This page relates to late January to early March I did get a quick look on February 13th because it was warm and still. They all went into the winter with at least about 15.5kg (35 lb) of honey and so were ok. The danger is that they cluster gets separated from the main stores and starve but with a bit of luck my belief that leaving plenty of honey for the bees to winter on is going to pay off. At the beginning of Feruary we had quite a lot of snow but the bees had a good fly the day before it came. These came out on day eight of the snow despite being from the weakest colony they seem happy enough and still have candy, as well as stores, to keep them going for a while. The pollen shown in the photo indicates that the queen must be going to start laying so that there will be some more bees to gather nectar as the spring flowers and shrubs start flowering. It takes three weeks from the egg being laid to an adult bee emerging. That bee will spend three weeks working in the hive then it will start leaving the hive to gather water, nectar or pollen to maintain the rythem of the hive. At the peak of the nectar gathering seasons the foraging bees will only live for about three weeks before they are exhausted. There was a lot of activity at the hive next day but when I studied it I suspected that some of these were robbers from another colony so that evening I placed this obstruction over the entrance to confuse them next day and it seemed to work as there was a lot less activity, just bees returning with bigger and bigger loads of pollen. Diary pages can be accessed from here by clicking the links below: 2008 Archive Winter 2008 Spring 2009 April 2009 Summer 2009 Made with Xara Web Designer Privacy |  Copyright 2009/10 | All rights reserved | 25 Woodlands Walk, Harrogate HG2 7BB SITEMAP