End of the Second Season

With the arrival of Hull Fair, the city's annual environmental nuisance and source of chronic traffic congestion as our inept city council close off a major thoroughfare to accomodate it, comes the cold weather. There's been a few nights of freezing temperatures marking the end of feeding the bees up with syrup. Their next feed will be a thick slice of fondant icing.

Worker taking last bits of syrup from the mesh of Contact Feeder

There's still been some strangely warm days, like today when the bees are still foraging. As you can see from the picture below they're still bringing in some yellow pollen. I think it might be from ivy.

They're still bringing in pollen

A couple of weeks ago I popped my mouse/wasp guard reduced entrances on Hive1 and Hive2 reducing the entrances to six or seven round holes in an aluminium frame. The smaller entrance makes it easier for the bees to keep out wasps and the metal is there to stop mice gnawing their way in. This week there's still been a few wasps hanging about the hives, I suspect they're going to have a difficult winter after such an unfriendly season.  Some colonies will use huge amounts of proplis to reduce their hive entrances to a few holes but it seems to vary from colony to colony, mine evidently prefer to leave it to me. The reduced entrances does cause some congestion at the hive entrance but beats wasps and mice getting into the hive.

Queuing outside the Mouse Guard at Hive1

You can see some of the paint on the landing board has been rubbed or worn off. Think I might give it a quick dab on a cold dry day when they're not flying. I haven't yet made a mouse guard for the Nucleus yet but I really ought to get that done at some point. when I built it what I could've done was use a few nails in the entrance to form vertical bars leaving gaps too small for mice, but I didn't get round to that.

The nucleus entrance is still pretty busy.

Soon I'll be popping some top insulation on the hives, possibly feeding them some fondant too. After that's done and dusted I don't expect to be looking under the crownboards again till sometime in Spring.