The Bass Rock.

Another day for Mrs TD's patchwork, this time in Dunbar. While there, Merlin and myself went for a stroll along the start of the John Muir Way which included a happy hour or so scrambling over some rocks on a small deserted beach. The sun came out as the afternoon progressed, I was alerted to the fact by a phone call from a friend who had promised me a swarm of bees, one had just emerged from one of his hives. A swarm will normally leave the parent colony at about two o'clock on a warm sunny afternoon; you can just about set your watch by it. He had put it in a skep (a raffia basket that used to be used to house bees) by the simple expedient of placing it underneath the branch occupied by the bees then giving the branch a good bang. The bees fall into the basket with a sort of a splash and, after a minute or so, you can turn the basket upside-down onto a board and wedge its edge up so that there’s a gap through which the remaining bees can enter. Assuming that you have caught the queen, it's quite straight forward; later on, usually in the evening, you can pick up the skep (still upside-down) and carry your prize away, and they won't even fall out. I arrived at eight o'clock and we put the bees into my hive and then drank coffee and chatted until the temperature had dropped sufficiently, then put them into the car and brought them home.

There are two basic methods of putting the bees into a hive:
First there’s the right one, which involves knocking the bees out of the skep onto a board that slopes up to the hive entrance, the bees will run up the hill and into the hive; if you are lucky, you will see what looks like a hole in the dark mass running up - and in the middle of this hole is a single bee, the queen.
The other method is the one that everybody uses, you remove the hive lid, bang the bees in and put the lid back on - it lacks a certain amount of subtlety but, since both methods involve a big bang, there's probably not a lot to choose between them.

I now have an occupied beehive in my back garden, it's not too clever as our neighbours have young grand-children who visit fairly frequently and I haven't had a chance to talk to them about it yet. I do have a permanent home for them but the move might not be convenient until the end of the week. As the bees only carry a bellyful of food each when they swarm, they will need feeding first thing in the morning in case the weather isn't suitable for foraging, they will want a lot as they must convert it to wax to build the urgently needed honeycomb.

The blip was taken from Dunbar.