My bees have been making the most of the recent mild sunny weather. Although we are still officially in winter they think it is spring. The first warm sunny day of the year with bees foraging on the snowdrops in the wood is cheering and usually sees my first bee photos of the year.
Snowdrops produce a lot of pollen and the bees get plastered in it. As a result they have to spend a lot of time cleaning up. The photos and videos provide an opportunity to see how they do it, typically hanging from a flower by one front foot and using the other five legs to move the pollen back and stow it in the corbiculae.
Here are a couple of videos.
When all is done they fly back to the hives to unload - only a few metres away.
It is normal to see a few dead bees outside the hives at this time of year. Any winter bees that haven't made it through the winter are pushed out of the entrance by the undertakers. However, this afternoon I was surprised to see one corpse outside hive 3 that looked a bit larger than the others.
When I turned it over it was the queen. She was marked last summer and was present and correct at my last inspection at the end of September.
Obviously something has gone wrong but I won't be able to do an inspection for the next few weeks. I expect to find either that the queen was superseded and there is a new unmarked queen, or that the new queen was produced too late to get mated and is a drone-layer, or that the colony is queenless. If I find anything interesting I'll report back here.
