Happy New Year my fellow Beeks!
This weekend has been the warmest and dryest so far at 7°C so Greg, who has been pestering to go and attend to his girls by administering their winter Varroa treatment, persuaded me to go and see them. I wanted to check out the state of my bee garden after the winter in any case (lots of grass) and perhaps do a bit of weeding. I knew it would be good for me to get out in the fresh air as well.
So we went along and suited up. As the weather is still cold and the girls are unlikely to be flying about we only put on the top half - bee jackets rather than our all-in-one full beesuits.
We got set up and Greg prepared his Apibioxial (Oxalic acid solution). I opened up the hives and we had 6 seems of bees in Laura and 4 in Kate, which is really great going and much better than we anticipated! It also looked as if they had lots of stores to see them through the last of the winter before spring. We just have to check that the queen is still alive and laying in March-ish. In the meantime, Greg has lots of plans to further develop his secondary apiary site - more coming on this soon!
The point of us being there today was to give the bees an Oxalic acid dribble treatment. This is extremely effective at killing Varroa however, it can't penetrate through wax and as most Varroa multiply in sealed brood cells this has to be completed when the hive is broodless or as close to being broodless as possible, ie in the Winter, when all the Varroa are on the backs of the bees themselves. Treating them involves dribbling the solution, mixed with sugar syrup onto the bees. The acid burns the Varroa but as it's a completely naturally occurring acid which the bees deal with in the process of making the honey anyway, it leaves them completely unharmed. Hopefully, as we move into Spring and the bees start reproducing dramatically, this should mean that there are as few Varroa in the colonies as possible.
Now for the best bit! Just as we were all done and were closing up the hives Greg let out a girly squeal crying "It's down m' bum! It's down m' bum! Kat! Help me!" So I did what any loving fiance would do: I stared in surprise at him prancing around creatively and creased myself with laughter! I then proceeded to fish the poor bee out of his boxers!
I tried to tell him to pull up his trousers and belt them tighter over his Christmas pudding but unfortunately, a couple of bees managed to get up his bee jacket and stung him on the chest and again on his back at which point, discretion being the better part of valour, he fled, pulling off and discarding his bee jacket and shirt on his way! I'm very sad to say that unfortunately, no one was around to see this display of manly integrity. Despite it to say, I was unceremoniously left to pack up our tools and close the apiary back up again. In any case, I didn't get my weeding done as I had to take Greg home and treat his boo-boos!
I hope you've all had an excellent Christmas and have started a Happy New Year. We'll be back in touch again as the weather starts to warm up and Spring starts to break. Until then.
Cumulative Bee Sting Tally:
Kat: 1. Greg: 8.