Despite gloomy predictions last month, August has been a good month with an average daily maximum of nearly 21ºC, low rainfall and no high winds; the good conditions have made it easy to remove honey crops and the honey is much drier than the early crop, averaging 17.5% - 18% water.

Queenright colonies are generally recovering well from the earlier bad weather; we need to do all we can to keep this recovery going.

Wasps seem to have suffered a considerable setback from the bad weather (every cloud…) and do not seem to be a serious problem at the moment - but it is well worth watching the situation carefully.

This is a very important time for our colonies, as the work that we do now will be critical to their survival through the winter.  There are three key requirements:

·         A viable queen

·         Adequate food

·         A sound hive, protected from pests and the weather.

I have covered queens in the item about supersedure cells above, but it is a good idea to check the health of brood at the same time that you check that the colony is queenright.  The NBU has some excellent leaflets on diseases (I have spare copies) and these are also available on their website: http://beebase.csl.gov.uk/public/BeeDiseases/indexDiseases.cfm.

Protection against pests, other than varroa, can wait until October.  When and whether to feed will depend on the type of bee kept and the food used.  Simple rules of thumb are:

·         Native black strains of bee will winter happily in a single, well-provisioned brood box.  They may gather sufficient stores for themselves if there is a good autumn.

·         Yellow strains of bee will require a double brood box with around 60lbs of stores.  If fed early, and the weather remains good, they will turn the food into brood and require feeding again!

·         Hybrids will fall between these two extremes.

If feeding sugar syrup then, traditionally, feeding should be completed by 15 September in order to give the bees time to seal the stores.  Do be careful not to spill syrup as it could start robbing and will attract wasps.

Fondant may be fed at any time during the winter, so there is no urgency to feed colonies unless they are short of food.  In fact it is probably better to feed fondant late because they will not then store it in the broodnest, restricting the space available for brood; late feeding also has the advantage that we know then how much has been gathered during the autumn.

Your varroa treatment should be well underway by now!  If you are using Apistan, do check that it has worked - we have resistant mites in the area - and remove the strips after 6 weeks.

Peter Edwards 30/08/2007