We spent Monday and Tuesday this week up in the Riverland again visiting a couple of apiaries that are now on the tail end of the orange blossom season. Due to a number of factors the bees hadn’t increased their honey supplies by as much as we had expected over the past month. It had been untypically cool which means the bees don’t fly as much and the orange trees don’t produce as much nectar. We also found some old queens who were way past their prime and due to that their colonies had become quite small and not so strong.

I got to see for the first time the results of a drone laying queen. Drones are male bees who’s single purpose is to mate with new queens. Other than that they don’t really seem to contribute much towards the greater good of the hive. They don’t work like their sisters, no nectar and pollen collection, but they’re definitely happy to eat the hives supplies. Usually this doesn’t pose too big a problem because drones will just make up a very small percentage of the colonly. Now in the case of a drone laying queen, she’s become so old that the eggs she’s laying thinking that they’ll be workers end up as drones because she can no longer fertalise them. As you can imagine when the last of the hard working female bees are gone and only their hungry brothers are left to run the hive their productivity goes downhill pretty fast.

We headed out to a site near Yumali which the Valkenburg brothers had been working on a couple of weeks ago and they’d told us that there was alot of swarming going on there. As we arrived Tim noticed a swarm swaying in the breeze on a Mallee branch and that was just the start of it. There were six more hidden amongst the trees and plenty of broken branches from where the swarms had been too big for the Mallee to support. With a bit of improvisation and box juggling, Tim managed to save all but one of the swarms we found.

Tim holding a swarm capured hanging in a Mallee tree

Sitting inside the truck we've escaped the bees for now

Tim and I were busy working at trying to give the bees some more space in their hives to stop them from swarming when a dust cloud rolled in just a couple days after the big dust storms in Sydney. It’s the right time of the year for hives to swarm as they’re filling up honey and the queens are busily laying new brood, but as soon as a hive has swarmed you’ve lost half the workforce and the colonly will have to build itself up again. That’s why everytime we check through the apiary we shuffle things around a bit to give the queen and all her workers some more space.

Checking to see that the Bees have plenty of space to work

Working in a dust storm

Over population

Tim's carefully cracking open the hive to put a new box in and give the girls space to breathe

We’ve been out in the citrus orchards working amidst the sweet scent of the orange blossoms. The weather has been great and the bees also appreciate the sun shine, they’re nowhere near as grumpy as when we were opening up the hives in the overcast cool days of last week.

Orange Blossom

Tim at work

sunbathing bees

The bees are flying home as the sun sets