October 2024
Closing Down For the Season Continued - Newsletter from Alan Riach
The bees should all be fed and sitting confidently with 18kg of food onboard. Beginners are always advised to “heft” their hives to ensure that they are sufficiently heavy, but knowing what a reasonable heft is, needs some experience. It is not too difficult to weigh hives using a luggage weigher and a piece of stiff 3mm fence wire (or a M5 (5mm thread diameter) 1m long, screwed rod from your local Toolstation serves nicely). See Technical Data Sheet number 21 on the SBA website.
A reasonable weight for a typical wooden single broodbox Smith or National hive would be 28 to 30 kg. with floor and roof. 26kg would be a bit light. If the colony is on double broodboxes, on 8 + 8 frames 30 to 33 kg. 28kg would be a bit light. Polyhives could be a bit lighter due to the reduced weight of the equipment (approx. 4 or 5 kg less)
If you decide that the hive is a bit light, it is now rather late to feed liquid syrup as the bees will struggle to dry it after this time, leaving a risk of fermentation, so place a couple of kg of fondant on the crown board over the feed hole. Placing here rather than directly on top of the frames prevents fondant softening and running down between the frames which might endanger the queen. A reasonably strong colony will have no difficulty getting to the feed
hole especially as its usually in the slightly warmer spring that they run short of food. The bees may still get some ivy nectar and pollen which is valuable for early Spring usage.
Generally, it has been a rather poor honey season although some late summer honey did appear. The heather in the Pentlands did not yield well this year – ah well, it’ll be better next year.
Apply your mouse guards now. The metal strip ones with 9mm holes are most convenient and to avoid the fight with map pins whilst wearing your gloves use my method of pre-pinning. Put the map or drawing pin thru the holes in the
mouse guard before you don your gloves and wrap a piece of tape round the pin (point of pin piercing the tape) and guard to keep the pin in place. You can then simply push the taped pin into the hive without having to carry out a hopeless search for displaced pins in the grass. If you use a wood or plastic entrance block, ensure that the slot is less than 8mm high as any larger and a mouse can deform its skull and squeeze in.
Ensure your hives are secure against winter winds. Strap the colonies with ratchet straps, as even if a hive does get blown over or knocked over by farm livestock, the bees will usually survive if the hive parts stay together.
