BBKA Forum

After a pretty dreadful start this spring, this recent exceptionally hot spell seems to have significantly benefited the bees locally to me in the South West. Lack of soil moisture has not apparently seemed to be an issue for nectar production by the bramble, which was certainly a concern at one point.

How has it affected other areas of country?

After the Beast from the East, Spring was rubbish and many colonies failed to get going as no pollen was coming in. Roll on to now and bees are still pulling in honey although I am expecting it to stop at any time. I still have plenty of supers on - see attached photo - and not enough buckets to put the honey in which I guess is a nice problem to have.

Mating has also been reliable as my girls usually have to hang around for many days until the weather is good enough and then make a dash for it. Currently 27 degrees and expected to be warm for a few days yet.

Is that a triple brood box Adam? Looks like a queen excluder above number 3.

Yes Jim, and the beer crate is to stand on to get the top super off. An indication of the forage available this year.
The colony has 20 frames of brood in two boxes and as I was going on holiday, I spread the brood over 3 boxes and left them to it. On the assumption that the queen has reduced laying now, I will reduce it down to two soon, once some of the supers come off. Notice the other two hives are quite big too.

Crikey Adam! And to think that the legs on your hive stand were 4ft long at the start of the season...

A paving slab - which work well to go under hives. At my out apiary, I use them with 4 house bricks under the hive floors rather than a stand; this seems to give enough ventillation under the hive (and no less than you would get with a WBC). I inspected the colony and took away the third brood box which was pretty full of honey so it's now down to two.
Note the small entrance - the large colony was quite happy with that; I see no reason why - with mesh floors - we ever need to have a full-width entrance.

We were promised another month of heatwave but it's just rainy and grey. Bees were flying well yesterday, bringing in some balsam by the looks of it.

New climate change predictions from the Met Office for a decade so called UK18 published last week suggest last summer’s weather had a probability of under 10% in the years 1981 - 2000 but a 50% likelihood in any year in the next thirty years.

Good by some measures posssibly but could have massive impacts on crop choices and forage availability especially if followed by another one the next year and so on.

Do you mean COP18?

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/c ... -_uk_2.pdf

That's the thing!