New Honey Bees! - Trevenna

Cornish Honey Bees

During late April 2020, we took delivery of 3 new colonies of rare Cornish Black Honey Bees to be housed in 3 new wooden hives.

Oh yes, we are counting the days for our first Trevenna Honey!

Bees are Vital

Bees do not just produce honey (this is the bonus pot!), bees are vital to our way of life because they pollinate food crops and wild flowers and fertilise plants so they can produce fruit, vegetables and seeds.

Keeping hives is one of the steps we are making to support bees in addition to planting more nectar-rich flowers, shrubs and trees, by leaving our gardens blooming, cutting the grass less outside of the main gardens close to the barns, and refraining from using pesticides in the gardens.

Wooden Hives

Over the Winter of 2019, we put together 3 new wooden bee hives and placed them in a quiet corner of Trevenna, in a field known as Garden Meadow.

New hives waiting for the bees to arrive.

First Few Weeks

The first fews weeks were nervous times, would the bees be prepared to grow a new colony in their new hive? Or fly away!?

So far, so good!

Cornish Black Bee coming into land

Queen Bee

Each colony arrived with a Queen Bee, marked with a white dot for identification purposes.

If the Queen Bee leaves, so do the worker bees, ….

Good news, the Queen Bee has stayed in each hive while the worker bees are busy making more bees!

Queen Bee with white dot surround by her worker bees

Hives located in Garden Meadow

Increasing Colony Population

Each hive has a ‘Brood Box’ area in the lower sections of the hive, and a ‘Honey Super” area in the upper part of the hive. The Brood Box and Honey Super are divided by a metal grill.

The Queen Bee is too large to pass through the metal grill between the Brood Box andHoney Super. Therefore, the Queen Bee stays in the Brood Box and the worker bees do their business around her.

Only when the colony populations are large enough will honey production commence in the comb of the Honey Super.