The month before last a question was asked about how to remove ants from under the lids of hives. I tend to just squash them all with the hive tool, however I noticed the article in the American Bee Journal, the history section of 50 years ago.

How To Keep Out Ants - To keep ants out from harbouring under the hive cover, shade boards and other spots, gather fresh handful of green walnut leaves, and spread them on top of the inner cover. Ants will leave at once and no more will bother if the leaves are renewed once in two or three weeks. Catnip will work too. Vern Bond, Kansas.

For Bee Stings - After scraping off the sting, scrape raw Irish potato and apply as a poultice, renewing in about every five minutes and continue for twenty minutes. There will be no swelling and no itching the next day. This is also good for insect bits and burns. Mrs Witcher Hatcher, Oklahoma.

Back To Normal

After spending 6 weeks in the UK (incidentally the weather was warm and showery - like an extended NZ autumn) we had a week of cleaning up then went to the far north for the National Beekeepers conference. Got rained out (roads were flooded so couldn’t do any tourist things), then it was back to a fine warm Wellington.

Very unusual winter we are having with warm, wet fronts coming from the north. I'm told some hives still have drones so this means they have kept rearing brood all through.

The other day I took the opportunity to remove some now dry super off the tops of an nearby apiary. When I looked under the feeder, some hives were wet inside and other were very dry. One I tilted a little more forward and the others I put a little piece of stick between the top of the super and the feeder to allow a little more air to flow. The bees were right up into the top super and were very active.

I was doing this in my normal clothes and although the bees were flying well, (bringing in lots of pollen), I forgot to look inside the hives to see what was going on. Normally at this time of the year, the queen has just started laying again in a patch about the size of your fist. With all this warm weather, the size of the brood nest could be considerable larger.

As there is very little flowering (I noticed some Eucalyptus in flower coming home), the bees will be using up their winter stores a little sooner than usual. So at the end of the month it would pay (on a nice warm day) to check your hives for stores. Don't pull the frames out and disturb the brood nest, just peer down into the hive and see that there is honey in most of the outside frames. You can heft the hive to check the weight but this is unreliable, as the weight could be brood and pollen, not honey. But it does give you a good reference if you have a number of hives. Any light ones should be investigated more fully.

The real danger period is October/ November when hives are really into brood rearing and using up to 0.5 kg of honey per day. In the mean time, make sure they still have a minimum of three frames of honey. Any less than this and you will have to feed warm sugar syrup (thick as possible) until the bush flow starts.

Start making up new gear ready for the coming season and refresh yourself by reading a few bee books at night beside the fire. Make up a plan and mark it on the calender, spring check, then once the bees are expanding, check every 9 days for signs of queen cells.

New beekeepers should keep a notebook to jot down what's flowering in your area and the date, what bees are visiting and what colour pollen is coming in. This way you get to know your area and can then start to anticipate when your main honey flows are and act accordingly.

Frank Lindsay