A New Bee-Ginning

This story hit a heartstring, even more so as this is a place that’s winning awards for what they do for nature, not just for bees but other vital and be official insects and more. Being beekeepers ourself and a nature-loving pest control company who love this park, after seeing the post we clicked comment, and this is what we said

I see your bee hives have been damaged, if your equipment is ok i will donate a swarm to you and even bring it down.

We were contacted almost immediately after this comment to see if,

1- we were serious 

2-if so what we could offer in terms of helping

The exchange went well and in case you haven’t gathered already we were as serious as can be. We came to an arrangement and started planning the logistics.

We then contacted our head beekeeper Filipe to see what we could offer them, in terms of our colonies. we didn’t want one of this year's swarms, we wanted a proven mated queen and a strong colony at that.

Backstory on Filipe, he’s the man behind of a new hive entrance called the “upstairs/downstairs intrance system”. It helps bees protect from pests and other robbing bees. He’s our mentor and has become a huge part of the shire pest solutions family. he’s our head beekeeper and a veteran, he has kept bees since 6 years of age and on three continents I believe, he’s one of the most knowledgeable beekeepers we have ever met or likely to meet.

Back to the story.

Bank holiday weekend arrived, the last of the year and we had caught up with the workload so a holiday was in order, well at least a working one. We packed the vehicle up Friday morning and arrived around two-three hours later give or take accounting for the traffic. 

We met mick the sites beekeeper with a nice surprise. We had replaced their lost swarm (which generally range from At least a hundred to a couple thousand) with a full colony at around 25,000 bees strong along with stores of food to make sure they have the best chance to survive winter. 

Whilst having the back and forth conversation in the first place we found out they had another empty hive with plans of more in the future. preparing for the future with the splitting of hives as swarm control is great, especially thinking ahead and having the plan already in place. 

An empty hive this year with solid plans already in place to get more, so what to do about that then???

We took them a second colony of course with at around 15,000 bees with stores. 

I’m not sure about who felt better in this situation us giving or them receiving them. 

Pictures speak better than words so, how about some shots of our very own Steve light with unity’s beekeeper mick. 

We stayed on Holiday Resort Unity for the weekend and lucky we did as the following day i gets a phone call as a swarm has landed on a car in the holiday park, would i be able to help of course i said yes and grabbed my gear, this picture shows some of the bees as i forgot to take a picture straight away