As part of the
OTEN course on beekeeping, I had to attend a practical session at the
bee garden at Sutherland. Looking at the list of things I had to be able to do, I was rather concerned as I'd only been to a couple of field days at the North Shore Beekeepers bee garden, and never actually worked with the bees myself.
Three of us were at the practical session, and I think I had the most experience of the lot. I managed to light a smoker, open a hive, locate the queen, mark a drone, graft day-old larvae into queen cells, pick up a branch holding a swarm, and not get stung once.
Actually I did really well with the queen cell grafting - all but one of my queen cups had a cell wall built onto it next day.
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