Thursday 23 February 2012

bees and bamboo

Today felt like spring.  I went to see the bees, and to my pleasure they were alive and flying from all three hives.  I was particularly impressed that the little colony in the nucleus hive, only half the size of a normal beehive, has made it this far.  They appeared as a swarm late last season, and by autumn were not nearly as large as my bee instructor told me a colony needed to be to come through the winter.  However, there was nothing to do about that, short of risking upsetting one of the established colonies by trying to combine them, so I fed them and left them to take their chance.  It looks like they may have seized it with all six legs and both wings.

I didn't open the hives fully.  It would probably have been just about warm enough for a very brief inspection if I've absolutely had to, but I didn't.  There's a risk they may have lost their queens during the winter, in which case there is no future for them, unless I intervene with a replacement, but they probably haven't.  Instead I gave each of them a 2.5kg lump of fondant, a soft paste of sucrose, glucose syrup and invert sugar syrup, which is supposed to be easy for them to digest, and not to require them to collect too much water to use it.  Stored honey by this stage can be rock hard, and require the bees to gather water to dilute it before they can eat it.  The fondant comes in plastic bags similar to vacuum packs, which are peculiarly resistant to being cut open with kitchen scissors.  The brand is called ambrosia (which makes me think of tinned rice pudding) and is German.  On the side of the box it says Bienenfutterteig, which translates as Feed Paste, and in smaller letters Einzfuttermittel,  which less felicitously translates as Single feeding stuff.  You put it on top of the crown board over one of the holes leading down into the body of the beehive, and they come up and collect what they want.

I bought the fondant a while back, when I was concerned that the unseasonably warm weather might be leading the bees to be more active and use more stores than they would normally, at a time when there wasn't much forage.  My bee tutor said that they knew what they were doing and would be fine, and then it turned cold again and a friend warned me that they wouldn't touch the fondant when it was that cold.  Then I began to feel so tired and unwell I decided to believe my bee tutor and leave them to get on with it, but today felt like paying them a visit.  It was very nice to see them, and fairly soon it'll be time to have a look inside each hive, and find out what's going on.  If I see them bringing in pollen in the meantime that will be a good sign that they are likely to be feeding brood.  They were foraging today, working the crocus in the bottom lawn and the hellebores, even the new ones in pots that are still stood in the porch.

I worked at weeding the damp bed.  I still call it the Gunnera bed, even though the Gunnera died a couple of years ago.  They grow from a great scaly core, like a rhubarb crown on steroids, which is vulnerable to cold in severe winters, rotting if it gets too wet, and being eaten by voles.  I have a replacement sitting in a pot in the greenhouse awaiting planting when the milder weather arrives.  Before planting anything it is necessary to remove the excess yellow stemmed bamboo, which has run far beyond its intended space.  Its name is Phyllostachys aureosulcata 'Aureocaulis', and if you are ever offered one I should treat it with the respect it deserves.  Once I've hacked mine back to a quantity of bamboo I consider appropriate, I am going to try and check its future wanderings by sinking two rolls of galvanised lawn edging around it.  It may of course attempt to burrow under or climb over the lawn edging, but at least that will give me a boundary to work to.  I shall have to be vigilant.  The way this bamboo spreads is to send out horizontal shoots only just below the surface of the soil.  These periodically send down roots, and a new vertical stem arises from that point, which gradually thickens into a large woody plate.  The roots do not go deep, but in established parts of the clump they are extremely firmly attached to the ground.  It's no good trying to fork them out, you would just break the fork handle, and a pick axe is required.  Bafflingly and rather frustratingly, while the yellow stemmed bamboo has gone wild, the black stemmed Phyllostachys nigra planted in the same bed keeps dying out in patches, and has never made a good clump.

Self seeded willows have shot up in this bed, and reached a considerable size remarkably quickly.  I should have hauled them all out last summer, but never got round to it.  Fortunately their trunks and roots are comparatively soft, quick to saw through and to chop through with the pick axe.  The bamboo roots are tough as hell.  I have heard of really rampant clumps that could only be removed with explosives.

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