I finally got round to putting mouse guards on the beehives today. I should have done it weeks ago, according to the books, but the autumn has been so mild that the bees have been pretty active, and I didn't think they'd have any truck with mice setting up home in their hives. Any mouse that goes in there at the moment would soon be stung to death, to judge from the quantity of irate bees I had on my wrists as I fiddled with the hive entrances. Once the weather gets cold, though, they will cluster together for warmth, living on their stores and not doing much, and then a mouse could wander around inside, eating through the comb and generally playing havoc.
The entrance to a beehive looks quite small, when the entrance block is in and they're limited to the little slot cut in it, but my beekeeping tutor and the books and magazines always emphasise that a mouse can squeeze through an amazingly tiny gap. The mouse guard is a metal plate you put over the entrance to make it smaller still, so that it really is too tight for a mouse to get through. My smart ones from the beekeeping supplies catalogue are galvanised strips that go the full width of the hive, with polka dot holes just large enough for a bee. You put them over the entrance and secure them with drawing pins, job done, and while I was at it I made sure I had the entrance blocks arranged so that the slot was at the top, not the bottom, as advised by legendary former Essex county bee tutor Ted Hooper. Some bees die in the hive over the winter, and when it's not too cold to break out of the cluster the other bees will remove the bodies from the hive to keep things clean and hygienic. You do not want them to block their own door with dead bees, and Hooper thought this was less likely if the entrance hole was raised half an inch above floor level.
The bees did not want to have their entrance blocks turned over, or the hive body shifted three eighths of an inch on the base so that the front was perfectly aligned with the entrance block, the better to push in the drawing pins. They showed their displeasure at being disturbed on a cool, damp morning by coming and buzzing round my head more aggressively than they usually do, and by trying to sting me through my gloves. It is not easy manipulating a drawing pin wearing leather gloves and bent double to reach a beehive entrance below knee level, with rows of would-be assassin bees perched on your wrists and crawling a few inches from your face.
My less smart mouse guards are strips of perforated zinc my tutor gave me when I started off, which are pinned to the front of the hive above the entrance to narrow it. I didn't have enough of the posh guards to go round, and had to put the zinc on for now, but I ordered some more galvanised ones when I got back to the house. The beekeeping supplier was not offering Black Friday discounts on mouse guards, or anything else, but looking on the bright side I've already had an email to say that my order has been dispatched, so should arrive tomorrow or Monday. I don't suppose the bees will be any more thrilled to see me then than they were today.
The Systems Administrator was originally going to do the weekend's food shopping, but after reading about the Black Friday supermarket riots we agreed that that tinned soup would be fine for lunch. Better not to go anywhere near Colchester until the hysteria has died down.
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