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..

Holy Crownboards?

There's much discussion (and yep I mean arguements) on the various beekeeping forums about whether or not hives should have holes in their crownboards for ventilation. The crownboard is a basically a ceiling for the hive that goes underneath the roof. Some of the old beekeeping books say  you need those holes for ventilation, some say you don't and some don't mention it at all. Back in the day wooden beehives all had solid wooden floors, since the fairly recent arrival of the varroa mite there's been a shift to wire mesh floors which the mites can fall through -that's usefull because it lets you work out how many mites are in the hive and so on, also any mites that drop out aren't bothering your bees anymore. Of course replacing a solid wooden floor with a wire mesh means you've suddenly added a load of ventilation to your hive.

Crownboards often have holes in them for a couple of reasons, to let bees in or out or to allow access to a feeder. After looking at the various arguements for and against leaving the holes open these holes I thought the bees probaby have a far better idea of what they want than a lot of people arguing on the internet so I'd let them bees decide for themselves.

I stapled a mesh to a little frame and popped it over the hole. A few hours later the bees had propolised it into place, If the bees don't want ventilation they'll block it up, if they do they'll leave it open. Simple as that. Also if they want more or less ventilation they can block up or unblock more of the mesh  as they choose. Not really rocket science is it? Three days later here's the mesh:

Grille over crownboard hole

The bees had reduced the hole slightly but not hugely. I've seen how much propolis this hive can lay down in a short time so I know they could have closed it if they wanted to, probably in winter they will. I'm not entirely sure what the bees on top of it are doing but they seemed happy enough. I still have the other crown board hole open near the front of the hive -so the bees can access a reserviour of used wax and propolis but more on that in another post.

For anyone wondering what propolis is: it's basically bee glue. The bees make it from tree sap and it's sticky as hell. It's used by them to block up holes and gaps in the hive and works really well. They also use it for things like entombing dead mice in the hive if one's managed to get in and then been killed.