February

The weather has duped us a few times this month here in Lincolnshire! We have had some really foggy, damp and cold mornings that we were promised by the weather forecast would cheer up. It rarely did! We ended up doing a lot of this month’s beekeeping tasks in fairly unfavourable weather.

If you look very closely, you can see our new apiary layout, now a long line rather than a big dog leg. You will also be able to see that this is a rather foggy day, a day that was alleged to be 17 degrees! Off we trotted into the apiary and found it really wasn’t the weather to be opening the bees up, so we changed tack slightly and decided not to open the bees up at all but we still fed them some pollen patties. 

The patties were kindly made up for us and we just took this box full of them down to the apiary and placed one on each hive. We find it is beneficial to give these to the bees earlier rather than later so that on the days where they can’t go out to forage, the patties are there for them. On good days when they can forage, the bees can find their own pollen and probably won’t touch the patties.

Here you can also see the bees still clustered nicely, in the perfect place to take any food placed above the hole in the crownboard. As it was still so cold, we placed the patties on top of the crownboard rather than under it to avoid opening up the hive and chilling the bees unnecessarily.

That’s the last of the quiet time for the season done, next month with better weather (fingers crossed) the bees will be much more active and of course, that means we will be too.