Plight of the bees

Not a great year for the bees this year. Our new apiary never got off the ground despite being in what should be the perfect location. We’ll try again with that next year.

The weather has been terrible. Plenty of flowers about for the bees but there just haven’t been enough opportunities for them to get out foraging as it’s been far to wet and windy. This has also meant that we’ve been unable to inspect as often as we should, so we lost a couple of swarms. For some reason it seems as though new queens haven’t managed to mate either so one hive never re-queened and then subsequently died of starvation once the weather turned for autumn.

This means we are going into winter with only two hives.  One of these has  done well and the other that may have re-queened, but we can’t be sure. We took some honey off the only hive that had done OK this year last week, and we are now feeding them up ready for winter. Lets hope they make it through the dark months of winter and come out the other side so that we can have another go next year.

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Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.

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