Well Dear Reader,
It's almost the longest day and all downhill from there on in as the earth spins on it's axis, wobbles, sneezes, and tips the northern hemisphere into the long slog to Autumn.
I often wonder what it's like keeping bees in warmer climes where they have 8-9 months of flows, and swarming seasons, well, pretty much all the time. 7 day inspections ? or just go for numbers and averages.
As I found towards the end of last month the weather here in Wiltshire had turned from a glorious spring to a colder June, I turned my attention to my entries to the Royal Bath & West Show's Honey Competition. I'd never entered this before, in fact I hardly enter any shows as they seem to fall at the wrong time in terms of preparations...
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It's interesting to find that even multiple weather forecasts can get it wrong these days. Rain was forecast for tomorrow, much of the day before a heatwave begins on Thursday...however I woke to a drizzly misty start and it's only now just beginning to dry up. Still, the Purple Tansy and Buckwheat seeds I broadcasted at the paddock on the hillside that is mostly bare earth after I controlled burned the thatch off will welcome the moisture and hopefully sprout before the mice / pheasants eat the seeds !
I'm still rootling through the box of beekeeping books I picked up at the GBKA auction at the weekend. 36 books of varying ages for a mere £5...14 pence a book. Only two are duplicates to my library - a Roger Morse one and the BBKA...
When March comes in like a lion and goes out like a Lamb....Well I guess we had Storm Eunice or was it her successor at the start of the month, then the winds dies back, the bees suddenly became visibly active and a week of gradually finer weather with plum and now pear blossom out....and then today it starts snowing as I filmed the bees coming and going in 9 degree heat...you couldn't make it up.
And the fuel seems to have jumped up again after such a generous cut in fuel duty of a whopping 5p and it seems it's almost back where it was a week ago. I was too busy trying to shake the hose out at the pump today into the diesel sipping Landrover that I completely forgot....to put the blasted filler cap back on and only discovered this...
The day began with me walking back across town after dropping of my work car for a service..I could hear the wind very high up whistling like you hear again if you’re on the coast - that high pitched whooshing of air moving fast in the upper atmosphere yet almost nothing at ground level.
By the time I got home it was raining but with blue skies suggesting the water was being carried miles horizontally from the actual rain source before hitting the earth.
I worked from home all day - bottling honey, levelling, keeping an eye on the garden which was getting a battering.
I also lashed down a tarpaulin that had come loose on a vehicle parked up which took some doing on my own.
Today I headed out to all the apiaries to survey the damage. To...
Afternoon, thought I would start a new blog entry of :).
At present getting ready fo the new season cleaning equipment making new equipment and modifications of old equipment.
Last season I managed to make up 28 nucs from splitting big colonys and splitting smaller into 1 / 2 frame nucs I had 10 queen's bought and I reared the rest.
I plan this season to have 40 single brood colonys ready for the end of July to go up on to the Heather using the same methods but using my own queen's my thought for next year is to winter more banked mated queen's in mini nucs, so I have those early queen's to play with.
Im not using pollen patties but I am using syrup extra pollen comes from frames I collect from colonys that have an abundance of...
So on a cold wet Sunday with the Beijing Winter Olympics on in the back ground, I've been having a slow day - a catch up with old Uni pals in Bristol last night with a number of alcoholic beverages consumed while we watched the rugby, I've not done much 'bee related' stuff today.
I ordered a back up stock of bulk jars and lids which arrived yesterday morning, prior to the suggested increase in jar prices....and having now done the sums the same order would cost me 26 % more if ordered today than last week.
I only checked this on 12oz jars and lids, but it's safe to assume the other jar sizes have also increased too. In effect adding almost 10p per jar (inc of vat).
Not only the jars but the lids increased too - in fact the lids...
Days like this where one is laid up feeling pretty awful (had all the symptoms of C-19 since Friday but no +ve result) means I delve into the library of books and periodicals I've amassed over the years and start re-reading and re-visiting articles that caught my eye and thinking about the coming season.
I always return to the old favourites like Honey Farming but also others on splits and queen rearing and management techniques. I'm considering using some different spring patties for build up from the Vita range to see if their claims are true...
To make life easier I'm giving up a few apiary sites as they are either physically a PITA to lift and transport kit to and from the truck or too small to hold the 20 hives I prefer to aim...
Like a lot of people out there, I was one of those that aspired for years to keep bees. I’d visited a couple of apiaries and sat wistfully amongst the returning foragers and fantasised that one day I’d get my own hives.
However living in a terraced house with a small garden on a small island on the Kent coast didn’t really resonate with the apiary sites I’d seen. I’d read a pile of books & watched every YouTube video I could find and was a paid up member of my local BBKA.
But in 2020, with the Corona virus pandemic at our doors & lockdown looming I bit the bullet, took the plunge, jumped in where Angels fear etc etc.
With my starter kit unpacked and hive half built I ordered a nuc.
I did have a few moments when I thought “what am I...
One has to strike while the iron is hot. I was told about a garage needing clearing in the locality a couple of weeks ago - and the offer was free timber so I couldn't really turn it down.
I've been thinking about making a quad hive stand for a while to go on one of my better sites to both fit more hives in one space and also see whether having a North, South, East, West configuration would make any difference to the yield or performance of the hives.
I'm sure Bro Adam could probably answer that, and I have an inkling I know the answer but below is the first of a number of these stands to be made.
The timber is oak, or something very like oak - hard as nails. The legs 10x10 ex-railway posts I picked up a few years ago. They are...
