The Dead of Winter

The beekeeping season has started and I've not posted for a while, been very busy with sales of my propolis and lip balm products. I've also made a Facebook page to help publicise my online sales, if you fancy a look it's over here: Hivemind Heavy Industries by Hull Bees.

12th March, 2014, sunbathing weather for some.

In early March I noticed Bumble Bees sunning themselves and beehives starting to appear in fields heralding the start of activity for bees and beekeepers alike.

Beehives ready to pollinate a field

Towards the end of 2013 we were told to expect the worst winter in 60 years, so I was expecting something along the lines of The Day After Tomorrow, albeit a little less crap than that 126 minutes of pure disaster. With that in mind, the winter I mean not the movie, and the poor year that was 2013 I'd decided to give the bees a huge amount of emergency stores using candy boards, a method which I gather isn't particularly common in the UK. Basically each hive was given about 7 kilos of white sugar formed into a huge sugar lump, a third of a pattie of pollen substitute and an extra entrance near the top of the hive. This meant that if the bees ran out of stores wherever they were in the hive they would have food directly above them -if it's too cold bees will starve to death rather than breaking the cluster to go get food stored elsewhere in the hive. The top entrance is for in case the main entrance at the floor of the hive gets blocked with dead bees. It turned out that like The Day After Tomorrow the much touted worst winter didn't really get off the ground either and save for a few freezing nights it was probably the mildest winter I've seen.

Lighting up my smoker and grabbing my hive tool on 15th March I decided to give the hives their first inspection. Whipping the lid off of Hive3 the sugar appeared to be intact but I could see the bees had
been taking the pollen substitute. In the picture below the dark area is empty space left where they've taken the yellow substitute. They need pollen for rearing brood so I figured that's possibly a good sign.

They've been nibbling.

This was the hive holding the captured swarm and was expected to be the weakest of the three colonies. When I removed the candyboard and I was able to see just one seam of bees. Not great, but the queen was already laying so I'm hoping she'll be able to ramp up worker numbers in the next few weeks.

Only one seam in Hive3

I did a very brief inspection and found they had a lot of stored food left over -probably on account of the mild Winter -that and the small population in this hive.

That's a lot of stores for Spring

They obviously weren't going to need feeding. In August this hive had had 4 seams of bees so that should mean a lot of dead bees somewhere. After the Winter of 2013 the hive floors were deep in dead bees but this year was very different.

Let the bodies hit the floor..

Removing the brood box to check the floor it was obvious that the bees had done a pretty good job of disposing of their dead sisters over the mild winter. With the floor cleared and swiftly blowtorched back on went the brood box, crownboard and roof.

Hive 1 and 2 both had about 4 seams of bees left in each and plenty of stores. As well as taking the pollen substitute they'ed also made a start on the sugar and had been making tunnels above the seams.

Hive1's Candyboard, slightly chewed.

Hive2's Candyboard, not much pollen substitute left.

There was some brood and eggs visible in both brood boxes so the Queens were getting into the swing of things. Getting the bees out of the tunnels in the candy was a bit tricky and involved a lot of shaking, brushing and the judicious application of smoke. There were more dead in Hive 1 & 2 than in Hive3 but that was to be expected given that there were larger colonies, but still nothing approaching the numbers of the previous year.

Dead On The Floor

Having removed the candy boards I knocked out the sugar into a large tub which I brought into the house giving my housemate the impression my bees had spent the Winter refining white sugar. :) I put it in an upstairs room to dry out in full sun and I shall probably be using it to make syrup later in the year.

Bring Out Your Dead!

As winter progresses the bee colonies die back. Those dead bodies can accumulate on the hive floor  reducing the ventilation element of the wire mesh floor and even blocking the exit so living bees can't get out. I don't imagine it's a whole lot of fun living in a house where the floor is covered with rotting corpses and doors jammed shut by more of the dead. Normally the colony will remove dead bees from the colony carrying the dead away and dropping them away from the hive, when it's too cold for flying they can't do that and the tiny corpses accumulate. Last winter seemed happy to hang about and lasted well into spring which caused a few problems for the bees including meaning they were cooped up in the hive longer than expected so there's more dead on the floor than you'd expect in a normal year.

There's probably a few ways you could remove the dead bees but possibly the easiest, quickest and least disruptive is to whip out the corpse covered floor and pop in a new one. I gather that the original National Hive floors had a slope so water could run out which also gave the floors half turn symmetry so you could just pull out the floor turn it over and put it back under the hive, that's no longer the case with open mesh floors, it's easier to make horizontal ones and it's not like water pooling is going to be a problem.

