Topical Tips
For January 2005
If you prepared your colonies properly for winter then there should be little work to do in the apiary, apart from a quick visual check on roofs, mouseguards, woodpecker defences etc.
A quick look at the entrances will tell you a great deal about the situation inside. It is normal to see fine pieces of wax debris and dead bees being removed. Large lumps of wax indicate a mouse in residence, soiling around the entrance suggests nosema and acarine, dead bees blocking the entrance suggests few left alive to remove them. On a fine day you might see some pollen being collected, perhaps from snowdrops, and this is a very good sign.
Bees survive the winter months on very little food (provided that they are not those awful yellow Italians!) so, provided that your hives feel reasonably heavy then there should not be much cause for concern. If they are light then there is an immediate danger of starvation - either because there is simply nothing left, or because the cluster has eaten its way to one side of the box and cannot reach the food at the other end in cold weather. In this case you should feed fondant or solid sugar now.
The food situation can change rapidly when colonies start breeding in earnest - all those hungry larvae need a considerable amount of food. Our problem is that this is dependant on day length (predictable) and the weather (not very predictable!). So a reasonably heavy colony now will be fine if the weather is 'normal' during January and February, but may need some food at the end of February when sugar syrup in a contact feeder can be used. However, if the weather is very mild and breeding is rapid, then the same colony may need feeding much earlier; in this case fondant or solid sugar would then be a much better option.
Peter Edwards 01/01/2005
