As winter’s hush melted into a jubilant spring, our beekeeping dream unfurled its brightest pennants. What began as a whisper has crescendoed into glorious technicolour: brilliant hives clad in King’s scarlet and azure, and – at long last – a chorus of honey‑scented wings.

March–April 2025 – Hives in Transit, Brushes Aflame

The first warm stirrings of March found us pacing the gates in delicious anticipation. At dawn on the 4^th a lorry rumbled in, stacked high with flat‑packed cedar – our future apiary in fragrant pieces. We swooped upon the planks like jubilant magpies, ferrying each component to the workshop where sawdust danced in sunbeams.

Over the ensuing weekends the hive bodies rose, dovetail bumping dovetail with clockwork precision. Yet timber alone would not do – King’s hives must sing! And so a phalanx of paint‑splattered volunteers took up brushes, baptising every roof and brood‑box in our battle colours: a stately royal blue kissed with daring crimson trim. Passers‑by gasped, teachers applauded, and more than one curious bee alighted to inspect our handiwork.

May 2025 – Apis mellifera Takes the Stage

Then, on a dew‑pearled morning in early May, the pièce de résistance arrived: two nucleus colonies, each thrumming with twenty‑thousand restless workers and a queen as regal as any monarch on Founders’ Day. We unveiled our freshly adorned hives, the paint barely dry but gleaming beneath a benevolent sun.

With reverent care we guided each buzzing cohort into its new palace. The bees poured forth in shimmering arcs, circled inquisitively, and – with a collective sigh of approval – began to map their crimson doorways. By noon the apiary pulsed with purpose: foragers decanting into blue‑trimmed alighting boards, guards flexing their wings, queens purring contentedly in the gloom. Our odyssey had crossed another bright threshold.

What Next? – Summer’s Golden Horizon

Ahead lies the sweet labour of expansion: supers to build, comb to draw, and meadows to seed with pollen‑rich blooms. Yet for this shining moment we simply stand, awed spectators to a ballet of wings, hearts swelling in time with every triumphant hum.