Saying that I don't think I'm terrible, I speak to other bee keepers, read magazines, follow blogs and even go to meetings, but I do make mistakes. Its a widely accepted principle among beeks that you never learn everything you need to know.
At markets I have often spoken to people who seem to think bee keeping is just sticking the bees in a hive and 'letting them get on with it' and Monty Don of Gardens World fame said as much in an interview.
Hopefully I'm in a reasonable mood and try to smile as I say 'its not quite that easy .....' and wonder if they look after their pets in the same way. ['Tiddles our cat is coughing up blood and hasn't eaten for a week, we'll let her get on with it'] and if Monty Don chucks a few seeds on the ground and lets them get on with it.
But I do get things right and I have to say somehow I have managed to get something very right.
For me the judgement on whether or not I have had a good year [a very common question] is not how much honey the bees have produced but how successfully they have survived the winter.
In the UK over the last ten years the average loss is about 15% and last year in the South East the figure was 23% which means I should lose 4. In America things are much worse and losses of 40% are common.
Some how I have lost ...........none.
A couple are on the small size but should be OK.
How have I managed this? No idea.
The winter hasn't been too bad but a mild winter might be a bad thing as the bees would be active and consume stores more quickly.
I have been more vigilant with their Autumn and Winter feeding and I have used my oxalic acid vaporiser for the Winter varroa treatment which a recent article said is a very successful method and doesn't affect the bees.
Although I'm very pleased, there is a down side. One of the things I've never been very good at is swarm control. Swarming is something that happens from May and is the process by which a colony splits in two and half the colony leaves the hive and settles in your neighbours garden who then proceed to have a nervous breakdown [the neighbours not the bees].
There is a multitude of ways, with varying degrees of complexity, of managing this and I've never really got a handle on it.
However last weekend I went to an Association meeting about it. I was hoping to find a single method that I could deal with and was delighted when someone went through a fairly simple process and gave out a handout with diagrams, timings etc. Just what I needed.
However it means:-
[1] having a huge amount of extra equipment.
[2] potentially doubling the number of colonies you have.
I'll worry about this later.
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