Today was warm, calm, and sunny, and I finally went to see how the bees were getting on with their last lot of syrup. I had thought about them at various points in the past couple of weeks, but what with my chest infection, storm Brian, and the funeral, there never seemed a good hour to go and look at them, and after all it was not as though they were going to starve to death imminently. Even if a hive is a bit light going into winter, there are ways and means of dealing with this, as long as the beekeeper knows the colony was low on stores.
Two colonies had finished their last bucket of syrup, and two had some left. One of the hives that had emptied their bucket felt good and heavy, so that's them done for the winter, barring a mouse guard over the door and then a trickle of oxalic acid when it gets colder. The other three hives felt slightly lighter than I'd have liked, and I decided to try them all with some more syrup and see if any of it went down. It is late to be giving syrup, but on the basis that I've seen bees foraging in the past couple of days on the Mahonia and the asters I thought they ought to be able to cope with a bit of syrup if they wanted it.
The bees in the heavy hive were rather grumpy about being disturbed. I shall have to see how they go next season, on the other hand the slightly tetchy colonies are often the most productive ones. This particular lot remain a mystery to me. This year they produced almost nothing, last year they made masses of honey, the year before that, nothing. In my enthusiasm I had lolloped off to the apiary wearing an old long sleeved t shirt under my bee suit, and so got stung on the wrist through my glove by some of the grumpier bees. You would think that by now I would remember to put on a proper shirt with buttoned cuffs so that the sleeves couldn't ride up.
After lunch we took Mr Fidget to the vet for a check up. A fortnight ago he suddenly went off colour and spent a couple of days mostly sitting on the sofa and not eating, while we wondered why these things always happened just before the weekend. He lost a lot of weight quite quickly, and was grooming himself frequently and occasionally drinking large amounts of water from his water bowl. By the following week he was more lively, but failed to regain the lost weight, as far as we could tell without the benefit of suitable scales. We dosed him for fleas, having found a flea on him, but the excessive grooming continued and his inside thighs began to go slightly bald. We worried. I remembered the time last year when Mr Fidget suddenly stopped eating and started running a temperature, and the Systems Administrator made the mistake of looking up excess grooming on the internet. Turns out it can be a sign of all sorts of things, since grooming releases endorphins and cats do it to sooth themselves. After a weekend spent scrutinizing Mr Fidget's hollow flanks from different angles and picking him up to try and guess the weight of the cat, while running a hand over his shoulder blades and his hip bones, we booked him into the vet.
The vet was running late after having had to put somebody's cat down, and was not having a good day, though I hope vaccinating the very small and very sweet puppy ahead of us in the queue might have cheered her up a bit. She listened to our anxieties about Mr Fidget and put him on the scales, remarking that he was not a small cat as she showed us that he weighed 0.1 kilos more than when he had his last vaccination. Then she ran a fine comb through his coat and found fleas. Ah, that would explain the excess grooming. We protested faintly that we had de-flead him ten days ago and a month before that. The vet said that we should have been doing him every month, without fail, and that the kind of flea treatment they sold in pharmacies was so ineffectual that the vets had stopped selling it. Then she put a thermometer up Mr Fidget's bottom to take his temperature, which was normal.
We have known this vet for a long time, and I was glad when I heard our appointment was with her, because in the past she has had a good instinct for when a cat is not right, and so I have to accept her diagnosis that Mr Fidget probably had a slight virus a couple of weeks ago, but was now pretty much over it and mainly had fleas. Remarkably, she declined to charge us for the examination because she had been running late, and we were sent away having purchased a box of approved anti-flea doses for the cats, and a can of spray for the house. We must spray everything, said the vet severely, including the car. I still believe that Mr Fidget is thinner and not as shiny as he was two weeks ago, but I am relieved that he is not seriously ill. I only hope that none of my relations picked up any fleas at the funeral tea, though if anybody was bitten I shall blame the late mosquitoes. It's this warm weather, you know.
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