Prep school

Temperature: 20C
Weather: Cloudy but bright
Stings: None

A longer visit today to start the process of closing down the hive for the winter.

I took out the Apiguard as that's been in for about a month. I consolidated the two brood boxes into one and put all the stores in the remaining box. They have about 4 frames of stores which is not going to be enough if, fingers crossed, we have another hard winter. I'll give them some syrup this week to help them prepare. I think they will need about 5-6 frames of stores to keep them ticking over.

I bumped and moved them around quite a lot and they weren't too annoyed by it. I got buzzed a few times but they left me alone when I was taking my veil off.

I also put in the super that I extracted the honey from last week so they can clear that up and get a little more in hand for the long winter days. Above that is the other brood box with porter bee escapes between so they can get out to the other brood box. I fee slightly guilty about taking that given how little I have left them but with the syrup they'll be okay. I hope.

In that upper brood box there are a few drawn frames so I should get them off to an okay start early next year. It will mean that I can get started replacing the older comb eImage via Wikipediaarlier in the year with newer to stop disease spreading.

I also checked the tray underneath the mesh and the Apiguard looks like it knocked down lots of mites. Not a huge amount. More than fell off when I was doing the count but not a huge number. Not enough to make me worried. I think they are fairly well set up. On Wednesday, I'll re-organise things again - it occurs to me that I might have trapped the queen above the excluder but I don't think I have. The frame I took out was not fully drawn so I can't see why she would be there. I'll find out on Wednesday.