The calm before the swarm

Well, that’s it, whatever you were celebrating, winter solstice is passed. 

Me? I have lots of kit made up ready for the spring and the hum of the hives. I always make up a few extra floorboards, they are the one item that gets messier than the rest of the hive and suffers most from degradation due to the weather, I put disposable flight boards on all mine. I think the bees work better with them but they are the first part of the hive to rot so rather than having to dispose of the whole floor I can just replace the flight board which gives the floor another couple of years.

I am also going back to solid floors; I have never been entirely convinced of the rational behind mesh floors and knowing that varroa struggle to propagate under warm humid conditions at least 50% of my hives are going back over to solid floors. One thing I don’t understand about beekeepers is their inability to have everything ready for swarming season.

It happens every year. Come on guys get your act together and know how you are going to cope with your swarming hives and have your kit ready. A once good friend who I was helping sort out her hive said she couldn’t manipulate the hive that week as her spare equipment was back at the house. 

Unfortunately, I am not a patient man and with a pre-emptive expletive I told her how useful that was. Oh well that was one less Christmas card I had to send.

For a couple of years, I have played around with using a modified Snelgrove as swarm control and it has worked very well. I did alter the way of doing it though as I could not be producing an extra brood box for every hive that took into its collective brain to swarm hence this slightly different way of doing things. It worked brilliantly for me and allowed me to have a majority of hives boiling over with bees as well as producing a lot of nucs. I am not going to claim it is foolproof: nothing is with bees, but it worked like a charm for me. Feel free to give it a go but don’t think I am saying this is a right or wrong way to do things; it’s just what has worked for me.

Happy new year.