Top: Thomas working with Iklas, Sami and Maya
Middle left: Sami handling a honey frame
Middle centre: A very young NewBee (Iklas’s son Mohammed) also joined us last Sunday
Middle right: Maya cooking the main course
Bottom left: Tabouleh waiting to be served
Bottom centre: After a few hours (and our 40 year old oven blowing a fuse …) we set down for a great lunch
Bottom right: Shadi, Iklas, Kinda and Mohammed relaxing in the garden after a hard day’s work with bees and cooking!
11 July 2016
Six NewBees joined us on Sunday 3 and 10 July
Many refugees are skilled beekeepers – it may be the key to a job
The big news is that we have had two visits from a large group of NewBees: we were expecting 4 people the weekend before last and were delighted 6 people turned up. Four young men, two young women. We split them into two groups (we don’t have enough suits and 6 extra people standing around during a hive inspection is just too many) and none of them showed any signs of distress of being so near thousands of bees. We sat down for home made rhubarb crumble and coffee afterwards and all said they wanted to come back. We also hatched a cooking plan: while they are waiting for their papers, they are living in government provided accommodation (a large hotel in a south Stockholm suburb) where they are not allowed to cook. So I offered them the use of our kitchen – we bought the ingredients a couple of day beforehand and after working with the bees, three of them cooked up a storm. We also invited Kinda Kokash, who initially introduced us to this group. It was wonderful to share food and stories on a very sunny Stockholm summer afternoon. Their names are (cousins) Sami Jolak and Nawar Asaad, married couple Maya Hana and Saad Yousseff, Iklas (mother of two, one of whom joined us last week) and Shadi. It is a joy to have them around.
And in other news …
Top left: We’ve even got bees on the upstairs balcony (door to the left) though we have now combined the two 3 frame nucs on this balcony into one 6 frame nuc (after they produced a queen who is now laying).
Top right: We keep the splits at the back of the house; there is not much working space here, so instead of using the wooden box (see bottom middle and right), we use a metal contraption which hooks onto the side of the box – it has room for two frames.
Bottom left: My aim is to take a photo one day of a frame with honey, pollen, eggs, larvae and capped brood … this was has everything except the last item!
Bottom centre: We were given this old wooden box by our teacher Rolf. Thomas built a stand for it and we use it to offload frames while we inspect the hives – it gives us a little more working space.
Bottom right: The working box is turned upside down when we are done.
No dramatic change in the health of the hives, except that we seem to have lost the super productive queen in the A-hive. She’s been missing for at least 8 days, possibly more. As luck would have it, we ordered two queens way back in April and they will arrive this week, so we will place one of them in the A-hive and one in a queenless split which have kept (aka the F-hive), standing behind the house. It’s a real shame the A-hive queen has gone missing – she might have been moved accidentally when Thomas made a split from this hive on 28 June. He was working alone and in a rush. We also made two 3 frame nucs from this hive which we put on the upper balcony, and one of them now has a laying queen in it, so we combined the two nucs into a 6 frame nuc box.
We sold three of the splits which was great as the person who bought them just wanted bees and brood, not a queen. Of all the nucs and splits we have made this summer – in which we inserted queen cells found in the A-, B- and C-hives – only one has produced a queen.
So now we’ve gone from 5 hives, 4 splits and 2 nucs down to 5 hives, 1 split and 1 nuc. The 5 main hives in the front garden are all busy producing honey; some more than others, but we should have some more harvestable honey next weekend. We’ve already sold some of the honey we harvested on 24 June; I’ve also sent a small quantity away for pollen testing.
beekeepers 