Gatsbees B-Log: March 2015

In early March, a welcome sunny day may be followed by a frosty night so it’s better to just peek inside the beehive to make sure the bees have enough food.  Imagine someone takes off your roof, prizes apart all the walls, rips apart your pantry, kills a few of your family and lets in the cold. You’d probably be annoyed!

A good way to check the girls without opening the hive is to put a camera underneath and photograph the colony through the mesh floor. The dark area shows where the bees are clustering and if they smell good and the floor isn’t piled high with dead bees, then they must be ok.  For the moment at least!

Care must be taken while walking to the apiary as there are bees in all the warm puddles, collecting water to dissolve and eat the honey, which was stored in the comb last year.

It doesn’t have to be deep water as their proboscis sucks up the water like a straw...

...but they have claws and pressure pads on their feet to prevent them falling into deep water.

One of the major jobs for the winter is to clean any used wooden equipment by scorching it with a blow torch...

...and also to make up new frames on which the bees build their wax comb.

Spring fashion, yellow bloomers

Coming in to land. 

The longer I keep bees, the more remarkable they become and with April on the doorstep, the season is about to begin.

Get ready for take off..........

Gill X