Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Feeding starts

The weather is not hot and sunny. Looking out of my window I see a very dull overcast day outside. On venturing outside I find that it is a supprisingly warm still day and the bees are behaving as though there maybe some mating flights in progress.

In the evening I started to feed the bees for the first time. I had melted 4 kilo bags of sugar with four pints of water earlier in the day and allowed it to cool.

The first colony to get a complete bucket of feed is one of the swarms I picked up a month or so ago. In haste they were put onto deep frames on two super boxes (two supers are deeper than one brood and the bees extend the frames down with extra brood comb). I want the bees to move up into a brood box I've put on above the supers so that I can move it off and put it on a hive base and settle them down for the winter.

The bees seem OK and I will keep them and build them during next year to see how well they make honey and how nice they are to work with.

1 comment:

Patrick Laslett UK beekeeper said...

These bees are not the best for allotments and all but the queen and a couple of frames (that are now in a nuc box)have been moved to Postwick.