Who knows if this will be of any interest to anyone, but hey, I’m going to write about what we have been up to this winter and our plans for the new season. That kicks off for us in three weeks. As I write this, Wales have just lost to Italy in the rugby, which just goes to show how things change. When I was a kid I played a lot of rugby at school, and Wales were among the best. Despite Irish ancestry, I am English, and support England, which usually means disappointment (in most sports), but I’m used to that.
Cleaning Up
Winter is the time when we move dirty equipment from apiaries and sheds on farms back home for cleaning and sterilising. It’s far from my favourite job, but I think it is important to properly deal with boxes, floors, and nucs after dead-outs. The Polystyrene kit gets a good scrape and is then submerged in a tank containing a combination of bleach and soda crystals dissolved in water. We have to weigh it down with paving slabs. The trouble is, when it’s bitterly cold, or raining, the idea of fiddling about cleaning kit is decidedly unattractive, so the job tends to get put off until temperatures exceed 8 deg Celsius.
Equipment made from wood is much more fun to clean up because I get to play with fire. After scraping it as best we can, we scorch wooden boxes and floors with a blow torch. It makes a lovely smell, and is curiously satisfying.
The cleaned/sterilised equipment gets loaded into the van and moved back to storage sheds near to some apiaries. We will already have tidied up our storage in the autumn, making it look like we are organised. That doesn’t usually last very long once the season starts.
Rugby Update
Wow, England just beat France in a real thriller of a match at Twickenham.
Buying Stuff
Another winter activity for me is buying equipment that I need for the season(s) ahead. There are sometimes good deals to be had. I bought a second honey extractor – one which takes the wider Manley frames – as well as a very fancy new incubator by Brinsea. The extra extractor will accelerate the process and gives us a bit of redundancy in case one of them breaks. Our main 30 frame extractor doesn’t do well with Manley frames, and we have quite a few of them. The incubator might be a little over the top, but we are hoping to really up our game this coming season on queen production. I like moving sealed queen cells to an incubator so that we can re-use the cell builder quickly, and it means that the cells are finished in a controlled and safe environment (as long as we don’t have a power cut).
We also bought a load of frames from Denrosa, both super and brood frames, assembled and fitted with foundation. They are good, strong frames, and I appreciate the fact that some other poor soul has had to fit foundation into all of them. They work out to be just over £2 per frame. I also ordered a breeder queen from Jolanta, which should be with me in April or May. At the forthcoming Beekeeping Show in Telford, I am collecting some nucleus hives from Gwenyn Gruffydd and some brood frames. The nucs are from Italy and a good price, but time will tell how hardwearing they are.
Speaking of The Beekeeping Show, I am taking the Mole (my son Alex) this year. We will be having a meal the evening before, organised by the Bee Farmers, and it’s always good to catch up with folks there. On the morning of the show itself I shall probably sign a load of books, collect my pre-ordered equipment, and most likely grab some protein patties and Formic Pro. I don’t expect to hang about too long, though.
Soft Set Honey
Winter is a good time to turn all of that oilseed rape honey from last spring into a delicious creamy smooth soft-set honey. I have a creamer which does a great job. I just chuck the liquid honey in and set the stirrer to run every 15 minutes for the next 48 hours. It’s in an outside shed with no heating, which works perfectly. I have started to sneak a few jars of soft-set into batches ordered by my customers, and demand is very slowly increasing. We love soft-set honey and cannot understand why most people want to exclusively buy runny. I have to admit that nearly pure oilseed rape is a bit too pale. It tastes good, but looks like it has been visited by a honey vampire. The Mole consumes great quantities of the stuff.
Cunning Plans
At various times over the winter, I review my notes from last season. It’s partly to make sure I have selected the right breeder queens, and to see if there are lessons to be learned. We are starting up two new apiaries this coming season, bringing the total to ten. My honey keeps on selling, so I have to keep adding more and more production colonies so that we can keep up. As long as the Mole continues to work for me, it’s not a problem, but I wouldn’t want to look after more than 100 colonies on my own. Especially at harvesting and extraction time.
Another important planning task is figuring out where my overwintered queens will be moving to. Some are in National nucs, most of which are already sold. The Langstroth nucs are to replace losses and to boost colony numbers at sites which could handle more. We also have queens in mini-plus hives which can go into newly made nucs or be used to re-queen any colonies with left over red-dot (or yellow-dot in one case) queens.
Making Hives
We still have some Langstroth cedar hives to build, from flat packs. I don’t like the open mesh floors that come as part of the package, so I make new floors of my own design. These are the under floor entrance type, with a small area of mesh at the back, but mostly solid floors (under where the brood goes). They are great, I love them. Really solid, and mouse guards are not required. I like to bash together as many floors as I can. It takes about an hour to do one. They are the right size for my Swienty poly hives, which means that they look slightly too big for the wooden ones, but I don’t think it matters. The bees don’t care.
Early Spring
The first actual beekeeping job of the season will start at the end of February, unless it’s freezing cold with snow everywhere. Normally, this time is We will be putting Apivar strips into every colony (nucs and hives), changing or cleaning floors, and feeding protein supplements and sugar if needed. Occasionally, we need to add fondant to a nuc (hardly ever a full-sized hive). The extra protein is just to ensure that they get a good start and grow fast, but it won’t be used on any that are already filling the box. Because we need to make plenty of spring nucs, due to expansion, I want them to make as much brood as they can.
I like to remove the old floor and replace with a new one, or at least a clean one. Mostly the floors are pretty clean, but any ugly ones will be swapped out for sure. Sometimes we give a new floor to the first hive, then scrape and blow-torch the one we just removed, then add it to the next hive, and so on. At this time, we also check hive stands. Some are pallets, which have a habit of disintegrating, so we will upgrade hive stands too if needed.
After we have carried out these tasks, we know exactly how many living colonies we have, and the state they are in. The Apivar can come off before supers go on, and everything will be nicely set up for the season ahead.