Last week we left a small gap between the brood box and crown board to let our bees munch on a bit of honeycomb. When we opened the hive today we found out that our bees do read the books after all…

Golden rolling waves of rogue honeycomb

‘Give bees a space and they will fill it.’

Our ladies built these beautiful honeycomb structures in less than a week and were already filling them with honey.

Sadly we had to take away their handiwork as we needed to remove the gap and close the brood box. A few puffs of smoke persuaded our bees to leave their newly made larder, which we scraped off with our hive tools…

Our bees enjoy making their own honeycomb creations free from the foundation of the frames

I enjoy seeing our bees build rogue comb because it gives a clue about what it might be like inside a wild honeybee colony.

It won’t be long before we close our hives for winter. I will miss seeing our bees’ cute faces peering up at us, but we’ll catch glimpses of them nibbling fondant under the roof.

Between now and then, we’ll need to keep feeding them lots of syrup to make sure that they have enough stores inside the brood box for overwintering. We found five frames of honey in Rosemary’s hive today. Each colony needs about 35lb of honey and I read that one frame weighs about 6.5lb, so we are nearly there.

It started to spit with rain before we could open Lavender’s hive so we topped up the feeder with ambrosia syrup and left our ladies to enjoy a sugary slurp.