So I’m calling this the Somerford hive stand design - it’s able to take 3 hives - wide enough for poly too (final photo for an example)
nailed together - although I’ve used coach screws in the past.
legs can be 10x10 or 12x12
length as required. Cross members are 26” for the 10x10 a little wider for the 12x12s
middle cross member about 14.5”
24 x 4” nails
KR
S
ps - all the timber was free....
On the eve of Christmas, it was all quiet in the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.....only a glance out the window, and what should I see, one of my honeybees, looking at me !!
Yes - it's a mild damp Christmas eve here in North Wiltshire, and the honeybees are far from being in the tight cluster they ought to be in this time of the year.
The fondant is ready in the truck for distributing to the hives after Christmas, and I read with interest that the NBU feel there are lots of reports of 'large drops of varroa' post treatments.
I wonder about the reasoning behind this and I think it's down to beekeepers thinking 'I'll vape when the queen goes off lay and that time is December' and this'll be their chosen method of...
Well it's been a while since I posted. Been so completely busy with main work and the bees I've hardly had a spare moment. But these last few weekends I've managed to find some time to relax, switch off and recharge the batteries. Only three more days in work then a good 12 days off.
The bees went into winter looking strong and thrived on the late flowering Ivy. Only last weekend they were out flying strongly.
The only damage so far was an entire apiary's roofs blown off in the last storm - my fault for forgetting to re-attach the straps to the poly roofs and the apiary is probably one of the most sheltered too ! The bees on some colonies were just peaking over the crown boards but allowed me to return the roofs with not one flying...
Spotted sparrows hunting down bees as they entered the hive. Bit like Asian hornets waiting outside the hives and either picking them off the ground or flying up and catching in mid air! Sparrow traps next!!
Well I have an evening to myself and even though I live and breathe my beekeeping I can't switch off and to my blog I turn. Apologies for the radio silence since 13th April but life is busy. I guess that's a good thing really and I shouldn't complain.
So what's new ?
Well on the honey front 20+ new customers and some very good ones as well. Had to have a special meeting with my accountant who was fast to admit I was the only client who has beekeeping as a declared income. Interestingly we had a discussion about buying assets that actually came true (well possibly for the buyer not me personally) where a business buys a very expensive asset to cut down on tax, then the asset is depreciated and the business sells the asset in a number...
Hello
Are there any beekeepers in the Gillingham (Dorset) area with honey to sell by the bucket please?
Thanks,
Louise
This time last year part of the country were experiencing a mini heat wave with temperatures in the low 20s and today it’s been a breezy chilly sleety snowy rainy dry warm sunny and actually quite hot 8-12 degrees.
If I’m confused just think how the bees just be feeling. One moment a blackthorn tree in blossom I was working under was literally buzzing in honeybees and the next silence as the weather spun on a nine pin and was then sleety.
Having managed to check all the colonies it certainly seems many are thriving - bursting at the seams. A few are behind the curve and a number have been identified for requeening as soon as weather allows and I see enough drones around. At the moment there certainly aren’t enough.
A week off work...
Well it seems spring is on hold - have had 4 days of solid beekeeping since Friday and while on the whole the bees are looking strong and have (annoyingly) in some cases built brace comb in the ekes I’d used for fondant, most are pushing on to a full brood box already, some on more. A few colonies had to be sorted through to pop the queens back down into brood boxes that had started laying in the odd super that had remained from the autumn.
The other part to the weekend was preparing and moving about 40 colonies to the OSR which is just starting to flower.
I finished that today moving a few old Langstroths I had that now have converter boards on to take national supers.
And another wild colony that I missed that was in an old poly Nuc...
Well dear reader - don’t imagine for one moment winter is over just because you see bees bringing in pollen from early crocus flowers....after a glorious weekend midweek has reverted to cold over cast weather and heavy rain this evening and a cold snap heading our way at the weekend - early March it may be but the season has a way to go before it really starts.
After a quieter February on the honey sales front March has taken off like a rocket with 4 new customers and some enquiries to follow up. Still, the time was well spent cleaning frames and filling them with foundation while the wax rendering continued a-pace.
The aforementioned trailer debacle (previous post) has now come to a conclusion having spent last Saturday getting it...
Hmmm. You know you're a dyed in the wool beekeeper when you know instantly by the pitch of the wing beats that the insect buzzing near you is not a bee - but a wasp. A median queen wasp at that quite a large female too. She was out and about today in the mild weather which was quite sunny at one point.
Sadly she was too mobile for me to swat, but with cold weather on the way again I hope she succumbs to the cold.
This morning a chap arrived to take my larger apimelter away to get the lower tank re-welded up as it had split slightly. It was too windy for the gas to work properly outside so he said he'd effect the repair at his workshop and return it next week.
Another day painting poly nucs to protect them from the UV - not that...
Well those who predicted the demise of Winter in the nice Sunday afternoon about a fortnight ago are today proven wrong - it was pretty chilly out there today. In fact as the day went on the temperature fell and the wind really came around from the North East and I had a taste of the arctic there as it whipped around the drive and in the funnel between my house and the neighbours.
The day was again spent cleaning frames, rendering wax and filtering molten wax from the boiler into large blocks - although it started early as a customer arrived early (9am on a Sunday morning) to purchase some wax for candle making.
It turns out her father keeps bees in Finland - around 10-12 colonies generally but in some winters he has lost the lot...
