Weather and Warnings of Starvation

I got an email from the National Bee Unit at The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs today. They maintain a great big database of beekeepers and apiary locations so they can keep bee keepers updated with warnings and info as and when they need to. Last year they sent one advising wasps were having a population boom so predation on honey bees was a concern. Today they were advising that due to the recent poor weather there's a chance of bees starving so to check their food and  feed them up.

Rain and cold weather stops bees flying -no flying equals no foraging and no foraging, as any hunter gatherer will tell you, means no food on the mud hut table. There's were some days of glorious sunshine recently when the bees made the most of the time window they have to gather food, however with this fairly freaky random weather there hasn't been a huge amount of food for them to collect anyway. Something I've noticed with this rapidly changing weather is that bees can read the weather better than me.

The above footage was shot after work on 20th April, 2012, I'd got home, it was nice bright and sunny. You can hear how busy the bees are but you can't really make out how many of them there were in the air at the time -but believe me there was a lot! After briefly filming the bees going crazy I decided to take advantage of the good weather and knock up some dummy boards I needed -basically a false frame for the hive that fills up space instead of leaving a gap the bees will have to heat or might build brace comb in. I brought out the wood, a saw, right angle measuring thing whose name I still don't know -I should google it sometime really but I'm still thinking it's probably called a t-square, a pinpush, a few boxes of nails, a craft knife, two hammers and a tape measure. Whilst I was doing this the activity around the hive ground to a complete halt. I thought nothing of it selected Winter Hill by Miss Derringer on my phone and started work. Then it began to rain. It seems the bees had been able to tell it was going to start raining and got under cover about five minutes before it began.

So yes, unpredictable weather and a message from DeFRA warning of starving colonies because of it. When I last checked the hives I was able to see a lot of capped brood in both, this mean that new bees would be hatching out within 2 weeks at most. New bees means a bigger workforce but it also means more mouths to feed and it takes a while for the young bees to graduate to foraging so this meant a greater demand on whatever stores the colonies already had. Well I know Hive2 has loads of stores as I've been feeding them up to build numbers for the nuc but I haven't been feeding Hive1, in fact when the weather was looking particularly good I'd somewhat optimistically plopped a super on top of it. A quick look in the super this afternoon showed not much of the foundation in in it had been drawn out and there were no stores in it at all. There were also quite a few bees wandering about in the super which could well've been a sign that they were low on food. :( Luckily I had 2 litres of spare sugar syrup sat in the fridge, I just needed to remove the Super first.

I whipped out the Queen Excluder, dropped one of the rhombus escape clearer boards I'd made last year and waited an hour for most of the bees to scoot through it. When I went back the bees had gone through the clearer so I removed the super and the clearer, replaced the crownboard stuck a contact feeder full of syrup over the central hole and an empty super on top of that then added the roof and green roof boxes on top.

In other completely unrelated news I've just noticed Blogger has a built in spellchecker. Think I'll be making use of that..