Episode 11: Red Kites and crunchy hay. Preparing the hives for winter.

[00:00:05] Welcome back to another episode of A Beekeepers Diary podcast. Where are we at? Near right at the end of October. 12 degrees.

[00:00:18] Has been very damp this morning but it's a lot nicer now. It's brightening up a little bit.

[00:00:23] There's a red kite circling and descending to my left in the next field and it is stooping down as landed.

[00:00:32] You can hear the crows objecting to whatever it's up to. It's taken off again now. Off up into the trees.

[00:00:40] Maybe it's caught something. That's nice. I'm back just checking on the feeding status of the bees.

[00:00:51] They've taken down pretty much all the syrup that I put in last week. It's sort of quite crystallized in the boxes

[00:01:00] just amongst the straw that I've got in there now. So I've just roughed it up a bit to make it easier for the bees to scrape the last few remnants out of the hay.

[00:01:11] And I think that'll be it for the year. I think I'll resort to fondant in a few months if necessary, which is not normally the case.

[00:01:20] So that's nice to get out of the way. And I've just started putting one of the hives fully into winter formation.

[00:01:30] That's the right word, isn't it? I've got a bonnet, which is basically a cube with the bottom removed, made out of celotex.

[00:01:43] The insulation boards cut into a box and taped together. A bit of a Heath Robinson style.

[00:01:53] Wooden skewers. A bit of glue. Just bodge it and tape it into a cube. And I slide that over the top of the hive.

[00:02:02] And then I've had a metal roof fabricated that goes on top of that because it's quite a soft material.

[00:02:09] And I don't want wood pickers landing on the top and hammering their way in over the winter.

[00:02:16] So I slid that on. And I've taken a little bit of video that I'll put on my Beekeepers Diary podcast Instagram,

[00:02:28] which you can get a link to, plug, plug, plug, plug off beekeepersdiarypodcast.com.

[00:02:36] You'll find the link there to my Instagram, which will have a little video should you wish to see it.

[00:02:42] So that's on top of hive one. And I've also put some sort of garden, sort of large fencing, large gauge fencing around the hive as well,

[00:02:57] which I've given it a bit of a gap around the perimeter of the hive as well with some wooden stakes to stop woodpeckers.

[00:03:06] Lovely helicopter flying by. It's great, isn't it?

[00:03:11] It's quite an affluent area around here, so people like going for their helicopter lessons.

[00:03:17] My bees have got a better postcode than me.

[00:03:21] Yeah, so I've put some garden sort of mesh fencing around the outside of the hive to keep the woodpeckers away.

[00:03:29] So they can't even if they landed on the netting, it's too far away from the hive for them to be able to peck through.

[00:03:35] So it's worked so far. So I'll do come back next week and do the same for hive two.

[00:03:43] They're flying a little bit. Not so much wasp activity.

[00:03:47] I've left the entrances at the tiny 1B space.

[00:03:51] It seems to be working for them.

[00:03:54] But yeah, they're just ticking over, going out for their, see if they can forage a little bit of ivy maybe.

[00:03:59] But I think it's a bit late for that now.

[00:04:01] So they just do their cleansing flights, go to the loo, have a look about, defend any intruders and yeah, chill out for the winter.

[00:04:12] Much like I planned to do.

[00:04:14] So that's it. Quick little update from here.

[00:04:17] I'll be back next week to do the other hive and yeah, have a good week. See you later.