Its been a very cold windy November and the bees in some areas have not done very well. Hives close to urban areas have brought in honey and the majority are making preparation to swarm.

While those in the country areas have required feeding to keep them alive. As said by Ted Roberts at last month's meeting, it only takes a few days of adverse weather and a strong hive can collapse dramatically. I've seen a few feral colonies (and a few of my nucs) that died out in the last few weeks.

Swarms are now common and should be used to best advantage. By uniting them with a weak hive, you get an instant production unit. If you have a number of weak hives, best unite them (using two sheets of newspaper) into production units. If they all have new queens and you want to keep them, make up four frame nucs and unite the bees left over into a strong hive. Spray the bees on the frames with sugar syrup. They can all be put into the same hive without fighting.

With the Pohutukawa, Kamahi, Manuka, Rewarewa and Buttercup now flowering, the bees have plenty to chose from and will suddenly bring in an enormous amount of honey in a very short time.

When you see the bees storing nectar in half the top box, (white wax on four or five frames) add another super (just above the brood nest - under-supering it is called) to stimulate the bees to gather more.

Remove fully capped frames or supers, extract and return the wets to keep the bees working. Please remember to check the hive for disease before removing honey. Lets hope we all get a bumper honey crop.

DISEASEATHON

On Saturday 16 November, four teams managed to inspect 77 of hobbyists hives in the Mana-Paraparaumu area. Only five were found with BL and these were all in the Raumati area - a very good result.

However, team leaders reported that a lot of hives are not being regularly inspected or worked. These were glued solid and needed to be prised apart to inspect them.

Another comment I could make was that many had ten frames in the supers. This is OK when the equipment is new but if left for a time, frames become very difficult to remove without breaking the frames of rolling the bees when the first frame is removed. This is dangerous if the queen happens to be on the first frame in. Most commercial beekeepers only have nine frames (pushed together in the centre of the super). It is so much easier to remove frames to inspect brood.

Anyway the weather was marvelous, we all put in six hours and finished with a bar-b-que at McKays. To all those that assisted, thanks, we all had a good time and I'm sure we all learnt a lot. MAF will now be following up to see the diseased hives are destroyed.