Welcome to Canalside Community Bees

Welcome to Canalside Community Bees! We are a cooperative bee club, or a honey CSA (Community Supported Apiculture!). Members of Canalside Community Bees invest at the start of the year to buy the required equipment. Through the year members get involved in managing the bees, building hives, planting bee friendly flora, harvesting honey and making use of hive products. Honey share members pay extra to get a share of the honey at harvest time.

We keep our bees on the site of Canalside Community Food (www.canalsidecommunityfood.org.uk/), a Community Supported Agriculture project just outside Leamington Spa. We are starting out this year (2012) with 4 hives and hope to expand as soon as the season gets going.

Friday 29 June 2012

Another swarm!!

Dinah and I collected another swarm yesterday. Its a big one and we put it in the top bar hive. Again? you might be thinking? Well the first one we put in the top bar hive flew off the next day. The second swarm we put in the top bar hive didnt seem to have a queen so we had to transfer to a national hive and gave a frame of eggs and they are happy there now with a new queen. So this is the third swarm to be installed. Hopefully third time lucky!

Thursday 14 June 2012

Report on R4 World at One

I heard an interesting short report on bees on the World at One today. All beekeepers are struggling with the poor weather we have had so far this year. It might make you more sympathetic to the fact that we might not have much honey to harvest this year unless the weather improves!! 
The link is here - and the report was at around minute 21:20