April 2000
A Wet Start to the Year.
Hives 1& 2 surrounded by their protective fence
&
hive 3, a small swarm collected last summer
The first week in April should see us Spring cleaning our bee-hives ready for Summer.
However April 2000 will be remembered for one thing - rain, rain and
more rain! One day didn't seem to go by without a downpour at some stage
of the day. Still, we weren't idle.
Some hive boxes have been scrubbed down and treated with a mild, bee friendly
wood preservative, (we use "cuprinol" wood preservative - a
relatively mild wood treatment).
A
before and after shot: The box on the right has had a year out doors,
stuck up with resin, and covered in green algae.
After treatment, they were stacked outside to "weather" as freshly treated wood would not be very good for the bees.
Newly finished boxes, and roofs are left to weather outside
Old frames stored over winter were cleaned of old wax and resin left over from last season, scraping any excess wax from the outside of the frames. Once clean these were placed in the deep freeze to kill off any "wax moths" that were making tunnels through the wax eating it up. Then we made up some new brood frames - large sheets of "wax foundation" were prepared to be put into the hives.
John scrapes excess wax and old resin from overwintered frames, ready
to put them on our newly "spring-cleaned" hives.
By Easter weekend the weather had finally improved and we could at last
take a look inside the hives.
Disaster !
Our smallest hive, a swarm from last year, didn't seem too bad, it was
just a little small.
However, our two larger hives were in a sorry state.... Poor old bees
! Rain, rain and more rain had crept into the main section of the hives
turning frames of stored honey mouldy and quite alot of the honey had
started to ferment. The boxes themselves had mould on the inner walls
and very few brood was to be seen.
Note
the grotty mould that has grown on the inside of this hive box. Poor old
bees!
Drastic action was needed almost immediately.
New brood boxes were prepared and it was a good job ten new brood frames
had been constructed as we used all of them between the three hives, replacing
the old, rotten frames and mouldy comb.
The scourge of ours and many a colony - the Varroa mite - was also present
in large numbers.
Bayvoral strips were placed between the frames.
Eric with a box of bayvarol strips, some used strips in front.
These strips are impregnated with a chemical that kills the mites. The bees paddle across the strips and carry the chemical around the hive and through the brood chamber killing the mites.
John in full beekeepers gear brings down some newly prepared frames
I hope that it does the trick and we get some sunny weather soon so that
our bees recover enough for us to expand the hives again.
A newly prepared hive2 is placed on the site of the old
hive and all the frames transferred to it. here the old weatherbeaten
hivebox (see how it has faded over the year), is placed in front of the
new hive, any bee stragglers will walk up into their new home.