The nucleus or nucs or colony of bees

Bees live in a colony. Timothy the beekeeper calls a small colony a nucleus or nucs. There are three different kinds of bees in a colony: drones, workers and the queen. Each nucleus contains one queen bee: the only egg producing female bee in the hive. Depending on the season there are up to a few thousand drone bees: fertile males and tens of thousands sterile female bees, the worker bees which produce and shape the wax honeycomb on the frame. The queen has a spermatheca, a reproductive organ to receive and store the sperm from drones. Using the sperm selectively she actually choses which of the eggs she lays is fertilized. Drones develop from unfertilized eggs while future queens and worker bees are born out of fertilized eggs. Queen, drones and workers are different from each other. The trained eye of the beekeeper can tell them apart.

Anaesthesizing the bees

The Styrofoam starter hive was placed on top of his neighbour to make room for the brand new wooden hive that will be the bees permanent home. Timothy the beekeeper gives every year a different colour to the hives he makes himself. This one should have been a bright pink as he assured me it was this year’s colour. But it had a brown tarnish: ‘Store bought,’ he said. What a pity. I love a bit of the old pink. The lid was off the Styrofoam box but before he was able to move the swarm from the one hive to the next Timothy had to give them a dose of the anaesthesizing smoke from the bellows.

The starter hives

Timothy Stevens the beekeeper also took out of his van a nifty homemade folding bench that he calls a hive stand. It made an open and level platform about a foot off the ground for the two hives to sit on and be secure. Finally he took out the two hives. They were disappointingly small. One was made out of wood and looked the part somehow, but the other looked more like a Styrofoam cool box. ‘They are starter hives with small swarms in them. The swarms will grow in size over the summer,’ Timothy explained. ‘By July they will have reached full force and are ready to produce honey. By then more storeys will have been added to the wooden hive and the Styrofoam box will be replaced by a wooden hive. The population of bees will have grown to sixty thousand.’ I was impressed.

Polranny Pirates hear about bees

Like all things momentous, having bees in the garden of the Polranny Pirates' hide-away started quite innocuous. It was on one of the days between Christmas and New Year that Ken and Toke Stevens from Newport came to dinner with the Polranny Pirates. Toke told us about the exploits of her children who we know since they were born, but lost sight of after they grew up. Timothy, the eldest, his mother said, was into bees; in a rather serious way, actually. Wow! Bees! That sounded interesting. Bees the charmingly creative, honey producing insects with a nasty painful and sometimes dangerous sting. While beekeepers, at least the one I knew, were thoughtful, patient and caring. When he was a child we used to call Timothy ‘the philosopher’ because he thoughtfully mulled over bits of information. It seemed somehow appropriate that as an adult he would get into bees. Photo: Amanda Stevens