New hive floor, flat packed like Swedish furniture.

Having seen the floor of Hive1 was deep with dead bees last week I ordered a new floor from Fragile Planet. Couldn't find them cheaper anywhere else, and it included a correx board to check the mite drop. Before assembling it I treated the wooden parts to a coat of shed and fence paint. Normally I wouldn't put that stuff on surfaces the bees will come into contact with as it probably has a pesticidal component to stop bugs gnawing on your sheds and fences but I don't want the floor to rot out from under the hive.

Treated for the weather

After a look at the instructions and viewing of the online video I knocked the new floor together. The floor it was replacing has a landing board -a sloping piece of wood the bees can land on before entering the hive. I didn't really have to time to add on to this floor as I wanted to get it under the bees asap.

Hive floor ready to go in

Landing boards seem to be more for the beekeeper than the bees anyway. It gives us a chance to see what's entering and leaving the hive, and whilst the bees will use it it may be something of a liability for them often being wet, providing purchase for mice and providing a place for bees to loiter whilst wasps pick them off. On the other hand some people suggest they make the bees' return easier to the hive after foraging.

After a quick peek under the crownboard I could see the bees were taking the fondant I'd  given them the previous week. Good news. Prising them apart with a hivetool I broke the propolis seal the bees had glued the brood box to the floor with and removed the brood box with the crownboard in place.

Deep in dead bees

As you can see it was pretty deep in dead bees. So deep they were actually blocking the exit stopping the remaining bees being leaving the hive at all. To keep the exits clear over winter beekeepers usually poke a stick or a wire into the entrance and waggle it about to create a clear space but with so many dead it didn't make a difference for this hive. I moved the corpse carpeted floor onto the ground the putting the new floor on the two beams supported by breeze blocks which I call a stand I popped the brood box back on, then replaced the insulation and roof. This time last year the bees were already active and filling supers, hopefully I'll be removing the insulation next week and the bees will begin building numbers as the weather warms.

I took the floor away from the hive and gathered the dead bees into a large metal bowl. Gave the chickens some but they weren't too impressed. Then I gave the propolis a quick scrape before lighting a butane torch and scorching all the wood and the mesh of the floor. Doesn't look as pleasant as it did now but my scorching was thorough so there shouldn't be any unpleasant germs or virii in there to infect the next set of bees it comes into contact with.

A thinner layer of dead bees in Hive2

That done I repeated the procedure with Hive2. A quick look under the crownboard showed me they're working the fondant. It had an almost complete carpet of bees on the floor but it was only one bee deep and hadn't blocked the entrance this time. This colony is larger than Hive1 at the moment and the bees were more active than I'd expected so a few puffs of the smoker were called for.

Floor, landing board, reduced entrance, and dead bees.

I placed the recently scorched floor from Hive1 on the stand and put Hive2 onto that taking away it's original floor. After removing the bees I scraped and scorched the last floor before putting it away till next spring when I'll probably repeat the whole process. In case you hadn't noticed beekeepers spend a lot of time cleaning things. The dead bees I've put in a sealed bin liner for now. A mate said she could add them to her compost heap. They might attract a few wasps but it's far better than popping them in the wheely bin. If the weather continues to improve I'll be starting proper hive inspections soon.

Hope there's no queen in this lot..

Spring Broke

Well on paper we're into Spring but nobody's told the weather so it's still freezing cold and looks set to stay that way for a while longer yet. After giving both hives a block of fondant each on Monday and finding the Nucleus colony dead I thought I'd take advantage of the warm weather (6 degrees C) to have a very quick look to see if they were actually eating the stuff. It turned out neither was.

Starting with Hive1, when I removed the untouched fondant I couldn't see any bees below it at all. So I cracked the seal and lifted the crownboard to see what was ging on in there. It was rather disappointing. I could see bees in four seams (the vertical gaps between the frames) but not a large number. I reckon there was probably enough bees to have filled 1 1/2 seams.

Small cluster in Hive1

I suspect this colony might not make it to summer. Looking between the seams I could see large numbers of dead bees on the hive floor. Removing them would mean a lot of disruption for this colony so what I've done is ordered a new floor from Fragile Planet. Once I've got it assembled I'll be whipping out the old one and popping the new one in place. Removing all the dead bees in one fell swoop with minimum disruption to what's left of the colony. Meanwhile to try and improve chances for the living bees I sliced up the fondant and put the thin slices directly on top of the frames -when it's cold they really won't go far to find food hence the nucleus colony having starved about an inch from food. I also pulled out the second to last frame which was empty and replaced it with one that had a little honey on it left over from when I'd been building up Hive2 numbers to make up the nucleus colony in summer.

