The Buzz Behind the Chocolate: The End of Summer

Continuing Melsonbee's Honey Blog....

The bees are beginning to get ready for winter, with a large drop in numbers. There's still lots of flying bees, but oddly not much honey in the supers, and stores in the brood boxes. There's lots of defensive activity too, with robber bees and wasps trying to get in. Its been a bad year for the hives, since their early great start with all the Oil Seed Rape honey, but since early in the later honey season,  there's been constant attacks by wasps. There seems to be sooooo many of them, trying to steal the honey.

We added some special devices to help close the entrances down so the hives were easier to defend. These devices are a bit like a bee Krypton Factor assault course, with a tube blocking the entrance and a grill on the front to let the queens pheromones get out, a homing beacon for the flying bees.

Apparently, the bees get it quite easily, but wasps don't, which is a good thing. However, like the original Krypton Factor programme, there's definitely an intelligence order to how quickly each hive picked it up, with Hive 1 taking only a few seconds, but Hive 3 taking their time. Maybe it's the landing board arrangement?

We split a hive, hoping to get another hive from it, but the wasps got in to the nuc box and ate all the food, ate all the stores and killed all the bees. I know they are an apex predator, but it was truly heart-breaking to open the lid and see the empty hive with a layer of dead bees at the bottom.