March Update

Slowly the weather gets better and the bees are starting to fly. Their initial flights are what are called 'cleansing flights [they poo a lot].
They don't go far from the hive but gradually start looking for forage. The first bee visited my shed to see what I was up to on the 12th Feb.
They start to fly when the temperature is about 10C but the hive cannot be opened until the temperature is about 15C.
I will take the winter wraps off  and remove the entrance reducers sometime next week.

Spring Feeding

As the bees start to emerge from the winter the concern for bee keepers is that the bees will have nothing for forage and their winter stores will be very low if not gone altogether and its not uncommon for colonies make it through the winter only to starve in the Spring. It happened to one of my colonies last year
Therefore its advisable to give them a kick start by making food available to them.
Usually this is done by feeding syrup but because they can fly and therefore excrete, the syrup is a 1:1 mix - 1 pint of water to 1 lb of sugar, rather than the thicker 2:1 mix in winter.
I buy 25kg sacks of sugar from Bookers and have spent a few evenings making the syrup up and putting it in 25ltr dispensers that will be taken to the apiaries.

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They are very heavy but at Scald End and Stevington I can drive right up to the bees to drop them off.
Ravensden is more problematic as access with bulky/heavy items is more difficult.
This year I will be adding something called Hive Alive which adds natural nutrients to the syrup and also has the benefit of preventing the syrup from fermenting.

Snelgrove boards

As I said in a previous blog, this year I will be using the Snelgrove method of swarm control.
An advantage of this method is that you don't need to have as much spare equipment such as roofs and brood boxes as other methods, but you do need to use a Snelgrove board.
These cost about £25 each but they aren't complicated so I bought a sheet of plywood for £21 which makes 10. In all I probably spent about £30 - £3 each.

Although I know the basic principles of the method, I bought something called 'A Simple Guide To The Uses Of A Snelgrove Board'. The author appears to have a different idea of what the word 'simple' means as it is 20 pages long.

I will do a blog about this about April time.