Been a bad year for my Bees. Started off OK at home and then I moved them to the land but then was a big greedy and split them at the same time to give me five hives. That wouldn’t have helped, then I had issues with the queens and there were delays during the season where they should have been gathering pollen.
The space where I put them is pretty sheltered and doesn’t get any cold winds. So I thought it would be OK. However, I think it is too sheltered as they didn’t start foraging till late in the day. I’ve been told that sunlight hitting the hive in the morning triggers them to start foraging. Sunlight doesn’t hit them until much later in the day and so the time they spend foraging is significantly less than it could be.
So now we are at the end of the year and two hives are gone. Two more don’t look as good as they should although you can’t really tell. They all have plenty of food and are still foraging a bit, which isn’t good news, as they should be settling down for the winter and not wasting energy and bees going out at this time of year. This risks them running out of food and I need to keep feeding them.
So I’ve decided to move them to another spot. It is less sheltered but it gets the sun as soon as it comes up and it stays all day. I’m going to install some new bases over the next few weeks and then early in the new year I’ll move them, perform a shook swarm and start next year with a new start. This assumes that they make it through the winter. Fingers crossed.
