Some beekeepers are always thinking ahead. They have a plan. They keep records, so they know what’s going on with their bees, and they take time to think about what they will be doing next, and then what next after that. I suppose personality type might come into it; not all folks are wired the same way, but thinking ahead a step or two is a helpful beekeeping trait. There is little point doing all of that thinking, planning, plotting, or whatever you want to call it, unless you also take action. Thoughtful planning combined with actually doing something to achieve said plan probably results in successful outcomes.
Thoughtful planning + Action = Proactive beekeeping
Many beekeepers tend to be reactive rather than proactive. They wait until something looks wrong, then try to fix it. The proactive beekeeper foresees potential problems and takes action to prevent their occurrence. It’s not that difficult, but it’s not always easy either. We all make mistakes, and that’s OK. Hopefully, our mistakes teach us something, and we can use the lessons to proactively avoid them in the future.
Experience Can Help
Experience can be a great teacher, if we learn the correct things from it. To me, experience is about how many colonies you see each week, year after year. It’s not about how many years you have been keeping bees. My son (the mole) has been through 50–100 colonies, April to September, for two years now. I bet he’s seen more bees in two years than a lot of ‘experienced’ beekeepers see in 20 years. Hopefully, under the careful guidance (or crazed ramblings) of this old walrus, he has learned a thing or two. Compared to a ‘proper’ bee farmer, this is a tiny number of colonies, of course.
Sometimes people learn the wrong things from their experience. Those beekeepers who don’t treat for varroa mites at the right time in the right way, or maybe don’t treat at all, often attribute the death of their colonies to all sorts of things, but rarely the varroa/deformed wing virus combo. It’s a blind spot. I probably have a few of those myself (blind spots). It is quite difficult to look in the mirror and admit that the person staring back isn’t as great as he sometimes likes to think. This is one reason why I try to avoid mirrors!
Dandelions To The Rescue
I have hopefully finished feeding the colonies that needed it, which was actually quite a few of them. I got through all of my fondant and ended up giving syrup to some. We now have plenty of dandelions in flower, which is the time when I think my bees have ‘made it’ through winter, as (weather permitting) they will get plenty of pollen and nectar from dandelions. The weather forecast seems OK for early April, so that could be when we start inspections.
To-Do List
The tasks I have lined up are:
- changing or cleaning/scorching floors
- repairing/replacing some hive stands
- moving any supers on floors above the brood boxes
- checking for queen & healthy brood (when it’s warmer)
- marking and clipping any queens that haven’t been done
- maybe a bit of equalisation at an apiary level
- swapping out some black combs for better combs or foundation (in a flow)
- dealing with any colonies that have no queen or a drone layer
- re-queening colonies with old ‘yellow-dot’ queens (YDQ) with some ‘red-dot’ queens (RDQ) that came through winter in mini-plus hives
- cleaning up boxes and excluders, and scorching with a blow torch (or bleaching, if poly boxes)
- continuing the endless task of putting wax foundation into wired super frames
- setting up a new apiary on a nice organic farm (owner insists on timber hives and no synthetic treatments, which is fine by me)
Queen Stuff
That will keep me busy for the next few weeks, and subsequently, it will be time to add supers and try to keep ahead of swarming. I only have six spare over-wintered queens, in mini-plus boxes, and eight colonies with YDQs that require replacing. Oh well, I shall do six. I actually have nine YDQs out of 71 colonies (13%); all the others are RDQs. Of the eight YDQs, one will be moved to a nucleus hive and used as a breeder-queen because she’s done well for me (Jolanta queen, J9 line). My other breeder-queen is an instrumentally inseminated one from Luke & Suzie at Northumberland Honey, which seems to have come through winter in fine fettle.
One of the YDQs has never really had the opportunity to fill up a full-sized hive (she’s in a double nuc) so I shall move her to larger premises and see if she can make some honey. She is a queen from Andrew Little (son of Peter). That is, of course, assuming that she was not superseded last autumn. That applies to all of my YDQs – maybe they are YDQs no more; I won’t discover this until inspections start.
So there you are; I do have some plans. They are not so cunning that you could stick a tale on them and call them weasels, but it’s better than nowt.