This year was a poor ones for queen bees. Two of our hives successfully produced new queens but both failed to survive their mating flights and so the hives were left queenless. We reunited them with our other hives so are now down to two. These are both doing very well and have a lot of bees!

We have taken a small amount of honey off but have left them plenty. Although this recent good weather has seen them very active in bringing nectar and pollen both from the himalayan balsam and ivy.

A varroa mite can be clearly seen on the bee in the bottom right of this photo (taken last week). We regularly monitor for varroa and treat it at this time of year with ‘apiguard’ and then later in the year with ‘oxalic acid’.

 Work continues on the roof. Quite a difficult job because it curves in more than one direction.

This collared dove seemed to take a liking to it all. Also moving in in large numbers are garden spiders. Apparently this is a very good year for them and Buglife are asking people to carry out a survey this weekend.

Work has also been carried out on the reed bed system that will process the waste from the resource centre. The reed bed area has been lined with clay (dug from an area of our own fields) and then will be filled with gravel (recycled stone from Ellel quarry) and water and planted with Phragmites australis the common reed and other species.

All our onions were harvested a couple of weeks ago  and dried in the old silage barn. It has been a really good crop this time and they have now been strung into ropes and will supply us throughout the winter and spring.

This was the first year that we tried growing them undersown with clover and it has worked well.