Bee bombs - wildflower seeds

Last week I planted my “bee bombs” in the planters by our hives. Bee bombs are native wildflower seedballs. You just scatter them on open ground. We chose to plant them in the planters by the bees to give them some food right next to the hives.

At last we are having a bit of good weather! The bees from at least two of our hives were out today, very active. There won’t be any nectar at this time of year, but plenty of pollen, for example on the hazel trees in the car park.

Cleaning old hives

We were kindly given an unused hive recently, which will be very useful as a spare when the new beekeeping season starts in April. (Why? Check out this post about “hive splits”: https://cpbees.blogspot.com/2019/04/hive-splits_26.html)

To reduce this risk of passing a disease to our bees, the hive boxes needed to be cleaned thoroughly. This process involves scraping all the wax and propolis (“bee glue”) from the hives boxes, and then scorching the insides with a blowtorch. This should kill any pathogens and allow our bees to live in the boxes safely.

Here are a few photos of the process. We plan to give them a lick of paint too, to make them match the rest of the hives in our apiary.

Weeds and leaves

Ste and I had a good clear up around the hives today. It’s much easier to do on a cold dry day when there are no bees flying about.

It’s a lot tidier looking now, but I also wanted to ensure there were no weeds growing under the hives. Sometimes it is important to be able to see what is dropping out of the bottom of a hive – it can give clues as to what is going on inside.

We spotted that catkins are already out. These will provide a bit of pollen for the bees in the next few weeks, which is good. I think these are hazel. http://beespoke.info/2013/12/26/bee-trees-hazel/