Saturday 16 March 2013

Fat Girls

Summer bees work so hard that they only live about 3 -4 weeks before they die. In contrast, winter bees live 4-5 months and spend most of their time mooching around the hive eating, and trying to stay warm. Not surprising, winter bees are a bit tubby.
To be fair this is more about genetic traits rather than life style choices - winter bees need to lay down fat deposits for survival, which is all well and good until some hapless beekeeper uses a queen excluder.
I had placed the queen excluder at the bottom of the hive to stop the queen rolling out or wandering off when I did that shook swarm. The queen is considerably bigger than the worker bees so she can't get through the wire mesh of the excluder. Neither can the fat girls as I found out last Thursday when there was a break in the weather.
Initially all looked encouraging; the bees were flying so they had clearly survived the cold snap. It was still too cold to take a look inside the hive, so all I wanted to do was check they had enough sugar syrup (they did) and remove the queen excluder.
That's when I realised that winter bees really are well padded, because there, trapped in the mesh were about 20 - 30 bees. It wasn't a disaster, but I was annoyed. Every dead bee means a smaller cluster which means its harder to stay warm.



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