Wildflowers?
Seeds are germinating in my supposed wildflower meadow. Wildflower seeds maybe! Or weeds...if there's a difference. Wonder if they will survive the frosts...did they intend to germinate in December or do they think it's spring?
Filtering by Category: Apiary CB4
Wildflowers
I have redesigned the back garden. Gone are the raised beds, the plants that were in them, and the intervening paths. This is what it looks like now:
Copper Hive and Pond Hive now visible from here, having been previously hidden behind raspberry canes.
I sowed many packets of wildflower seeds on the cleared ground, and watered them in. Watch this space!
My Neighbour's Trumpets
In October, the showiest thing in the garden is the orange trumpet plant that climbs over the top of the fence from next door. The bees love it.
A quick internet search tells me that this is Campsis radicans, the trumpet vine.
The flowers are big and bright, and they seem to be a source of both nectar and pollen. Some bees head right down into the narrow funnel of the trumpet, where there may be nectar. Others are gathering pollen from the yellow anthers further up.
But somebody else is foraging here too. This spider has captured one of the bees in a strategically located web!
The Apiary in August
As pictured here, you can see that the garden is a mess, but we enjoy a nice Sunday breakfast watching the bees.
It is late Summer and the availability of forage in the garden (for the bees at least) is reducing, but there are still some flowers around. The bees' favourite thing is the Echinops:
And they continue to forage on the remaining raspberry flowers, but most of those are now turning to fruit:
The bees are on watermint:
And on marjoram:
This forager was collecting pollen from a Japanese anemone. Look at that nice full pollen basket:
Copper Bee Apiary
Our house has a leaking roof. I bought the house over 10 years ago, and noticed the leak in the roof soon after. It still leaks today. Rain comes in. Every so often we attempt a repair. Then from time to time we get professional roofers in. No success yet.
Anyway, one day in early June 2015 I was sat thinking about how nice it would be to have a new roof. Perhaps we could redesign it. Perhaps we could have a vaulted glass roof, to let in light so that I could grow a grove of lemon trees in the sitting room. Or perhaps we could have a flat roof and I could put beehives on it. Or a green roof. Or...a copper roof. I very much like copper rooves. I like the metal copper. On the gin terrace, where the apiary began with the first hive - Cedar Hive - being set up, there is a copper rain chain hanging from the gutter to channel rain into a copper oxide glazed bowl beneath.
Imagine, a copper roof, with beehives on it. This was the germ of the idea for a name which, after some thought, became Copper Bee Apiary.
We don't have a copper roof on the house, and the old sloping tile one continues to leak. But I discovered that Thornes sell a copper roof for a beehive. To date, two of my hives have these: Copper Hive and Disc Hive. You can read about the individual hives here, including a photographic time-lapse of the oxidation of the Copper Hive roof.
Thank you Stephen Boulton
The beginning.
Read More