Replacing the crownboard I blocked the central feeding hole, replaced the insulation and roof. Now the fondant is directly above the bees -where they're standing in the photo I'm sure they'll start feeding. The question is of course is too little too late? I won't know for a few weeks yet. Being a smaller colony the food will go further but if the colony gets too small they won't be able to maintain hive temperature and humidity which might lead to their demise. The obvious thought is to add a heatsource, however that would make the bees more active, so they'ed blaze through their food, noticing the increase in temperature they'ed start flying out to forage and die out in the cold dwindling the population even faster than before.

Hive2 hadn't touched their block of fondant either, but when I looked into the feedhole below the block I could see loads of bees and some flew out to greet me -or perhaps they flew out to tell me to put the damn lid back on, it's cold out. I removed the crownboard as before and was able to see it was quite a different story to Hive1. There was about 6 full seams worth of bees in there, active and moving about.

About half a colony in Hive2

As with Hive1 I sliced up the fondant and put it on the tops of the frames then replaced the crownboard. This colony is far stronger than the other but the larger numbers also means more chance of starving as there's a few thousand more tiny mouths to feed.

Looking at the strengths of the colonies during the September inspection I can see that Hive1 actually looked the stronger colony, it had more bees and it had more brood. In the lead up to winter both hives were treated in the same way and fed the same amount of food so I think it reasonable to have expected Hive1 to be the stronger coming out of winter. The change in strength may be down to genetics with Hive1 having been requeened with royalty from unknown and probably foreign parts although I'm pretty sure she's been superseded and her successor(s?) will have mated with local bees. I did notice the different placements of the clusters. Hive1 were positioned slightly to the right and towards the back of the colony. This is away from the hive entrance and both feed holes in the crownboard whereas the bees in Hive2 had positioned themselves between the entrance and the feed holes which I would assume is a draftier place to be.

After five years or so of winter losses dropping it appears, from the beekeeping forums, that there are heavy losses this year with some people having lost large numbers of colonies so far -think I saw one person had lost eleven. The previous winter (2011/2012) was very easy on the bees with larger numbers surviving for spring, unfortunately the rest of the year was poor so many bees starved later in the year. This year the winter weather seems to be lasting into what's meant to be spring so whilst the bees have used up their winter stores they can't forage yet. I'm hoping both hives will pull through but the way it's looking I may well find myself bidding on new bees this year.

The Queen is Dead

This morning I got another email from the National Bee Unit about a starvation risk to bees and advising people to give their colonies a quick inspection to check food stores despite the cold. It's late March now, about time the bees start foraging and their keepers start feeding colonies with sugar syrup to build up numbers after the winter die back. Unfortunately the weather's being a bit random and instead of warmer days we've had snow and ice so the bees can't forage and it's too cold for syrup. I gave all three colonies a block of fondant as winter food back in November. The fondant was still there in January suggesting they were still okay for stored food at the time.

Lifting the lid from the nucleus and removing the polystyrene insulation I could see the upside down plastic food box with fondant in it above the feed hole. I initially thought was probably a good sign, after all if the bees aren't eating the fondant they're probably still eating stored honey. I removed the fondant, had a look in the feed hole but couldn't see any movement, if someone opens a hole in your roof when it's 2 degrees outside chances are you're going to be investigating pretty sharpish so the fact they didn't didn't bode too well. I removed the crownboard completely, I could see bees but they weren't moving.

Dead bees

Looking in the photo you can see all the cells have been opened and are empty, this suggests starvation to me. There is some visible mould but I believe that will have grown after the bees had already died -or at least had died back to too few to control moisture level within the hive.

It's quite a dramatic change from when I opened the hive in January and it was stuffed with live bees and stores. It didn't take long to piece together what had happened. Back in January I'd noticed the cluster was towards the left of the hive. As winter wears on the bees die back the cluster shrinks. As the colony had shrunk they'ed wound up clustering in the seam between the two left most frames. The feed hole is above the seams either side of the central frame. When the bees are clustered they won't break the cluster to look for food so they'ed remained in their cluster and starved to death even though there was a block of fondant big enough to sustain them for weeks about an inch away. There was even some capped honey on the outer face of the leftmost frame which they hadn't opened either.

