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It is terribly late and I still have the slight smell of smoke around me from my latest trip in the apiary (that smell has already become synonymous to my weekly trips to the apiary, quite a distinctive and not at all unpleasant smoky smell). Quite an exciting day today as I got the chance to actually lift out a frame from a hive and have a real look around. Quite amazing really as I am sure in a few weeks time, once I have my own bees, this will be second nature. For the time being however I still get a little bit nervous.

It was a really nice session however with wonderful weather to enjoy the evening of hive investigation. All the groups split up and tend the same hive each week to see how it is getting on. Sadly our hive is not really doing very much and the poor queen is running the risk of being dethroned by her own daughters in favour of a new queen. We shall wait with baited breath until next week…

I have to say I did a mental survey this week. You may remember from before that I stated that I feared beekeepers would be mostly old, bearded, slightly rotund would mostly be ale drinkers (though the new fashionable ones would be cider drinkers!) and would have a penchant for morris dancers. I would like to report that tonight’s session had only a few of these types. I would say about 40% were female (none had beards) and only about 20% of the men had beards. Due to the fact that none of them started to dance about with bells on their legs or had handkerchiefs in hand I would also doubt that many of them were aspiring morris dancers either. A positively normal bunch of people then

This is probably bias because some of the lovely ladies who I had spoken to previously and mentioned the blog had commented on when the next one was going to be. They were all slim, young attractive and beautiful. Quite the opposite of what I have been describing all along!

Suffice to say they were all very pleasant including the bunch that I accidentally went to the pub with afterwards. That was an interesting drink while others around me recounted war stories of beekeeping – certainly very entertaining excluding the one about the gentleman who was stung in the eye. Apparently he got all puffed up, lips went blue, foaming at the mouth and was then rushed to hospital but was all okay in the end! Ouch, time for me to go home and dream nice dreams!

All in all a lovely evening and the count down has started……not long now till I get my own.