International Day of The Bee
I only discovered recently that May 20th is dedicated to World Bee Day. And why not? Bees are fantastic little creatures who do so much good in the world.
Five facts about honey bees specifically:
Bees have a sense of smell 50 times more powerful than that of a dog.
Because of the above amazing sense of smell they can be trained to detect explosives and landmines etc. Whaatttt?!?!
Queen bees can lay between 2000-3000 eggs a day.
Worker bees can fly up to 20 miles per hour.
Healthy beehives can house between 20-80,000 honey bees.
And it’s about these bees I want to talk. Last June while sat outside in the garden on a warm afternoon with the kiddos, there was this sudden deafening noise like a military plane was heading our way. I looked up and the sky was black with bees that had swarmed. I yelled for everyone to get inside and to shut all the windows. Then they disappeared or so I thought. Forty-eight hours later, back they came and this time they decided a gap in our flat roof was a good doorway to a new world. You could hear them buzzing inside the kitchen, their legs were coming down out of light fittings and fixtures. It was WILD!
My husband went up a few doors to a neighbour who keeps bees to see if they were his. Turns out they were his friend’s bees, so he called his friend who came within an hour or so and tried all the tricks of the bee trade to entice those bees out and into new hive so he could take them with him. He tried smoking them out, lemongrass essential oil (who knew this was attractive to bees), everything. There is a very small window of time, either 24-48 hours in which this will work if it’s going to work. Well, queen bee wasn’t going anywhere. She was quite happy in our flat roof thank you very much.
We were told the only other solution was take the felt off the flat roof and have them extracted that way, but that they should die off over winter if we left them. So leave them we did.
Then comes spring of 2025, and I look out the window one bright morning to find that instead of dying off they’d multiplied and were having a great time and creating quite the buzz around the hive entrance. So we started phoning around for someone to come and remove them resigning ourselves to the fact that our flat roof would need to come off. We then discovered that we had to wait for just the right temperatures otherwise the extraction could kill the bees.
Bee extraction begins
Finally the time was right and three people arrived one April Sunday with a Henry hoover and various other bits and bobs to remove the bees. With a bit of deduction they discovered that the bees were right at the front behind the fascia boards and if luck was on our side and our beams ran horizontally and not vertically then all they would need to remove was the boards itself. As it so happened, Lady Luck was on our side-hurrah for a less expensive and time consuming job!
They started taking off the board and soon they have the first piece of honeycomb removed. They children got a full morning’s intro to bee hives and keeping and delighted in trying the honeycomb.
It was super fascinating to see how they had structured their hive inside the roof, and I was surprised and maybe slightly disappointed with the amount of honey that came out as move of the hive was bees in various stages of development.
The bees got gently vacuumed up into a new temporary hive home and were taken away to be rehired in an apiary with Mansfield Honey Bees. One day, we would like to ensure into bee keeping…perhaps in a proper hive though.
For the 10 months we had them sharing our we gained an even greater appreciation for them, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t happy that they’d been moved to more appropriate accommodation. Our neighbour is also relieved as she is highly allergic and couldn’t open her back windows for fear of them coming in.