Photo Gallery

Some of our hives in Widcombe. It's midsummer and the bees are hard at work.

A frame of bees. Most of these are workers, although the large chap you can see towards the right hand side is a drone, a male bee. Drones do no work except to mate with queens. Mating happens outside while the virgin queen is flying. Several drones can mate with one queen. After mating is achieved, the unfortunate drone's genital organs are torn off and he dies a lingering death.

This is a swarm of bees hanging off a small branch. Sometime in late sping or early summer about half the bees may decide to leave the colony with the queen to set up home somewhere new. Usually they settle in a cluster like this for a day or two before moving into more permanent accommodation.  Millions of words have been written on how to prevent swarming, but in my experience it is almost impos

Here is the same swarm after I have shaken it into a straw skep. The queen is inside, and the bees are clustering around the entrance. As long as the queen is inside, they will all go into the skep within an hour or so. Then, once they've all stopped flying - around 9 p.m. in May or June - I simply wrap the skep in the sheet you can see in this picture, and take it to a new hive. Swarms collected 

This is a frame of honey. It looks white because each individual cell is capped with a thin layer of wax.  Some types of bees are known for the beauty of their wax cappings, notably the English Black Bee. Black Bees became almost extinct in this country in the early twentieth century after disease almost wiped them out. Apiairists re-stocked with bees from continental Europe which tended to be les

Not a bee at all,  but a deadly enemy of bees. This is an Asian Hornet. Note its black thorax, and its overall appearance is far darker than the harmless European Hornet. They arrived in France in the early years of this century in a shipment of timber from China. They have now spread over all of France and Spain and into the Channel Islands. Although a few queens and one or two nests have been fo