bees, seeds, and pests

I didn't finish clearing the strip along the side of the wood from the turning circle to the bonfire heap.  Nowhere near.  It didn't help that it began to rain after lunch, but I wouldn't have finished even if I'd had all day at it.  I suspect that to enjoy gardening, or beekeeping, you have to be an incorrigible optimist.  Everything will get done eventually, and next year it will turn out really well.

The bees are not starving.  Every hive I've lifted the lid on has been packed with extremely lively bees.  I risked taking the supers off one colony that swarmed late in the season to harvest the scrappy bit of honey they made before swarming.  I know the new young queen is present and laying because there was brood in the brood chamber when I checked last week, but she won't have time to make a vast number of new bees in what's left of the summer, so they don't need the extra space after losing around half the bees with the old queen.  I darkly suspected them of starting to move the honey down into the brood box, and thought I'd take it first.  The one way bee escapes did not do a perfect job of clearing the supers of bees, and I had to do a fair amount of shaking, banging and careful brushing to remove the last few dozen.  I waited until the rain had just started before giving them their consolation prize of a bucket of sugar syrup, so that none of the bees from the other colonies would be tempted to come and investigate.

In fact, I have never observed feeding to trigger robbing in the apiary, but I am trying to do things by the book as far as I can.  The supers on the next couple of hives I peeped into were full of bees, and I'm still not sure it would be a good idea to reduce their living space while it's so hot.  I prised up a few frames of honey to see if they were capped with wax.  If they had been that would have been a signal that the bees had reduced the moisture content far enough for the honey to last in storage without fermenting.  Most annoyingly, the frames I checked were not fully capped, in most cases no more than half capped.  The bees must still be messing around with them, though I don't know what they're foraging on in any quantity by now.  There was virtually no activity at any of the hive doors when I went up there this morning to take the supers off the late swarmers.  What, then, are they doing with the honey in the supers?  I definitely want to get the honey off before the ivy flowers open, since I tried harvesting a super of late honey once before, and my experimental teaspoonful tasted so horrible that I didn't even bother extracting it but gave the super back to the bees.

Meanwhile, the plague of possible mouse droppings that infested the conservatory a few months ago has revealed itself to be the scattered seeds of Geranium maderense.  One of my plants flowered this spring, and I was watching the seed head and trying to gauge the moment when the seed would be fully ripe to collect it.  While it was drying numerous small, dark, cylindrical pellets with pointed ends appeared around our chairs on the conservatory floor.  The Systems Administrator was concerned that they were mouse droppings, they looked so exactly like the ones that appeared in the blue summerhouse during the mouse infestation.  I installed an electric rat zapper, but didn't catch anything.  I eventually picked the geranium seed head and left it to drop its seeds into a big plastic bowl in the study, where it stayed until this morning when I finally got round to clearing it away because I wanted the space to stand the honey supers, pending extraction.  In the bottom of the plastic bowl were more black mouse dropping-like cylinders.  I put them safely in an envelope, thinking sadly of how many I had swept up off the floor, though in truth I've collected more than enough seed, and have already got half a dozen young plants in pots by the greenhouse.

A muntjac was barking earlier this evening, close to the house.  As I sorted through more old gardening magazines while it rained I had a nasty feeling reading the articles on late summer colour that the comparative lack of flowers in the back garden was not entirely down to lack of planning or drought, but partly because things have been eating them.  Knautia macedonica normally livens up the beds with dots of dark red from its small, scabious-like flowers, but I've scarcely seen a flower this year.  Something, rabbit or muntjac, is eating them before they ever open.