Sunday 26 April 2015

poised for action, weather permitting

Once the Systems Administrator had drilled holes in the metal covers for the beehive roofs the rest of the construction went together really easily.  I finished assembling my fifty frames, as far as I could with only three sheets of wax foundation to go in them, and have sent off for some more foundation and another roof and entrance block.  With the complete frames left over from last year and the three I did this morning I have enough for a full size hive and a half sized nuc.  I've got two nucs, three brand new spare brood boxes and an emergency fourth consisting of an old national hive with an extra inch and a half stuck on top so that it can take the larger commercial sized frames.  I have spare floors, though they are solid and not my preferred open mesh, three complete roofs, spare crown boards and entrance blocks, and some sturdy ekes normally used for holding food buckets in the autumn that will do as makeshift stands.  I am all set to try and control swarms, except that if next week's weather forecast is right it won't be warm enough to open the bees.

In the longer run I need more open mesh floors, some more proper stands, a couple more entrance blocks and probably some more crown boards.  And the discipline to unite colonies come this autumn if they all make it through the summer so that I don't go into next winter with as many as six colonies, let alone more.  The trouble is that most methods of swarm control leave you with two sets of bees where there was only one before.  Pick up a swarm or two and you can find your number of hives has doubled in the course of a season.  For every hive you really need to reckon on having a spare, for use at this time of the year when they're thinking about swarming.  It's easy to end up perpetually short of kit.

As the treasurer of the local beekeepers I see how many hives all the members own up to when I'm processing their bee disease insurance payments, and it never ceases to surprise me the number who reckon they won't have more than three colonies at any stage of the year.  If you start the season with more than one you are quite likely to get up to at least four at some point, if you want to either do artificial swarms or simply split your colonies to prevent them swarming.  I fear many people must do what I've done myself often enough in the past, which is to stare anxiously into their beehives, conclude they don't know what the bees are doing or if they've already done it, and leave them to get on with it.  You will probably not lose all your bees that way, but you're unlikely to get much honey, and the bees you do lose may end up causing a nuisance to somebody.

The day was so cold and dank that I gave up on my plan of working in the greenhouse when I'd finished with the beehive equipment, and began to tackle the mess on my desk instead.  Apparently the UK is going to be hit by an Arctic Plume.  I think I'll hold off on buying new pelargoniums for the pots by the pond for another week or two.

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