A month in the Apiary - May

by Nick Pendleton, Woodside Farm

We have had an interesting month around Fletching and Piltdown, with the weather varying from lovely, sunny days to frosty, cold, almost wintry ones. This has given us a slight variation in each colony - smaller ones have stayed smallish as the cold snaps prevent them from building up too much, whereas the larger colonies have made the most of their time foraging outside the hive and consequently, are building up quickly.

This month we have seen the bees bringing in lots of pollen. From those warm sunny days, looking through the clear, glass crown boards, I have seen evidence of the bees building wax on the frames, inside the hives.

In early May the cold, sunny weather was then replaced by very cold, very wet weather. With the cold weather I still have not been able to do a proper inspection in the hive; instead I must look at the entrance of a hive, and on the floor around it, to get an idea of what is going on side the hive. Notwithstanding the conditions, the bees have been well behaved. Perhaps the bees are so sick and tired of the low temperatures, so far this spring, they just sat on the comb looking mournful, or it may be a by-product of my queen selection from the more calm an more gentle hives, for breeding. By selecting larvae from the best hives, I can go some way towards breeding better, more gentle bees that produce a good honey crop. I am part of a ‘Calm Bee project’ as a member of High Weald BKA that has this very purpose.

This involves taking a newly laid larvae, placing in in a cell cap and creating the environment whereby the worker bees will fee ‘Royal Jelly’ to allow a queen to emerge sixteen days later, in an apedea. This is a much smaller hive where workers have deliberately been made queen-less. That way they are supposed to gratefully accept the new queen that arrives. Sounds simple, but an awful lot can and often does go wrong.

Next month is normally the busiest time of year. We are in the middle of a couple of weeks of bad weather, but I am expecting that once the sun comes back out, the bees will certainly be keeping me busy!