A wonderful late summer visit to the bees. Local Helicopter pilots make themselves known as I talk over the days activities. Feeding will be paused to leave space for the winter bees to be created. Don't want to fill all the space with food just yet. Varroa treatment will continue.
Welcome back to a beekeeper's diary. Another week in. Oh wow. I've just noticed a European hornet just as I'm standing here just in front of me making its way through the burned grass.
It's within one foot of me. How lovely. See if it discovers the beehive. Still a few swallows about. Oh, and a bee.
Oh god. Every week. Put my hood up again. I never learn, do I? Yes.
So we're back. Helicopter lessons seem to have started again in my local area. You can probably hear. Still a few swallows about. They're slightly alarmed by some buzzards that's floating overhead in the thermals.
All is good. So yeah, about the bees. I stood and watched the entrance for two or three minutes when we first turned up, And I can see a few wasps around, but none are trying to get in the hive entrance. I've still got that reduced down to about half size. There's still plenty of bees flying and congregating around the entrance, so the wasps aren't even trying to get in at the moment.
So that's good. I hefted the hive, which is where you can periodically throughout the season get a feel for how heavy your hive weighs. You take your hive strap that sort of holds it down onto the blocks it's on, take the roof off, and then you hold, get a few fingers underneath the back of the hive and just lift it up an inch, so you can get a feel of how heavy the hive is which indicates how much stores are in the hive. So I've done that last week, it was light as a feather. So which is why I started feeding.
So I gave it about three and a half kilos of feed. I've come back this week, it's all gone and hefting the hive now, it feels a lot heavier, so I'm a lot happier with that. I did bring a similar amount with me today. It's a bit of a balance because tempting though is to pile some more feed in. It's still we're still in August.
I still need the bees to have space within the hive to lay the winter bees, so I don't want to clog the whole hive up with feed, so it's a bit of a balancing act. Dear that was a hornet. So what I don't want to do is fill the hive to the brim with stores and leave the queen nowhere to lay. So I'm gonna not feed anything this week. I'm pleased with the weight, they certainly weigh that we're definitely not in hungry territory.
We're in comfortable weight territory, nowhere near enough for winter but for the next few weeks I'm gonna juggle it and then start feeding properly probably in a couple of weeks. But I want to give them a good I want to give the queen a good chance to have space to lay that winter cluster. I've taken a few pictures. If you want to sort of see, I do take pictures in the operative video on my visits which you'll be able to see on my Instagram account, beekeepers diary podcast. So have a look on there and I'll post a few pictures every now and then.
So I've taken some pictures today of the Varroa tray that's underneath. Way fewer Varroa drop this week, but still you know a reasonable amount so the the treatment is definitely working for being killed which is good. So I put that tray back in. Probably got another four weeks of that treatment to go, but the bees have obviously happily fed, taken that feed down. I took one frame out in the middle of the cluster to have a look, see what's going on and it's it's a full frame of cat brood which is what we like to see so I took a snap of that as well so I'll post that on my Instagram as well.
Yeah so good stores. I didn't go through the hive properly to check anything was happening with the queen, but I'm gonna trust that there's not much I can do at this time of year really if I make a mess of it, so I'll just leave that alone. I've not put any feed in, but I've left the feeder on top so for when I need to start feeding in the next couple of weeks. Yep. All is good.
Hopefully we're making good winter preparations. We shall see. Anyway, hello to all of you that are listening. Thank you to all my new listeners. Probably be back next week for a little chat.
Hope you're enjoying the holiday weekend. If you've gone carnival, hope you had a good time. And catch you next week.