Beekeeping – Giving back to the Bees
Now that we’ve taken the honey off our bees, it’s time to give something back. I guess we’ve been giving lots back to the bees all along simply by having them and trying to nurture them in our back garden, but the aim now is to get them built up with enough stores to get them all through the winter safely.
I’ve now put the frames that we extracted from back into the hive so that the bees can clean out the last of the honey and use the drawn frames for their stores. We’ll also be feeding like mad with a strong sugar solution. All three hives will be over-wintering on a Brood and a Half and are now configured in this way. This means that the colony has its brood box and a super and the queen has free reign to lay in these as she sees fit. Hopefully this will give them plenty of room for new larvae and also lots of room for stores. Presumably having them on a brood and a half will also give them more room for expansion in the early spring (if they make it through the winter), so it should help with swarm management next year as well.
I checked the super above the brood box when I returned the frames to the hive and the queen had been laying like crazy in it so there are lots of new bees on the way that will hopefully be industrious over the next few weeks. I watched the bees coming and going for a little while. There was plenty of activity thanks to todays sunshine and light winds and they were bringing plenty of pollen back to the hive so the bees are still gathering from somewhere.
The stronger of the hives still has an extra super on as well, on top of a queen excluder, so the hive configuration at the moment is; floor, brood box, super, queen excluder, super, crown board. I then have an empty super on top of that which will contain a contact feeder and then of course the roof. At the moment the crown board has all of the cappings from the honey frames that we picked off before extracting. We thought we may as well give it back to the bees to clean up as I’m sure they’ll be glad of any extra honey they can get their mandibles on!
By the way, I’m drinking a cup of lemon and ginger tea whilst writing this, sweetened of course with our own honey!
