Trehenna from Glenholm.

We had glorious weather for our annual heather picnic at Glenholm today. It is a beekeeping meeting but, these days, there are seldom any bees there. It so happens that beekeepers second favourite pastime is chatting and so is always a worthwhile event.

Two of our newer members reported on some creative techniques they had been using to cure the problem of laying workers; they are obviously going to be, or already are, very good beekeepers having increased their stock from two colonies to eight as well as taking a good honey crop in their first full season. They had a spare queen while a neighbour, for unexplained reasons, had a queenless colony that had gone on to produce laying workers. It is the accepted wisdom that, once a colony has reached this stage, it is doomed; the workers, being unmated, can only produce (very inferior) drones and will not accept a new queen. Their solution was to remove the affected colony, put a new hive in its place and put the new queen with some of her own workers in it. They then removed each frame, in turn, from the old hive and shook the bees off it onto the ground. The bees then returned to the site of their old home where they were accepted by the new colony which was then both queenright and had a large population of bees. The procedure is not in any of the literature but, it's simple, obvious, and sheer genius.
This particular couple are rather curious in that they name their queens, they have Morticia, Wednesday and, for some strange reason, Thursday. Perhaps they've just not come across Grandmama, the third female member of the Addams family.

This evening, after it had started raining, I went out to the car to fetch the camera; I noticed that there were not the usual masses of slugs and snails that inhabit the garden when it's wet. Then, I found the most enormous hedgehog. It was the first time that I had actually observed the evolutionary phenomenon of which I was already aware: instead of rolling up into a ball - it scuttled off into the undergrowth; I do hope that prevents it being run over.

The Blip is from our picnic site, also covered by Janes11.