October has been fairly wet, with a few cold, sunny days towards the end of the month. Bees are shutting up for winter, but they are not the only ones. As beekeepers, we must be careful with mice trying to nestle their way into hives for the winter. Mice can squeeze their way through most entrance gaps, but the mouseguard holes are just slightly too small for their skulls. Once inside a hive, mice can eat their way through stores and set up a nest in there. They can destroy combs, so it is best to avoid housing them if at all possible. Therefore, this month’s main job has been attaching mouseguards to the front of all the hives. This can be quite a fiddly task, so we find that using the snowley mouseguard magnet with a pot of drawing pins speeds things up. The magnet is pictured here with a drawing pin attached to the end, ready to be pushed in.
The activity of attaching mouseguards can also encourage bees to start pouring out the front of the hive, which really slows the job up (never mind the stings that go with it). For this reason, we did the job just after 4pm and as you can see from this picture, the sun was just about going down on a lovely cold, sunny day here at Rand. This meant we barely had any disturbance from the bees and could get the job done quickly.
We also have a few hives which have been placed out in preparation for next year, for artificial swarms/increases etc. To stop anything hibernating in these over winter, we have closed the entrances entirely, using entrance blocks, as pictured here:
As there have been confirmed discoveries of Asian Hornets this year in the UK, we have continued to check the Asian Hornet traps. Fortunately, we have not found any of this invasive species, so all other species have been set free. The chance of catching an Asian Hornet will decrease as we go into winter, so we would be unlikely to find anything now. However, we will keep checking, just in case!
Moving into next month, we will be doing some hefting of the hives to check on stores. As we move into the colder temperatures, our main priority will be to keep them stocked up and provide the bees with any extra food, should they require it.