I gave a handful of dead bees to the chickens, I may give them more another day. As I'm certain the bees died from starvation not disease the comb can be cleaned up by the other hives later and reused when I start up a new colony in the summer. As my colonies are part of the EU Pilot Surveillance Programme I shall have to email the Regional Bee Inspector and let him know the colony died. I removed the insulation, and the sliding bottom board to better ventilate the hive dead hive. I also stuffed up the entrance to keep out wax moth, mice and anything else that might want to set up home in the nucleus, and moved onto Hive1.

Once again I could see the block of fondant sitting in it's transparent box above the crownboard. I removed this and three workers quickly came to see what was happening. This could mean there were only three bees left alive in the whole brood box or it could mean the colony is happily clustered and eating stores. It also meant the bees are able to reach the fondant. When bees are cold they move slowly, you can actually watch stray bees outside the hive grind to a halt as evening falls and temperature drops. The three I saw seemed to be moving about as normal though which suggested to me the colony are okay and still able to maintain heat in the hive. The fondant had only been nibbled a little but I decided to swap it for a fresh block anyway just in case it'd dried out or anything. Instead of removing it from it's foil packaging completely I left it on and cut out a rectangle to expose the icing. Hopefully that'll stop the stuff drying out too quickly. I popped the hive back together and moved onto Hive 2.

That was a different story again. The bees had taken about half a cm of fondant directly above the feed hole and when I removed the block to look below it I could see a large number of bees milling about. This suggests suggests two things: one there's a lot of living bees in there, and two they're low stores hence their actively taking the fondant.

Live bees, Hive2

As with Hive1 I swapped the fondant for a fresh block and closed up the hive. I then got my stethoscope out and had a listen to compare the two hives, they sounded pretty much the same to me so obviously Hive1 does have more considerably more than three bees in it.

Over the past few years winter losses have actually been dropping, although there was an increase in the long wet 2011/2012 winter. Here's the figures from the previous 5 winters, taken from the BBKA's winter loss figures published after the October 2011/March 2012 survey.

Percentage loss of total number of colonies in England overall and North East England

Winter

2007/2008

2008/2009

2009/2010

2010/2011

2011/2012

England

30.5%

18.7%

17.7%

13.6%

16.2

North East

43.0%

8.9%

16.9%

17.1%

15.9

Hopefully I'll have no further winter losses.

Winter Padding

We've had proper snow over here. After false start in early December, Winter proper has arrived -although I have a sneaky suspicion it's going to be pretty short lived. There's snow on the garden, snow on the car, ice on the bloody windscreen and snow on the beehives.

I've been out in the cold to check on the bees. Using a stethoscope I got to hear what I'm fairly certain was a healthy hum in both hives. Most of the bees still living in the hive will have probably been born in late autumn at the earliest and many won't know much more than the darkess of the winter huddle. Any still surviving older ones probably regale them with stories of back in the day when you could go to magical place called Outsidethehive and meet flowers. As the younger bees roll their faceted eyes and mime tiny yawns at each other the old timers probably waffle on about all the work they did gathering nectar and turning it into honey and tales of the pollen and water they gathered for the colony. The young bees will probably think the old bees are a bit daft the in head as the only life they know is all about eating honey in a big winter hug and taking turns to move to the outside of the hug and shiver before going back into the warmth of the colony cluster.

Fondant for Winter

Well after the other night's freeze it's warmed up a little and the pond has unfrozen for a while. Still too cold to give the bees anymore syrup though. Provided the bees have stored enough food for the winter they can now be left alone to eat it. If they have't got eough food stored yet you can still feed them. What I'm planning to do carry on feeding them untill they stop taking anymore food. It's too cold for syrup now, so it's time for some solid food. The solid food for bees is fondant. Yep, christmas cake icing.

It's easy enough to make: just 6 lb of sugar and 1 pint of water add a teaspoon of cream of tartar and boil till melted. It's quite nasty stuff if you get it on you as it sticks like glue and stay hot for a long time.

Making fondant. Don't get it on you.

Once melted you need to whisk it up to get some air into it. I popped it into my trusty food mixer, a handed down Kenwood machine that doesn't see much use. As the fondant gets more air in it and cools it becomes harder for the machine (or you) to whisk and before finishing my batch it burnt out the motor on my blender. Oops. I used a hand blender to finish the batch which seemed to do okay. I then spooned the white gunk into some cleaned takeaway food boxes.

It's not mashed potato.

