Episode 93: January Checks and Early Season Panics

Hi, I’m Stewart Spinks and welcome to Episode 93 of my podcast, Beekeeping Short and Sweet.

Another busy week and I’ve been out checking up on the colonies we fed last week. I’ve also had a question about early season colony management so stay tuned for more chat about making a great start to the new season.

Welcome back to the podcast, if you’ve only just found us, you are most welcome and if you’re a regular listener, I’m grateful to you for sticking around. It’s been another wet and windy week, super mild and no sign of any wintery weather at all. The bees have been out flying on regular cleansing flights and apart from a mouse in an unused nuc box, everything seems safe and secure.

We’re currently sat at 80 colonies, a mix of full-sized hives in all shapes and sizes, Nationals, Commercials, Langstroth's and some 14 x 12’s, together with a similar mix of nucs in the various sizes. We have wooden and poly hives and I have to say, this year, we seem to be doing very nicely in the poly hives. The nucs and full-sized hives all seem to be of a decent size and active in the mild weather. I should really carry out a count up of the two material types to give you all a better idea of the exact mix, in fact, if I just visualise the apiaries I can do it now. Currently, we have 8 times full-sized poly hives and 12 times poly nucs. The rest are wooden. We do have more stock of poly hives just no bees in the as yet. I use the Maisemore Poly Commercials and the Honey Paw Poly Langstroth’s. Both are fantastic, we’ve had the Maisemore poly hives longer than the Honey Paw’s and they’re still in excellent shape. In the beginning, I did worry about how long they would hold up and although it’s only been a few years now, they’re doing remarkably well.

The better poly hives are using 100g per litre material and that certainly seems like a substantial weight of material giving a nice feel of strength to the hives. I really must do a weight comparison between a full made up poly hive and a wooden one to show the difference. We’ve been out visiting the apiaries as I mentioned and quite a number of the colonies have been getting stuck into the fondant that we put on last week, smooch so, in fact, that we’re going to have to continue feeding those colonies now until the Spring flow comes in otherwise we risk seeing them starve out and there’s only one person to blame for that. The nucs housed in the BSHoney 2 in 1 nucs have been looking very good this Winter, the boxes are full of bees and the poly material really seems to be helping them, that said, we’ve not had any cold weather yet so they’ve not been truly tested. These nucs have certainly been the ones to gorge themselves on the fondant and we’re currently adding the second bag to most of these boxes.

A couple of the Maisemore poly hives are similarly across the top bars, I posted a picture or two via Patreon and my social media feeds, twitter and Instagram, showing a “nine-seamer”, That’s a colony with bees visible between ten brood frames which adds up to nine seams.

For those colonies, I added a homemade eke with two bags of fondant directly on the top bars. The eke’s are made from cheap roofing batten simply cut and screwed together. The Maisemore poly commercials are about 500mm square so easy enough to sort. The trick is to keep a close eye on them in the Spring or you’ll end up with a really nice 500mm square block of brace comb that will need cutting away from the top of the brood frames and make a nice mess with honey and wax dripping everywhere. I speak from personal experience, of course, last year the bees were away so fast the brace comb seemed to appear overnight!

Once they do start to build into the Spring it’s important to get the eke off and another box on, but more of this in a few minutes. Checking out the other apiaries, and we currently have eight active apiaries, the bees were all looking well and feeding quickly into the fondan