Saturday 31 August 2013

autumn feeding

The bees had taken down their sugar syrup in twenty four hours, when I went to check on them after breakfast.  The feeders were empty, and I brought them back to the kitchen to refill them.  There are so many wasps around now, I don't want to risk pouring out syrup in the apiary.  They were particularly interested in the back of one hive, and when I looked more closely I saw that I hadn't quite lined up the eke with the crown board beneath, and there was an almost-wasp sized hole, with the face of a guard bee on the far side of it.  I carefully shifted the eke by a centimetre to close the gap.

An eke is an empty box that you put on top of the brood box, when you are feeding using bucket feeders, to support the roof.  If you don't have one, the roof won't even make contact with the rest of the beehive, but will be left wobbling around on top of the plastic bucket.  I have used spare brood boxes in the past, but don't always have that much unused equipment.  A couple of years ago the Systems Administrator made me some extra boxes out of recycled decking, that are pretty much the same size as the brood box.  They wouldn't do as part of the permanent beehive with frames of comb in, as that has to be accurately sized down to the last couple of millimetres, to allow the bees to move freely within the hive without encouraging them to build random bits of comb in the spaces they consider unacceptably large, while if it is too small you risk rolling and crushing bees trying to get the frames out.  But they are perfect for feeding.

I made more syrup yesterday, to give it time to cool down for today.  The trouble is, the stock pot does not hold nearly enough.  Yesterday I pressed the pasta saucepan into service as well.  The jam pan would hold more, but doesn't have a lid, and leaving an uncovered pan of syrup lying around would be asking for trouble with all the wasps.  There were never fewer than six buzzing around the kitchen as I made up another batch of syrup, but they were not at all aggressive.  I should not tempt fate, since I'll probably be stung tomorrow, but it seems to me that they aren't, on the whole.  If you don't flap and swat at them, they seem happy to ignore you, and just buzz around looking for anything sweet.  It is still a nuisance, having endless bags of sugar in the kitchen, which always seem to leak a few grains, and pans of sugar syrup, which always drips, and the wasps, and I can see the appeal of buying my syrup ready-made, if I knew where to get any locally.

Apparently earlier in the season when they are raising young the adult wasps feed on a sugary excretion produced by the larvae.  That seems quite odd, viewed from a human perspective, since you could argue about whether they are tending their young or farming them  The adult wasps only start attacking fruit, beehives, and anywhere else they can find sweet stuff late in the summer when the queen wasp has stopped laying and there are no more larvae to tend (or farm).  They feed the larvae on flesh, a key difference between wasps and bees.

I have to go on offering the bees syrup until they won't move any more down into the hive.  This could take some time.

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