The finished product looks a lot like mashed potato. I made these last month and left them in the fridge till they were needed. When I cut the space board insulation for the tops of the hives I made a hole for the fondant boxes to go in.

Dinner is served.

The fondant goes onto the crownboard over the feeding hole and a half depth of the insulation goes over that to keep the heat in. It's not airtight so some heatloss probably still occurs but the bees can glue it down round the edges if they feel the need.

Bees of Hive1 and Hive2 enjoying some nutritious candy.

The bees in Hive1 started eating their fondant from one end of the box, whereas those in Hive2 started from the middle which as they progressed gave them more surface area to nibble. Today I replaced the boxes with new ones and was able to see that whilst Hive2 only had a little fondant left from the the corners of the boxes whilst Hive1 had about a third left. When I checked them today I lit the smoker just in case but didn't smoke the hives -better to have the smoke avaiable if i needed it than not available if I needed it. The bees in Hive1 remained in their cluster whilst I removed the box and popped a new on in it's place, looking in the hole I could see them moving about a bit but they didn't seem in a hurry to come and meet me. I had set the smoker down nearer to Hive1 than 2 so it may have been that they managed to detect the smoke I guess. Hive2 was a different story, they were very active and I had to drop their new box on in a hurry as they started to come meet me. One managed to fly out before I got the box in place. There was about 8 or 9 dead bees outside the mouse guard of Hive1 which I flicked away from the entrance. I think they're probably dead bees that the colony pushed out, in the summer they'ed normally carry the dead bees out and drop them off away from the hive. During winter given the number of bees that do die off there's a good chance that dead bees dropping from the cluster to the floor can build up enough to block the entrance so it's good practice to get a wire and now and then poke it through the mouseguard holes to clear the way.

It's Freezing

Cold weather in the UK in December isn't really newsworthy, I know. However it's something new for my bees so I felt it blogworthy. Last night the temperature in Kingston-Upon-Hull hit zero degrees celcius and the wildlife pond in the middle of the garden froze. It's still frozen and I expect it'll remain so for a long time. The other one in the corner wasn't iced over today but I don't think I'll be hopping in to test the temperature anytime soon.

Frozen pond

As I said this is the first winter for my bees. Given the normal lifespan of a bee the only bee in a colony likely to live through more than one winter is the Queen but both of mine were born this year so it's a first for them too. Today I had a look under the hives with my trusty BeeSpy 3000 but there wasn't really much to see. So I went back inside and returned with my stethoscope. Doesn't everyone have a stethoscope? Putting this to the hive wall I was able to hear the bees merrily buzzing inside. They sounded a happy bunch and knowing they're still alive makes me a happy chap too. Of course there's a lot can happen between now and Spring and a lot of colonies don't make it so fingers crossed.

Something else I've just had to do is check the levels of varroa in the hives. I previously treated the mites with a course of Apilife Var in October but no treatment gets rid of all of them and in the hives of the complacent beekeeper they can rebuild their population. So first thing to do was check the numbers mites still in the hives. Both hives have wire mesh floors so mites that fall, or die drop out of the hive. To check the number of mites we monitor the number of them that fall out. Because beekeepers like to name things this is called "mite fall" fairly self explanatory name really. To measure mite fall you place something sticky under the hive and, hopefully, when a mite falls through wire mesh floor it'll be stuck there when you come to count them later. I used greaseproof paper sellotaped to correx boards and smeared with petroleum jelly.

Setting a trap for Varroa Destructor

After a few days with the sticky paper in place there were no mites visible on them at all. That doesn't mean there's no Varroa in the hives, it just means there's probably not enough of them at present to need further treatment. If there had been the treatment would have been to drizzle the bees with a 3.2% Oxacylic Acid solution. 5ml of the stuff between each frame where the bees are. Sounds pretty harsh pouring acid onto your bees doesn't it? It kills something like 97% of the mites, and whilst it has a negative effect on the bees too it's believed to be far less harmful than the impact of the Varroa themselves.

Space board

In the last really exciting installment of The Hivemind and Me I wrote a bit about follower boards which provide a litttle insulation to help the bees make the most of their space in the brood box. As it gets colder the bees are going to need a little more insulation than that. Hot air rises so I think a little insulation on the top is called for. There's various options to choose from all with different rationales. For example the Warre Hive uses a cloth placed on top of the fames with a 'quilt' of wood shavings on top, whilst other people like to wrap up their hives in black insulation giving them a Pulp Fiction Gimplike look. Obviously what you opt to do depends by and large on where you are, for example a bee keeper in Kenya probably doesn't loose much sleep over winter snows, high winds and sudden drops in temperature whereas in Siberia it's possibly a little more relevant.

