I have my hive!

I got my first colony from Deborah, a local beekeeper.  It's quite a small colony - about 4 frames of bees, so I needed to build it up.

I fed the colony with sugar syrup - one kilo of white sugar to 0.5 litre of water - and was amazed that they ate that within two days and then proceeded to eat a kilo of sugar a day.

Well, I say "eat". I mean "store" and "use".  When I opened the hive after about two weeks, the bees had drawn out quite a bit of the additional foundation that I had added and created a lot of capped stores (ie the sugar put into cells in the comb and sealed off, for later consumption).