The signs of a healthy hive

You might not have time to keep an eye on your Hive or Hives throughout the winter. The bottom line is that in a healthy hive, housekeeping will still be undertaken between January and April. The winter seasons. Your Queen is still laying, but at a lower rate of production. The number of dead worker bees will build up. They have worked themselves to death. This is normal and nothing to worry about. In fact, if you spot dead bees at the entrance of your hive it’s a great sign because it demonstrates the colony is still alive and thriving.

Fluctuating temperatures throughout the year are confusing your bees the same way Corona has confused all of us. Remember bees rely on the sun to calculate their position.

My Queen breeding programme is due to start and I will be giving a course on methodology and technique in May, so if you are an ‘advanced’ beekeeper come along and learn something about how to raise new Queens.

I view my bees as my own personal army, and the hives are like battleships- they have a landing deck or platform from on which they glide in or launch themselves. This morning one of my bees sounded like a spitfire. If you think about the noise that a bee produces compared to the scale of their minute worlds their wing noise is the equivalent of a rolls Royce engine. A bee’s buzz is loud.