope. Not quite so keen to get stung and see if we react, but that'll no doubt come. Thanks then to Elspeth who is on the Committee of the Longford Bee Keepers Association and volunteered to do us in her own home apiary. There is a club apiary but it has had some health problems and they are trying to keep visitors out while they isolate and sort it. She is a wonderful person and a good friend so we were treated to excellent hospitality too - coffees, cakes, sandwiches etc, as well as being loaded down with helpful literature, back copies of the Federation magazine "An beachaire" (The bee keeper), as well as being able to enjoy her perfect, bee-friendly cottage garden (along with attached farm, chickens, ewes and lambs etc).

We got togged up in our shiny new suits, gloves and (not so shiny) wellies, Elspeth lit the bee-smoker and off we went to find her three hives. This is the start of swarming season and we needed to check every frame in every brood chamber for sneaky queen cells, so we had real work to do while we were getting trained; plenty of practise at all the moves. It was very enjoyable and fascinating. We learned to crack apart the hive boxes which get glued up by the bees (the glue is called 'propolis') and then to prise apart the frames of brood and honey.

More importantly, maybe, we learned to reassemble the boxes without crushing any bees between the parts - bees getting squashed upsets all the workers and you can fast have a problem of angry bees on your hands. Some boxes are heavy but you must learn to be gentle, controlled and slow. Clonking about knocking bits together upsets the bees. You also need to be aware of where on your hands or body there might be bees. No good squatting and squashing a bee between thigh and calf, or leaning on a fence with a bee on the palm of your hand.

We also had to learn to tell the types of comb apart - are those storage cells for honey or pollen, are the brood cells for workers, drones or are they 'queen cups', do they have new eggs in or healthy white larvae, curled cosily round into their 'C' shapes. We had to become adept at spotting the drone bees and finding the queen bee in each hive. Your health checks now are all about is the queen there and laying eggs, and has anyone started trying to build queen cells -  a sign that half your hive may be about to depart in a swarm. More amusingly, I was also trying to suss out how to take pictures with gloved hands and with my face covered by the 'sword fencing' mesh visor.

As I said, though, it all went well and we are very grateful to Elspeth and her husband for entertaining us and for laying on this training for us. We were both delighted that we didn't 'freak out' and we feel like we may be able to cope with our own bees when they arrive (June?). All in all a brilliant day. Lovely too just to be near canals again and to see the picture postcard, beautifully maintained lock with its lovely flower beds and spruce black and white gloss paint.

Back home then to the continuing drama of the Guinea Fowl 'integration' if you can call it that. With the rabbit run doors open we sat back at a distance to watch Blondie's "escape". She was very reluctant to come out but eventually started to move about and soon came across Henry and Min. They seemed to get on OK with H accepting the new girl and even trying to mount her. We relaxed. I took the dogs for a walk leaving Liz well able to cope. Unfortunately, no sooner had I gone than Blondie suddenly took it on herself to make a drive east, a meandering path through various bits of garden and hedge, field and so on. Liz tracked her and called me over when I got back with dogs, by which time B was 2 fields away and almost at Una's. We rounded her up and sent her back home. She is a good flyer and whirrs over hedges with ease and can run like 'Road Runner'. There is no catching her but you can shepherd and marshal her. We then had an afternoon where she headed east several times and had to be rounded up but by roosting time she seemed to be hovering around the pop hole door with the rest of the gang. At that point Henry decided to have another go at her and she exploded into flight and whirred away across the east field, disappearing into the hedge. We went out with binoculars and walked the hedgerows but as we go to roost ourselves tonight we can honestly not say where she is or whether or not we'll see her again in the morning. She has a night outside to cope with. We are wishing her all the best, but we have to admit we have singularly failed to look after her as you should.