It wasn't wax moth. Turning the frame round to examine the far side I loosed a loud expletive as I was unpleasantly surprised to find a huge spider a few inches from my hand. It wasn't one of those inoffensive raisins on skinny leg type spiders we see so much of, this was a fat legged, silvery grey refugee from Middlearth. Luckily she was busy with a worker bee. Her web making skills weren't up to much but there was another cocooned bee and an egg sac in there too. I'm certainly not arachnophobic but it's fair to say I'm not hugely keen on finding large unexpected spiders near to my fingers -the latex gloves I was wearing suddenly felt far too thin.
Initially I decided to try and take a photograph but quickly changed my mind. Like I said she was pretty big and I thought she might nick my camera. I also didn't want her to run onto me or to escape near the hives to spend the rest of the year chewing on my workers. Holding the frame at arms length I rushed over to the patio and with one welly booted foot kicked her off and stamped on her. To any onlookers I imagine it was just like that bit in The Lord of the Rings where Samwise Gamgee defeated Shelob.With a hivetool I removed the mess of webbing and as I didn't want a tribe of spiderlings feasting on my bees I lit the blowtorch and took take care of the egg sac.
After a lot of Googling I think what I'd found was a particularly large female Mouse Spider. They're called Mouse Spiders because their grey velvety fur looks a little like that of a mouse, well a little like a mouse if you overlook the fact it's got no tail, 8 legs, 8 eyes, fangs, mandibles and makes webs. They're one of the few venomous spiders in the UK that can bite humans and as English arachnids go I gather they're rather aggressive. Hope not to encounter any more of them this year.
With that unpleasant little experience in the past I found another visitor to the hives this week. Inspecting Hive1 I'd removed the Demaree and the Super and had just moved two frames onto a perch to give me room to work in the hive when a black hairy shape poked up between the dummy board and the hive wall. I stopped work to see what happened next and up popped a very large bumble bee being harried by a few workers. Going by the colouring and the size I'm pretty sure it was a Tree Bumble Bee (Bombus Hypnorum) Queen.
Whilst the Bumble Bee is far bigger than the Honey Bees it was hugely out numbered. She was actually far too big to fit in the bee space between the frames and at one point tried to go back into the larger gap between the dummy board and hive wall. The workers clung to her and I think were probably biting her, don't think any actually managed to sting her - perhaps she was too heavily armoured for them. In the end the she managed to fly away.
Tree Bumblebee Queen vs. Honeybee Workers
I'd expected the honey bees to be a bit more proactive on the home defence front with alarm pheromones triggering lots aggro and the mature bees going onto a war footing but that wasn't the case at all, they were no more feisty for the rest of the hive inspection than any other time.
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