Apiary Diary - March 2021
Updated: Aug 21, 2021
Surviving winter floods and ‘robbing’
Happily, all the hives survived the winter. While not particularly cold, it was damp—well—more than damp: from Christmas day until mid-February, gardens and meadows in West Oxford were submerged due to winter flooding.
However, raising the hives well above flood levels (a lesson learnt from our early beekeeping days) kept the bees safe. Flooding can also affect the emergence of flowers, but now (in late March) more blossom is appearing, and the bees are gathering pollen from a huge willow nearby.
One hive emerged weaker than the others, and I noticed that it was getting ‘robbed’ of food stores by other colonies. To give them helping hand I restricted the entrance to a narrow opening (about two bees wide), and this seems to have helped the defenders.
New season, new Top Bar Hive!
Pre-season prep—aside from the post-flood clean-up—has involved clearing more apiary space and building new hives and stands, as we plan for more colonies this year.
Although most of our hives are conventional ‘nationals’ (vertically stacked), we acquired a top bar hive (TBH) late last summer. It was donated by a wonderful and very experienced beekeeper from Old Marston, who constructed it himself, but has downsized his operations.
We’re very much looking forward to populating it this year. TBHs are often favoured by low-intervention beekeepers for several reasons, including that inspections can be performed with minimal disturbance, and their construction give bees more freedom to build exactly the right comb where it's needed.
Hive observations
After a couple of ‘false starts’ on warmer days in February, the bees have been out foraging increasingly of late. It is ever fascinating to watch them bringing in the pollen. As I write we’re due a few warmer days, and more blossom is emerging, so this should give them a boost.
I noticed very different-looking bees popping in and out of Hive 1. In the picture above, the last bee flying into the hive has an abdomen that appears more orange than that of the bees just ahead of it. There was no aggressive behaviour at the entrance, however, and rather than signifying another case of ‘robbing’, this indicated that the queen would have mated with multiple drones with different characteristics, which keeps the gene pool varied and is considered good for the hive.
Mark, Botley Meadow Bees, 31 March 2021