Nirakaro
New Bee
Ok, bear with me on this, because I'm pretty clueless:
Last spring, I ordered a package of bees (not the best way to get bees I know, but funds were limited), and put together a top bar hive (I may be an incompetent beekeeper, but I'm an ace woodworker). The bees came at the end of June, and settled in well – they'd drawn five or six frames of comb after a week or two.
After that, thing went slowly downhill. There was brood on the combs, they were bringing in nectar, but each time I looked in the hive, there seemed to be slightly fewer bees, and they never seemed to have more than a kilo or two of honey. I fed them syrup inside the hive (which seemed to attract huge numbers of wasps), but the last time I opened the hive – late October – there was still very little honey, and to my eye a tiny colony on only two or three combs, which I thought unlikely to make it through the winter. I made sure they had easy access to a block of fondant, helped them along with a couple of inches of kingspan to the top, sides and ends, and hoped for the best, without much optimism.
Yesterday, first day that seemed warm enough, I pried up a few bars expecting, really, to be conducting an autopsy, and to my superlative surprise, out came a few bees! There was even one having a fly around.
So my question – I assume that having got this far, they'll make it to the spring. I want to mollycoddle them and help them get off to a good start, so how do I do this? Should I, for example, give them a 1:1 syrup quite early, and then be ready to feed them if it's a rotten spring? What's the general advice?
Last spring, I ordered a package of bees (not the best way to get bees I know, but funds were limited), and put together a top bar hive (I may be an incompetent beekeeper, but I'm an ace woodworker). The bees came at the end of June, and settled in well – they'd drawn five or six frames of comb after a week or two.
After that, thing went slowly downhill. There was brood on the combs, they were bringing in nectar, but each time I looked in the hive, there seemed to be slightly fewer bees, and they never seemed to have more than a kilo or two of honey. I fed them syrup inside the hive (which seemed to attract huge numbers of wasps), but the last time I opened the hive – late October – there was still very little honey, and to my eye a tiny colony on only two or three combs, which I thought unlikely to make it through the winter. I made sure they had easy access to a block of fondant, helped them along with a couple of inches of kingspan to the top, sides and ends, and hoped for the best, without much optimism.
Yesterday, first day that seemed warm enough, I pried up a few bars expecting, really, to be conducting an autopsy, and to my superlative surprise, out came a few bees! There was even one having a fly around.
So my question – I assume that having got this far, they'll make it to the spring. I want to mollycoddle them and help them get off to a good start, so how do I do this? Should I, for example, give them a 1:1 syrup quite early, and then be ready to feed them if it's a rotten spring? What's the general advice?