If your catching a streak of bad weather I would just leave your bees alone, aside from toping up their feeders I wouldn't change the nest structure until they are warm and productive.
rainy and in the 60's!
Hi everyone....Really long spell of rainy days and temps not out of the 60's....but, I wanted to check on my hives. Is it OK to do so? I know it isn't ideal to check on them in the rain, but was looking for some OK around that.
Drizzling and overcast much of the time, so I will try to find a window away from the rain, but am still nervous. Also, thought I should feed them (per Matt in ORegon) with this long spell. Am also going in to look and see if I should put bars in between the brood and honey, right?
More questions for the folks on this great forum! Thanks so much!!
Drizzling and overcast much of the time, so I will try to find a window away from the rain, but am still nervous. Also, thought I should feed them (per Matt in ORegon) with this long spell. Am also going in to look and see if I should put bars in between the brood and honey, right?
More questions for the folks on this great forum! Thanks so much!!
1 - 5 of 5 Posts
Liz,
We're suffering along with you in the rain...
I would check your colonies to confirm whether they have honey stored. If they are lacking honey, I would start feeding until the rain subsides. I just checked all of my colonies this weekend and most of those I started this year from swarms were out or on the verge of running out of honey stores. Most of my hives that overwintered were still pretty heavy.
You can get in and get out of the hives pretty quickly without bothering them too much.
The blackberries just started blooming here, which is wretched timing given the forecast this week. Hopefully there will be sufficient sun breaks and the bloom will be long! The weather is finally supposed to turn here next weekend.
Cheers,
Matt
We're suffering along with you in the rain...
I would check your colonies to confirm whether they have honey stored. If they are lacking honey, I would start feeding until the rain subsides. I just checked all of my colonies this weekend and most of those I started this year from swarms were out or on the verge of running out of honey stores. Most of my hives that overwintered were still pretty heavy.
You can get in and get out of the hives pretty quickly without bothering them too much.
The blackberries just started blooming here, which is wretched timing given the forecast this week. Hopefully there will be sufficient sun breaks and the bloom will be long! The weather is finally supposed to turn here next weekend.
Cheers,
Matt
Kind of ironic because we are getting almost to much dry weather here, and other places are flooding, actually have wildfires up in quebec the smoke was blowing all the way down to Main from what I hear . Checking the honey stores is a good idea, but don't change the brood nest, if you put extra bars in the bees cant be as efficient at keeping the brood warm.
As always, thanks for all the great feedback. Put some sugar water in there yesterday as I noticed that they were in fact eating their honey stores based on what I had seen a week and a half ago.
Counting on sun breaks!!
Counting on sun breaks!!
1 - 5 of 5 Posts
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