Welcome to the Thorne Bee Blog 2024! By now, we are well into the year though and starting to see some much-anticipated signs of spring.

By our museum apiary, we have spotted these lovely snowdrops, which seem to spread a little more every year. This is such a welcome sight at this time of year, not only because they are so pretty but also because it is the first sign of the spring to come.

That said, this January we have seen storm after storm and combined with the recent floods, it has been a slightly tumultuous winter, even though it has not really been that cold here. We had couple of hives fall over in the wind. You can see from the photo below the value of strapping hives together as the boxes all just toppled over together.

We should mention that this was actually just empty boxes too, so the weight wasn’t there to hold them down – no bees were harmed in this photo!

At this time of year we don’t like to disturb the bees unnecessarily, however, we did take a quick peek into some of the hives where we couldn’t detect any activity from the outside. However, we were pleasantly surprised to see them thriving and just still hunkered down in their clusters.

Next month we will be checking for stores to make sure that any colonies that are starting to build up, don’t suddenly starve due to inevitable cold snaps. We have seen this before where a colony starts to build up nicely in numbers during warmer spells and then suddenly a drop in temperature means that they can’t forage, can’t feed the colony and then die out. We will also be really gearing up in February with our plans for the year and getting prepared with equipment that we will need.