Apiary Update 21/9/24

Had a good check of the hives this afternoon. They are all buzzing. Didn’t open any other than to add the supers. Loads of bee activity with pollen coming in from all angles. Lovely orange pollen. I added 2 flow supers to the Red and Green Poly hives in an experiment to see how they perform over the winter. It is always good to do things with a pair of hives as a double positive or a double negative result is a lot more convincing that just a single.

Headed up to the bees in simple style today rather than taking the usual transport of the Quad Bike, but with only 2 supers the quad was a bit of overkill and a lot of hassle with opening and shutting the gates through the sheep. The wheel barrow was easier through the woods.

Evidence of Robbing

So some of the hives were clearly exhibiting robbing. There were bees fighting to defend the entrance from other bees. I therefore closed down all the Poly Hives to an entrance of about 1 inch and added a robbing frame to the front of the purple hive. This was a bit of a a compromise as there was huge activity in bee numbers so closing too much simply cuts off their ability to get enough bees in and out to bring in any extra winter feed that they may be able to get and need. However too big an entrance and they will get robbed out. I left the large round opening open so that the drones can leave the hive. This is the time of year that the boy bees, the drones, are expelled from the colony to go and die somewhere else and not to eat the honey supplies. It is hard being a boy in this world!! They have however served their purpose and are now a waste of valuable resource.

This is a robbing screen in yellow attached onto the front of the wooden Langstroth hive Purple Wood. The idea is that it creates a small opening for the bees to easily defend and allows them to see out through the mesh to see if there is danger. This will now stay on till spring. Current configuration is with a single access slide open. This gives the bees a really defensible access to their hive.

Lots of bee activity.

You can clearly see the bees coming and going through the hole in the bottom of the robbing screen. The fact that they are bringing in pollen (orange lumps on their legs as they fly in) at this time of year is a great sign that they have young bees and brood to feed.

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