gavin

I know, its only March. The sun came out and stayed out, the wind had dropped, and I was still fretting about the level of stores. So off I went ...

Parking in the usual lane behind the big wall, I picked up the usual bits and pieces. The jacket and veil with the metal hoop sticking out. Hive tool. My favourite smoker, now sadly with a few holes nibbled in the bellows from a winter in the shed with the mice. Bag of crumbly bits of wood. Camera. Newspaper, but not the lighter as I discovered 15 min later.

A few steps from the car, and more than a hundred from the bees, a dark worker came right up and hovered in front of me for a while. Was it just coming to greet me? Curious about my purple jersey? Perhaps it was just trying to work out why the damp muddy patch suddenly had a big red-painted metallic thing parked beside it.

Snowdrops are still in flower. Cherries are nearly there. Even the pears are showing signs of life.

First things first: just watch the bees. Quite a fuss in front of the hives, and a puzzle as to why two of the entrance blocks had been moved again. Didn't I jam them in with twigs before? What do I have to do to keep them in place? I don't think much of the design of those cheapo mesh floors as the drawing pins get in the way of a neatly fitting entrance block.



As before 1, 2 and 3 (as I'll now call them) were bringing in pollen. Some snowdrop and also some big bright yellow leggings that reminded me of willow from the size of them. Maybe willow is easy to collect. There is willow out, but I didn't know of any in flying distance. Most of it is still in bud. Colony 4 is the Monkish one, and I could see no pollen being taken in. Is it queenless? Let's have a look.

Inside the Monkish colony there seemed to be a good number of bees on a few super frames. There's no queen excluder, so lets pull some of these super frames. No brood, no eggs, not even any cleaned cells. OK, it is warm and the bees are calm (the smoker was lit but I hadn't touched it) so lets look below in the brood box. Nothing! Just a few scattered bees. This colony is doomed, as it seems to have no queen and even if I gave it eggs there are no drones and will be none for many weeks. Drat, my losses are now 50%. There are plenty of beekeepers locally who have been wiped out this winter, or had a significantly higher proportion of a much higher total number lost, so I shouldn't be too surprised.

Next one along. Still that delicious aroma of Glen Isla heather honey even before you open the hive. Wow. Sealed brood, open brood and eggs in three of the super frames. Without lifting any boxes I can see that the bees are on 8-9 of the frames in the brood box below. Great! This colony seems to have fairly pure dark bees and is going to be my first to reproduce. I've not seen a colony this size in March for many years, possibly never. Still plenty of stores.

The unused smoker has gone out. Perhaps I should re-light it.

The next one was a swarm from Invergowrie last summer and has just one brood box, no super. Around 4 frames of bees, mostly on the front half (all my frames are perpendicular to the entrance) and on one central frame there was a smallish patch of brood, including sealed brood. There were two full frames of stores on one side, and presumably more on the other, so this one is also fine to be left alone and ought to build up to full size on the rape. This one had its entrance block about 1/4 of the way across the floor, still parallel to the entrance. Can mice do this?!



The last one is another brood and a half, with the super a late addition of an OSR harvest that never got extracted added back to the colony it came from. This one did get a little restless, so I did get to use the smoker, just a couple of gentle puffs over the frame tops. No need to upset them with smoke. The bees were in the super and raising brood there, and were occupying many brood frames too, though not as many as the second colony mentioned. There were plenty of stores in this colony, and that is all I needed to know. Little disturbance, no lifting of any boxes, little chilling, and all back together again.