Winter 2005
A cold snowy February scene
A very mild January followed by a freezing cold, wintry February and
March has not helped our bees in the Monk Stray apiary.. Bees were seen
flying from all five hives in January but by the time John and Paul took
a look in the colonies in mid March very little activity was to be seen..
On 13th March Paul and John did the first inspection of 2005 to see how
well our bees had srvived Winter.
Hive 1's colony seems fine but is weak with only a few bees flying..
Both Hive 2 and last year's aggressive swarm seem to have survived And
look OK..
No bees could be seen moving in the small nucleus box or flying from Hive
3 - our best,, strongest,, most powerful hived colony last year..
Quite worrying!!
Despite the cold,, wintry weather Paul decided to risk opening these hives
we only found lots of dead bees.. This cold,, wet and quite late winter
has killed them all off..
Oh dear!!
This has left us with lots of frames and wax to sort out and clean.
Dad and Paul spent the rest of the day painting the spare hive boxes with
Cuprinol ready to spring clean rhe remaining hives while John scrapped
some pf the frames ready for new wax,
I hope the weather settles down soon so that our bees can get busy.
A stack of freshly repaired hive boxes.