Season's End

Not blogged for a while, been working on a few other things and, well, there's not been much going on beewise really.

They're prepping for winter! ..sortof..

On the 16th August I had the final of the three visits from the Regional Bee Inspector as part of the European Union Pilot Surveillance Programme for honey bee health. There was a patch of diseased brood in Hive1 but a matchstick test showed it wasn't one of the dreaded Foulbroods. The bees seem to heave dealt with that themselves now.

Hive	Combs of Brood	Combs of Bees	Notes
Hive1	3	7	Some signs of phoretic mite disease
Hive2	6	13
Hive3	1	4	Very few eggs

Colony inspection from August 2013

And here's how it's looked across the year for hives 1 & 2.

Combs of bees and brood across three inspections

Hive 08/09/2012 14/04/2013 16/08/2013 Hive1 18 combs of bees 7 combs of brood 2.5 combs of bees 0.5combs of brood 7 combs of bees 3combs of brood Hive2 13 combs of bees 6.5 combs of brood 3 combs of bees 0.5combs of brood 13 combs of bees 6combs of brood

The figures from the first and third visits should be very simlar so as you can see Hive2 is doing pretty much as expected really but Hive1 is at below half the strength they should be for this time of year. I've had a look in the hives today, they should all be winding down on egg production and storing up food for winter right now and I should be thinking of combining Hive1 and Hive3 but they're still busy raising brood and laying eggs, Hive2 in particular had a huge number of eggs in it today.

Brood rearing in all three hives

Fresh eggs, in late September

The only hive with a super on it was Hive2. Most f the frames were still empty and a couple had a little honey in but not a lot. Here's a photo of the fullest frame of honey today:

Barely enough to sweeten a mug of Roibos

They're obviously not going to be finishing this anytime soon so what I've done is removed the super and placed it above the crownboard on another empty super. Hopefully the bees will remove what little honey there is in there and store it in the brood box instead. When I tried this before to consolidate two supers it went a bit odd and they stored a shedload in the super they were meant to empty, can't see that happening this year though.

Nothing in the brown one,
not much in the green one.

Something quite noticeable is the lack of drones in any of the hives. art of winter preparations is for the bees to expell them from the hive. It's a little harsh but that's nature's way.. they'ed only use up stored food over winter otherwise. amongst the brood in hive2 I spotted one drone cell, don't fancy his chances much though. They've got some stored honey and pollen in all three hives, unsurprisingly Hive2 is leading the way with it's larger workforce.

Honey being stored on a brood frame

I put the mouseguards on the hives a couple of weeks. I actually saw a mouse type rodent thing last week. It ran like the clappers when I was the chicken run. Unless it's met the cat it's probably somewhere in the garden still but there was no signs of mouse damage in the hives -it's probably been too busy robbing the chickens to try the hives so far.

I'll not be looking in the hives much again now. At some point I'll have a quick look in Hive1 and 3 and depending on the numbers I might unite them, other than that the only time I expect to be looking under the crownboards again is for the oxalic acid treatment when we're into winter. The main beekeeping work from now will be feeding them syrup.