Title Photo: A Wild overgrown Apiary
At the start of the month, we still had temperatures of 14º and all our colonies were active trying to find any late Autumn flowers to supplement their winter stores. A tough call for any worker bees.
Then we had torrential rain and floods followed by -5º temperatures which has hopefully killed off most of the remaining worker wasps bothering our hives as their Queens go into hibernation.
But back to gloomy wet weather for the end of the month.
I’m often asked about insulation for colonies during the cold damp winter months we are now all facing.
After feeding well, I will normally seal any “porter bee escape” holes in the crown board, as the bees will have used propolis to seal the crown board to the brood chamber or super I’ve left on top of the hive for the winter.
This is what happens when you don’t….
The zinc gauze on the right has been totally sealed by the bees using propolis but the “ porter bees escape” was too large to seal so they have left it open. This is what I would normally seal with a strip of Gaffer tape, wood or glass.
Then I put a pre-cut carpet square over the crown board. Job done.
But is all this fuss necessary? Probably not, as most commercial Beekeepers wouldn’t bother with all this fuss and bother.
Here we go again. If you really want to be able to take your roof off and see what’s going on in the colony, you can use a glass or Perspex Crown Board (below home-made) over the cold winter months.
But, and there is always a ‘but’, you do need to provide some insulation on top of the Perspex sheet otherwise the bees will continually have a wet layer above the cluster dripping onto them. The heat from the bees clustering meets the cold of the Perspex sheet forming condensation.
So to solve this a little “skip diving” resulted in some modern building insulation being discovered cut to size and sealed with Gaffer tape.
Please note the DIY handle!!
All this just makes it easy to take a peek and check all is going well without disturbing the bees.
Best we leave them all well alone at present. With mouse guards on and woodpecker wire around they should be fine.
Visit the Apiary once a week or so to check for storm damage and consider next month depending on the Varroa drop, what treatment if any you need to do when the Queen may make a halt to her egg laying. The Varroa breed in the sealed brood so if you get a break in egg laying 21 days or so later, all Varroa riding around on the back of bees are so much easier to treat.
Next Month: A case of monitoring and not interfering.
Last but not least, still flowers about but no insects around to work them or provide a pollination service.
