It's About Time He Fixed That Gate...

Sunday the 3rd of March: Late Afternoon.
While his bees were hard at work in the early spring sunshine, LandofSpike had some seasonal tasks of his own to complete.

Apiary Diary: A Little Maintenance

1. No Grass and Looking a bit Scruffy

Task: Last year's wet weather had transformed the Apiary (and the previously grassy plains of Spike Acres) into a mud pit. 
It was now spring and the grass hadn't yet recovered.
Also, the Apiary was covered in leaves, twigs and other detritus that had built up over the winter.
Action: Leaves and twigs raked up, grass seed laid.

Raked & seeded. There are even some daffs

2. The Apiary Gate Needs Some Attention

Task A: Sticks from the willow screen above the door were continually dropping down into the door space, getting wedged in the door and stopping it from closing.
Action A: Attach wooden strip across front and back of the top of the door frame to keep the sticks in place.
Seal the job with weatherproof paint.

     Before: typically shoddy workmanship                                After: still shoddy of course, but problem solved

Task B: The Apiary Gate wasn't closing properly as it had not yet had a lock fitted.
The lock needed to be:
   i) sturdy enough to keep the gate from swinging open on its own or blowing open in the wind.
  ii) simple enough to click open when carrying lots of bee equipment.
Action B: Attach lock device
Secure clip to Doorframe with 20mm panel pins.
Hammer 30mm nail into top right hand corner of gate so that the head of the nail just rests behind clip when door is shut.
Door will now click open with the gentlest of tugs or pushes. It will also click shut with the same minimal pressure.

   Position of gate lock on unpainted lintel                        Close up of lock device: gentle click to open

Update: A Week Later

The Apiary gate modifications are working perfectly.
On the other hand, it has rained, more or less, continuously for two days, turning the Apiary and the rest of Spike Acres, once again, into a sea of mud.

Get Thee Behind Me, Jet Stream

Somewhere the sun is shining, 

So, honey, don't you cry,

We'll find a silver lining,

The clouds will soon roll by. 

So sang Elsie Carlisle, vocalist for the rather excellent Ambrose and his Orchestra in 1935.

And now, seventy seven years later, the clouds are indeed about to roll by. 
And the place where the sun is about to shine is right above the BeesofSpike Apiary.

Yes indeed, the English summer is, eventually, almost here.
This is due to the Jet Stream finally shuffling back up into its customary, more northerly, position after having lingered too far south for far too long.

And happily, it's taking its appalling weather with it.

No more of this for a while

It has rained every day at the BeesofSpike Apiary since the bees arrived.

The Apiary's newly laid grass has more or less disappeared, and the yet-to-be-named Hive Number One stands glumly in a depressing sea of mud.

But all is about to change.

Today, Friday 20 July, apart from being Mrs LandofSpike's birthday (Many happy returns, of course) marks the end of the interminable Jet Stream-induced rainy season.

And about time too

Tomorrow, it will be sunny all day. 

And the forecast is set fair for as far into the future as LandofSpike's weather-predicting seaweeds can tell.

The BeesofSpike will like this.

It's at last a chance to get a concerted spell of foraging under their belts before they have to hunker down for their first winter at the Apiary.

A BeesofSpike forager finally out and about, collecting pollen from the privet hedge two gardens down

The Honeymoon's Over

LandofSpike's first seven days of beekeepery have not been the best of times for his lovely new Buckfast bees.

This post was meant to recount the transfer of his colony from the travel nuc to the main BeesofSpike hive.
The transfer was totally successful but unforeseen events mean that the report must wait a bit longer.

I find myself instead documenting a week of problems for the BeesofSpike. 

Problem Number 1: Appalling Weather for Bees

The weather has been atrocious over the last week.

Yesterday was the worst of the lot, it chucked it down all day. 

Just like today. 

It's still raining now, as I type.

In fact, it has tipped it down every day for the whole week. 

It was even raining when the BBC Weather Report was claiming that it was sunny.

And the forecast for next week looks just as bad.

And all the while that it's raining my workers are unable to forage.

This is bad news for a small colony of bees that are already into July and have got limited time to get themselves strong enough to survive the winter.

The bees need every bit of good weather they can get.

Although even in the rain we can see them trying their best.

In the meantime I've been leaving the varroa board in place.

The varroa board is the sliding removable tray at the very bottom of the hive that catches everything that would otherwise fall to the ground.

In this way I can monitor what's going on inside the hive by analysing what drops out of the hive.

And after a particularly heavy rainstorm i found... 

Problem Number 2: Rain Incursion

There was water on the varroa board.

That shouldn't be there.

Drat

Surely the hive wasn't leaking from above. 

It wasn't.
Therefore it could only be one of two things.

Or both of them.

a) the hive entrance is quite open at the front and it's possible rain could get in that way.

b) the tray protrudes from the back of the hive by approximately 3cm so rain can fall directly onto the rear of it.

So, to protect the back, I put a length of 2x1 across the width of the hive stand, just above the tray, to act as a little roof.

For the front, I put a couple of tiles under the back feet of the stand to tilt the hive forwards a bit. 
I now realise that setting it up meticulously spirit-level horizontal was a bit of a mistake.

Hopefully the slope will encourage sitting water to not drain into the hive.

On further advice from Beeguru1 I'm going to tilt it forward a bit more tomorrow. 

As much as 15* is fine so the bees will have to get used to being on a bit of a slope, although hopefully a slope is better than a puddle.

On further inspection of their varroa board, i noticed that along with some encouraging pollen and wax debris, a couple of legs, two wings, an antenna and other assorted detritus, that there seemed to be more varroa activity than i was expecting.

Problem Number 3: Varroa Mites

When varroa mites drop to the bottom of the hive they fall through the cunning wire mesh screen and get trapped on the oily surface of the varroa board.

Not nice

Yesterday, across the whole board, I counted approximately 15 mites.

I cleaned and reinserted the board and today, 24 hrs later, there were about 17 new ones.

And magnified, using the LandofSpike makeshift optical device. Really not nice

In addition, this morning, I found a bee on the landing board, struggling to walk and staggering in circles.

It had stunted wings and a varroa mite onboard its back. 

A BeesofSpike worker, fatally damaged, varroa mite on wing

Two ominous mite counts and that poor sad bee infested with that grisly little beast pointed to only one conclusion.

I consulted Beeguru1 and he confirmed that it looked like the colony had a varroa infestation and that we needed to get it treated double-quick.

It's therefore time to get some Apiguard into the hive.
I've got some on order but I need it now. That means a trip across town to the local(ish) Bee Supplies Shop on Monday morning so the fightback against varroa can start as soon as possible.

And so the honeymoon period's over rather sooner than I expected.

My poor bees most certainly arrived at the BeesofSpike Apiary with varroa already on board.

But hopefully, this is where their luck starts to change.

Seeing just that one horribly damaged and distressed bee really underlined for me the consequences of getting it wrong. I've now got a chance to put it right.

Every crisis can become an opportunity, a crisitunity, as Homer Simpson once said.

The more things that go wrong, the more I learn and the better and more capable a beekeeper I become.

Which would imply that after a first week of appalling weather, water incursion and a varroa infestation, if it continues at this rate, I'll soon be the most experienced and battle-hardened beekeeper in the country.