July has been a much calmer month here at Rand! All the nucs have been sent off and swarming has come to an end (thankfully!). This month has mostly been a case of inspecting the colonies for the usual things: presence of a queen, a decent amount of bees/brood and pests/diseases. One of the main issues we have had this month has been the hot weather. We have seen bees die in the hive from overheating before but usually with sufficient ventilation, this is avoided so we have opened up entrances to give them a bit of extra air. Vented suits have been our friends this month!

If any colonies have been found to be queen-less (after making sure there is definitely no virgin queen etc.), depending of the number of bees or brood in the hive, they have been re-queened or united with other colonies. We find that July is still early enough in the year to re-queen as long as there are plenty of bees and some brood in the hive. If there are only very few bees and little to no brood, then we unite them with stronger colonies using the newspaper method as we find this to be a simple and mostly successful way to unite. It is a good time of year to bump up colonies in strength instead of letting them dwindle because smaller colonies at this time of year are unlikely to make it through wasp season, let alone winter.

Talking of wasps, we have started to see a small number buzzing around the apiary. Some years are worse than others for wasps here but generally we do find we get quite a lot. Maybe it is the big laurel hedge that edges our Lakes apiary! This is one of the reasons we like to make sure the colonies are nice and strong. Any small or weak colonies are most likely to succumb to wasps. Soon we will be reducing the entrances down to one bee space to make it easier for the bees to defend their hive or we will use Wasp-Outs which have worked very well in the past.

This month we have swapped out older combs for newer ones as we think this is one of the easiest ways to keep disease at bay. Plus, it is easier to see eggs in new comb! We have seen lots of stores being collected this month as well, so we are keen to leave the bees with plenty to keep them going into the Autumn too. Here you can see a great brood frame packed with stores.

Next month we will be trying to keep the pests at bay. This will include being on wasp patrol but also potentially starting our varroa treatment to make sure that the bees are healthy and happy going into winter.