Water water everywhere

My garden contains two wildlife ponds. I made the first one to house frogs to control the slugs and snails and generally protect my plants. Why fight nature with pesticides when you can let nature do the job for you? I liked the first pond so much I made a second bigger one in the middle of the garden. They look nice and house a variety of plant and wildlife, this year I found young damsel flies drying their wings on the water soldier leaves.

Wildlife Pond2

There's also a small birdbath. It's about a foot across just over an inch deep and rather than the nice clean oxygenated water of the ponds tends to look a bit murky what with it being shallow, birds washing and crapping in it and the sun warming the water making it an excellent environment for all kinds of mould and grot, even the mosquito larvae in it look a little unhealthy as they fight to breathe through greasy matt meniscus. Anyway guess where the bees go to collect their water? The clear waters of the wildlife ponds or the murky shallows of the birdbath. Yep they choose the birdbath everytime.

Bee drinking the birds' bathwater

Progress in Hive1

Hive1 is now full of bees. I've still not seen that queen at all but eggs are being laid and new workers are hatching, I'm also not seeing any swarm cells or supercedure cells so I guess the bees must like her. Something I have noticed is that the bees in Hive1 are a bit slow to draw comb at the front of the hive, the shallow frame I put in nearest the entrance for sacrificial drone brood is untouched so far, although they have torn down a load of comb on one of the national frames and replaced that with drone comb. The bees are so populous in hive1 I decided to super it and take the chance of swapping out some of the original national framed and their adapters for commercial ones.

I ordered a National shallow to use as an eke for the feeder and built up some national deep frames to place in the national deep box along with the removed national deep frames. It all went fine, I pulled out two national frames removed the adapters and popped them in the middle of the deep box, put a queen excluder over the commercial brood box and the national deep over that. I figured the existing eggs and brood in the removed national frames would hatch and leave those frames whilst the bees below drew out the commercial frames below. It worked perfectly, not one swarm cell was made.

What I did find though was the plastic queen excluder was a total pain to use. The bees covered it in bright orange propolis, some bees got caught in the holes, others got caught in the propolis. Removing it took an age as I had to free it from the box and the frame tops it was also stuck to. I wound up ordering some framed wire excluders and shelving the plastic ones -maybe I'll lose them next auction I attend.

Some bees. Of course.

Green Hive Roof

A while ago I read something on the net about green roofs. I thought they were a pretty good idea, I'd also read that a beehive may need some insulation to keep the heat in over winter and in the summer the sun on the metal roof skin can make things pretty uncomfortable for the bees inside. So I figured why not put a green roof on the bee hive? It should provide insulation, it'll be more aestheticaly pleasing and it'll possibly reduce the amount of attention the hive draws from neighbours.

My first attempt at a green hive roof

Turns out nobody seems to sell them so I needed to do a little research then make one myself. I read all about the different layers used for drainage, growing medium and whatnot and thought it sounded a little complex. I figured with it being such a small area I could just ignore all that technical stuff anyway. So off I went and bought some exterior plywood for the bottom and some wood for the sides.Treated the sides to match the hive and made basically a box with the sides dropping an inch below the floor. This then sits on top of the hive's proper roof and won't slide off. Unfortunately it was too heavy so I cut out most of the floor leaving a frame in which I stuck two layers of correx.

I then lined it with pond liner underlay, pond liner and another layer of underlay and flilled it with mostly perlite, a little soil and some vermicompost. I'd read that sedums are the things for a low maintenance green roof so bought a few and some nice grassy looking stuff. Popped it all in the box and slapped it on the hive. It's all doing rather well. Mostly I let the rain water it but I've added a litre or two of tap water myself now and then to help it along. As you can see from the picture it's doing fine, and certainly looks nicer than the metal square with a brick on the top type roof common to many hives. When I want to work the hive I just lift it off and pop it on the floor then remove the regular roof which is still underneath, in the photo above you can see hive2 still has a bare metal skin.

It is a little on the heavy side in fact and I suspect the wooden sides won't last forever so my plan is eventually to make a new version using two halves, each being a watertight rectangluar box with a lip on three sides that completely cover the hive roof and clip together in the middle. I'm thinking of maybe using aluminium for this so it'll last longer and have thinner walls. That'll have to wait till I have some spare cash kicking around though.

I occassionally see bees investigating the sedum flowers on it, posibly even gathering pollen or nectar, and I think they may use it to identify their hive. At the moment the second hive has a large bonsai tree sitting on top of the roof, looks nice and holds the roof down but obviously doesn't insulate much.

Roof space