Hi Shaz, there is something to bear in mind. It’s the brood that needs to be kept at a constant 34-35deg.C. During winter the bees will constrict the brood, also the brood will have a warm thermostatically controlled blanket of bees around them.
If we have a crown board or bee mat in place, there’s probably no harm in removing the roof for a short period on a warm day. We just wouldn’t want to remove the crown board or bee mat & then start removing brood frames that will disturb that warm blanket of bees, thus allowing cold air into the brood.
Yes, I keep telling myself the bees can get by just nicely on their own as they have done since they first appeared on the planet. Temps average around two degrees to 14 degrees from June - August but over the last two weeks we have been experiencing some good frosts and heavy, cold, wet fog. The weather as you have experienced can be a mixed bag anytime of the year. It sounds like a perfect area for bees to live up where you are. I do hope you get some rain soon. We had some rain today which was most welcome.
Is the perforated eardrums playing havoc with eye sight too Dawn
The spring Wattle is in full bloom now and the bees are having a feast on it. Got some winter rain and it is looking good for a very short and mild winter.
Cheers
Many new beekeepers having just started out with a nuc actually don’t know how to gauge their colonie’s need for food.
Bees are pretty self reliant, but there are times where we need to help along, especially if we didn’t leave stores or started a new colony
The basic rule is, if you want to breed up a productive colony, you feed it up with a bit of sugar syrup, to help them building comb and establish their home.
I hope very much our bees find pollen to feed their babies. Not all pollen is as good as it looks in terms of nutrients, but I’m very reluctant to feed any bee feed that contains Chinese pollen, or soy.
There is as yet no scientific advice on bee feed. I guess natural is best, and where the bees lack a certain amino acid, they seem to try to make it up by volume in other amino acids. Seems to work for insects.
Anyway, you want fat bees for the start of the season to be productive.
Makes sense, if you start with skinny bees in spring, they need summer to build up and miss the major flows, in eu and us anyway.
Hi Shaz, I saw some of it when I had a pollen trap in use. It’s very bitter tasting, as other very dark colored pollen was. It’s funny that, the lighter the color, the better it tasted. I have no idea where it came from. Sorry about that
Hi Jeff, no worries. I have only seen one bee last Spring with purple pollen. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw it as it was bright purple and looked so lovely.
I just had to super my beach hives after finding 9 kg of honey in the flow roof in one! Just 4 weeks ago they still had 2 empty frames in the brood box! That’s so quick.
30 minutes up the mountains, we have to feed syrup to our single broodbox autumn nucs, while they bring in plenty of wattle pollen.
Acacia pollen lack certain amino acids, so while you think the bees are on a roll, it’s not as great as it looks.
The urban hives sure have more variety.
It’s my first time to taste paperbark honey and I don’t particularly like the aroma and taste. Sort of cheesy. If anybody else has a lot of paperbark, how do you like the taste?
The hosts of my hives down by the beach are very happy though.
Seems like pollen traps in your area in early spring would be a brilliant way to go? Better than cutting out- or removing pollen frames. It would act as swarm prevention- and also give you pollen. And bee pollen is in HIGH demand. It’s a super super food- full of amino acids. The plants put their absolute best resources into making the pollen… no wonder baby bees thrive on it.
Wow! Note this down and next year put an ideal or a flow super on, eh? 9kgs in the middle of winter! How did you harvest it?
Maybe you can feed the cheesy beach honey (honey with a cheese flavor is just wrong) to the mountain bees? Then they will grow strong and make you nice tasting mountain honey.
Been thinking on those lines. But then, down there they may have been in contact with AFB and all sorts of things, so reluctant to introduce the cheese up here.
But certainly consider autumn nucs to send down for build up next season, and quarantine them for the spring flow up here.
Well, to clean out the honeycomb, I just turned the roof on a little bbq table on its side adjacent to the hive and waited an hour for the bees to walk over to the landing board of the broodbox.
The combs in the roof were so covered in bees, you could hardly see them.
But once they dutifully had walked over, it was easy to just get the hivetool under and gently lift it out. Very virgin and soft.
Fortunately there was no brood up there.
I feel better to leave that paperbark salty cheese honey down by the beach. I reckon it would spoil my ‘boutique flavours’ that everybody loves so much.
But as you said, with good management one could take advantage of that strong winter flow down there to build up nucs.
Here we go, starting migrational beekeeping.
Hi Peter,
There was the odd plant around. We don’t live there anymore but there was definitely more Patterson’s curse every year. Maybe was that… hmmmm
Undoubtedly there is other flowers with purple pollen but that is the common one in Aussie and bees love it. I use to move my hives 150 klm’s to boost the hive on it and the fields were purple with it. It is truly a curse for the cattle but pure heaven for bees.
Regards