However I'm in neither Kenya nor Siberia but the North East of England, I can't ignore insulation but at the same time don't need to go overboard. What we normally use in our homes is a thick layer of fibreglass wool, more recently there's been various kinds of fibreglass and polystyrene insulation boards coming out too. It's a good idea to avoid added a surface which water can condense on when you're insulating a hive. I opted to use Knauf Space Board Loft Board Insulation which is a 52.5mm thick extruded polysyrene board giving insualtion equivalent to a 27cm thickness of glass wool. Part of my reason for using this is that it's good insulation but also with it being so robust I can just stick a square of the stuff on a crownboard and drop the roof back on top of it.

Knauf  Space Board.
Traditionally used by beekeepers since the dark ages.

Honest. Really.

I popped to B&Q and bought one board which was large enough to cover both hives with insulation to spare. I just cut out two squares using a long craft knife and a crownboard as size guide then cut out a rectangle in the middle the size of a chinese takeaway box. I then pulled out this smaller rectangle and cut in two pieces across the thickness so I have a removeable portion to allow winter feeding with sugar fondant which I can then place some insulation back on top of..

The problem with this stuff is when you cut it little crumbs rub off. I don't really fancy a garden covered in bits of orangey pink extruded polystyrene and don't think the bees particularly want a hive full of the stuff either. So out came the blow torch and with the lightest brushing of a flame all those little bits of polystyrene shrunk back into the main body.

I'm contemplating putting a thin polystyrene tile over the rectangular cut outs as some heat may escape from the cuts, there will be a ventilated 20mm gap between the top of the space board and the underside of the roof. In the case of these two hives I'll also be putting green roof boxes above the metal skins which will mean a little more insulation above the roof.

Guards! Guards!

My garden is probably a fairly mouse friendly place (except for the cat) as I have two rather modest woodpiles in the rear corners which I added to give my frog populations somewhere to sleep and encourage other urban wildlife. The only thing that'd make my garden more friendly (except for removing the cat) would be to add a warm box of food for them to spend the winter in ..which is exactly what a beehive is. The well fed and slightly insulated hive has warmth and plenty food in the form of honey, bees and possibly wax, it's also fairly safe from predators (like the cat), and people are fairly unlikely to disturb the hive till Spring leaving the mouse to spend a happy winter on a high sugar diet.

How do mice get in? They just walk. If it's a cold night and the bees are all huddled up for warmth a mouse can just wander in unchallenged. You would expect a mouse in a hive to meet a fairly unpleasant death by multiple bee stings once the bees become a bit more active and start wondering who invited the furry thing that keeps peeing in the corner into their home, however, whilst I've never actually strapped a video camera to a mouse and encouraged it to enter a hive so I can see what happens, I'm told that once the mouse is in the hive the bees will ignore it completely.

So we want to keep the mice out of the hive. How do we do that? We add a metal mouseguard. A determined mouse can gnaw through a wooden entrance reducer so for this job we need something metal. As with everything else in beekeeping there's umpteen different kinds of mouseguards. What they have in common is that they should provide a metal barrier that the mice can't chew through and present some kind of access that allows the bees to go in and out but not the mice. Mice can squeeze though some fairly tight spaces dictated only by the size of their skulls. I decided to make my own mouseguards from wood and aluminium, they double as entrance reducers too so I put them in place when the wasps numbers rose in the hope that they'll make the hive entrances easier for the bees to defend.

Mouse Guards

The guards are just a wooden batton the size of the hive entrance with a piece cut out to allow bees to enter and exit. Over that I've put a piece of aluminium in which I've drilled holes through, I think I used an 8mm drill bit, should be enough to let even the drones leave the hive whilst not letting the mice in.

Bees using the MouseGuard

As you can see the bees are getting through the guards ok, there was a little confusion as they got used to the idea and it does slow them down a bit on a busy day -and given the bizzare bursts of warm weather we've been getting there have been some pretty busy days of late.

Just visible in the above image is the edge of the mesh that makes up the hive floor. Whilst it sounds a bit nuts to have an open mesh floor at the bottom of a hive over winter common consensus seems to be that the extra ventilation this provides is more useful than the extra insulation afforded by a solid wooden floor. Apparently what kills bees in the winter isn't cold but dampness and starvation. Whilst we feed them against starvation the ventilation of the open mesh floor should hopefully stave of the threat of damp.