I took a trip into the hills above Cajamarca city in the highlands of northern Peru late last year with Rider, a local beekeeper, to visit his hives and to see how his bees were doing. In the shadow of the new mega copper mines of Michiquillay, we visited his the colonies at his country house and he showed me how to care for the hives- how to check that each hive had a queen either present or on the way and how to move frames between hives to ensure that each hive would have only one queen – a hive without queen or with too many queens and you risk losing your bees as they will swarm and leave you with an empty hive.
