Our apiary always needs a bit of a tidy up after winter. It gets a lot of leaves behind the hives and weeds growing under them.
So yesterday we cleared all the leaves up and pruned back a lot of the foliage at the edge of the site.
We also checked the hives to see that they were all still alive. We’re pleased to say that all five hives are alive and four of them were actively flying because it was a nice day (for February!).
We’ve made sure each hive still has some food, just in case the weather turns bad again. The end of winter is a common time for hives to die from starvation, because obviously that is when the food stores run out!
We won’t start opening the hives and performing inspections until mid March at the earliest. We’ll be looking for a nice warm spring day so we can check that the queen is OK and laying well. After that, in April, the beekeeping season will start in earnest.
Here are the “before” and “after” photos.
Before
After
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