Our venerable Britannic
majesty has just celebrated 60 years on the throne. Royalty is a subject I’d best avoid when visiting our
neighbours, recently retired farmers Paul and Christiane. Christiane buys magazines like Paris Match and avidly follows news of
William and Kate, etc., but, if I happen to call in and sit down for a coffee
and Paul catches sight of said magazine, he takes me to task on why ‘we’ still
have a royal family.
I’ve tried explaining
(from the fence-sitting position of being neither a royalist nor a republican)
that they certainly bring in a lot of revenue, etc., but he won’t have it. I’ve asked whether he’d have us bring
back the guillotine, with which they did for their own noblesse: no, he
recoils; he just wants them retired off.
We have a Queen with a (albeit symbolic) legal role and a working prime
minister and the French have a president and a prime minister. “Why do they need two persons then?” I
counter. Oh, they do different
jobs, he responds, but with a doubt in his voice. I have him on the ropes and ask why the Germans make do with
a chancellor and a president, their president being as symbolic and
un-politically involved as our queen.
Why does the British prime minister correspond with the French president
but not the German one? What does
the French prime minister do? I
sense victory and we start talking about the safer subject of agriculture.
We appear to be changing
queens. I’m not sure Elizabeth is
about to abdicate; I’m referring to our new colony of bees. There was a strange to-do a couple of
days ago, with a cloud of agitated bees surrounding our hive; I’ve never seen
anything like it. As I called
Gabrielle on her mobile to tell her, they all started making
their way back into the hive. She
later rang our Brittany bee expert, Richard
and we now think that this may have been a ‘re-queening’ with the new virgin
queen exiting for an airborne shag-fest before returning to the hive to start
laying.
 |
| our first swarm |
When I popped back for a
quick visit at lunchtime the day after, (I was helping dairy farmer Hubert
re-roof a barn) I found Gabrielle looking intently at the bees. “Is this what you saw yesterday?” she
said. Indeed it was but this time
they formed into a stable lump suspended in a little silver birch. Gabrielle phone Richard for advice
while I got all our protective clothing and other beekeeping paraphernalia
ready. I then clipped of a few
small branches to expose the swarm then, once Gabrielle had a firm grip on the
branch, I cut it free and Gabrielle walked calmly towards the hive. We’d prepared a ramp up to the opening
of the hive (a sheet of wooden board covered in a white sheet) and Gabrielle
then sharply shook the branch to dislodge the bees who fell with a sort of dry
splosh onto the ramp and immediately started making their way up the board and
into the hive. Phew! And a great feeling that like the new
queen, we were no longer bee ‘virgins’. (see video above)
Richard had told us to try
to put them back in the original hive.
If they were re-queening, then this would work but if there were two
queens (think Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I ) then they’d
swarm again and then we would have to put them into another hive.
 |
| cutting down swarm |
… and swarm again they
did, two days later. We installed
our new mini-hive with just five frames, which Richard calls a nucleus and the
French, une ruchette. (Thanks to Andrew, friend and
volunteer, who built this from offcuts of exterior ply only a couple of weeks
ago.) Same technique but the bees didn’t seem 100% sure, a lot of them
remaining in clusters on the outside and underneath. Gabrielle phoned Richard and I called Olivier, who lives and
keeps bees in an adjoining village.
Both of them are also experiencing bees expressing somewhat unusual
behaviour. Olivier turned up
within five minutes in a white van that should have had a blue flashing light
on top for added authenticity, I reckon.
While he was there, the bees did seem to go inside, aided by some gentle
persuasion from Gabrielle with a soft brush and so we got some white wine from
the fridge to boire un coup, the traditional
way to say thank you.
 |
| queen excluder grill over entrance |
Celebrations were perhaps
a touch premature and the bees became unsettled again. Olivier had given us a strip of plastic
grill (cut from an old ‘queen excluder) with the advice to put it across the
opening for a couple of days, once we were sure that the queen was inside (the
key issue); this would prevent her from leaving again and causing another
swarm. Olivier left and the bees
did swarm again but this time we let them enter by the top of the ruchette, them filtering down between
the frames. They all
went in and Gabrielle filled up their feeder with sugar syrup and then had to
rush off for a gig with her violin.
In early evening, with little activity, I attached the grill to the
front. All seems well and we now
have two hives of bees.
