April 2024
The Colony Build Up Continues - Newsletter from Alan Riach
The bees are out at every opportunity although they would be better with umbrellas some days. The mouse guards should all be removed now and check that there are no blockages of the entrances due to dead bees.
A quick inspection can be made on a quiet sunny day when the temperature is over 12 C. Don’t keep the hive open too long, just sufficient to check that there is brood.
Keep checking for food. Remember, anyone can take bees through winter, it’s getting them through a Scottish Spring that is the challenge, especially if we are unlucky enough to have an East Coast haar setting in. If you run out of fondant, you can revert to a bag of sugar. A bag of sugar with a 2cm hole in the flank of the bag and soaked with 100ml of water to prevent the sugar from pouring out, is placed over the cover board feedhole.
The Canola (edible oil seed rape) is well advanced with reports of the first signs of flowering in some of the more sheltered areas, so make sure you have everything ready for any artificial swarming operations that may become necessary. Clean up these used brood frames or replace them with new ones as necessary and insert new foundation.
I had occasion to search out James Pagden’s 1868 booklet £ 70 a year – How I make it from my bees. This was where Pagden first described the stock-movement process, which we still use for artificial swarming. Pagden was still skep beekeeping and thus couldn’t check the colony for queen cells. He watched carefully for swarms and when one issued and bivouacked (settled temporarily in the apiary), he collected it in a new skep (after 15 minutes), moved the original skep to one side and placed the new skep containing the swarm in the original position in order as he put it “to collect all the flying bees and moving the original skep away a short distance so that it would lose all its fliers and weaken it to the level where it wouldn’t throw off cast afterswarms”. His advocacy of skeps was based on economics – a good quality skep, placed on an upturned round American cheese box sitting on 4 bricks with the whole draped with an artificial fertiliser sack (would have been jute) to protect it from the weather and the whole topped with an upturned dairy cream bowl (second quality to save cost) – total price 1 shilling and sixpence per colony (7.5 pence). We don’t, of course, advocate using skeps any longer, as it makes disease checks and swarm preparation checks too difficult, but it is interesting that Pagden had discovered, all that time ago, the basics of the artificial swarm system that we currently use.
