Turning

Beekeeping is overlapping cycles, not a story with three acts, but if the season has an end point, today was it. I've posted a picture of a queen before, and there is nothing out of the ordinary here, but - barring a crisis - this is the last time we will see a queen before March, so you have to, don't you...

We visited all the hives to remove the Varroa treatment from all of them but this one, to put an empty box of frames under each brood, as capacity for additional winter feed, and to top up the feeders with sugar syrup, to give them something to put in those frames. Ivy is in flower now, so they can collect ivy nectar for winter too

This colony is having a different Varroa treatment, which stays in place for another two or three weeks. Today I scraped the plastic surface of the treatment strips, and relocated them to a different position in the hive - which the manufacturer says increases their effectiveness. To do that, I had to lift out just one frame to get access to one of the strips, and there she was ('Of all the frames in all the hives in all the apiaries, she walks onto this one')

Of the dozen or so years we have kept bees, this has been the one with the lowest fun to anguish ratio. We have had all kinds of disasters and made all kinds of mistakes in past years, but this one has felt relentless in its disappointments and sparing in its joys. There has been more than once when the 'why bother?' feeling has bubbled to the surface. I take it as a sign of good faith, then, that this beautiful queen chose to wish us farewell and better times to come

She is offering a clear view of her long legs and her large abdomen - significantly lighter than her daughters - as she turns. Her wings, which have only ever been used for a mating flight, have caught the light beautifully. Even her ineptly-applied beauty spot has a touch of silhouette art to it. Around her you can see the fruits of her labour: sealed cells incubating new brood; open cells with pearly-white, segmented, coiled up larvae of various sizes, due to be sealed in themselves in the next few days; a contented colony around her, busying themselves with cleaning, feeding and fussing

From now on, we will continue to feed the colonies while they continue to take it. We will put a little insulation in their attic when the nights turn cold, and we will configure the entrances so that mice cannot use the hives as a winter retreat, but we will not fully open the hives again until there is spring warmth. I hope this queen is there to welcome us

The extra is a moth doing a better job of camouflage than the one I posted two weeks ago. It was only when I got home that I realised that I had missed a treat, and that that flash of colour between the wings was a hint I had missed. This is an 'Underwing moth' which means that if I had persuaded it to spread its wings and display its hindwings, I would have been treated to a riot of colour - designed to startle me into running away. Another time