I finally went and trickled oxalic acid on the bees. It was very tempting to leave it another day, since my cold seemed to have staged a resurgence in the night, but you are supposed to do it while they don't have any brood, which generally means shortly after Christmas, and the weather was right this morning, not too windy, not so cold that the bees would freeze and me with them in the time it took to open the hives, but cold enough that they would be clustered together. The instructions for applying oxalic acid say the temperature must be over 3 degrees Celsius, and tell you to trickle a measured amount over each seam of bees, which means the dense mass of bees you see between the combs when they are all huddled together for warmth. It is a rather beautiful expression, seam of bees. Obviously on a relatively warm day when the bees are moving around the hive or even flying then you aren't going to get any seams to trickle over.
If you are a small scale beekeeper then you buy the acid ready mixed to the correct dilution, not long before you plan to use it, since it doesn't keep very well. It has the effect of killing varroa mites, being much more toxic to them than it is to honey bees. Bizarrely, despite the UK government's warm words on the importance of pollinators and for reasons best known to themselves, it has not got round to licencing oxalic acid as a veterinary medicine for the treatment of varroa infestations in bee colonies, although it is widely used here and on the Continent and is approved in several European countries. So you cannot legally apply oxalic acid in the UK as a mite treatment. But you can apply it as a hive cleanser, so in late December and early in the New Year many UK beekeepers, myself included, go out and cleanse our beehives with oxalic acid.
The bees do not like it. I can't blame them. I wouldn't like it myself if in the middle of winter somebody came and lifted the roof of my house and trickled dilute acid over me. On the whole, given that while they weren't choosing to fly today it was just warm enough that they could if they had to, they were pretty good about it, but they weren't happy. I wouldn't normally lift the crown boards off the hives at this time of the year, since they are trying to keep warm, but since I had to it was interesting to see how differently the colonies behaved. The little dark bees, that are always a bit peppy when I inspect them in the summer, though not vicious, were the most active, sending one solitary guard out when I first touched the hive, though she didn't seem to think much of outside and soon went in again. As I began to trickle they began to spill out above the combs, though not too much, and a few flew around my head.
The lovely, large, late swarm that bulked up rapidly after arriving stayed firmly put inside the hive, as did one of the more productive colonies, merely making a defensive gesture and pointing their bottoms at me. They both had nice tight clusters, whereas the golden bees that are always late to get going in the spring seemed to be all over the place in their hive. One of the two colonies that resulted from a bungled split had more seams of bees than I was expecting and looked far stronger than the other. I meant to unite them at the end of last season, but dithered and put it off until it was too late, so if they both make it through the winter I know which queen to keep next year when I do unite them.
Winter losses vary wildly from year to year and between beekeepers. Last season I went into the winter with four hives of bees, and all four were still alive come the spring. One proved to have gone queenless, but did what the textbooks say they will do and experienced beekeepers will warn you they don't always, and made themselves a new queen when given a frame with fresh eggs from another hive. The same thing happened in a previous year, but they didn't cooperate with the eggs so I lost the colony, which I looked on as a sort of delayed winter loss. I've never lost more than one hive in a winter, though when you only have three or four that's still a high percentage. I went into this winter with six colonies as a result of my attempts at swarm control and picking up that late swarm, which is too many. I don't have time to look after them all and, crucially, I don't have enough equipment.
I prepared my bees diligently for winter. I fed them, and put guards on their hives to keep mice out, and now I am treating them for their most serious pest - sorry, I meant that I am cleansing their hives. I want them to be healthy, and am trying to give them every chance to live. But if they all come through the winter I am going to have to condense them. And if I should lose one then I'll look on it as a natural winnowing process.
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