Hi everyone!
Welcome to a new school year at Braidhurst! I hope you have all had a lovely holiday and a ready to get stuck back into learning.
Our bees haven’t been holidaying over summer, but have been working extra hard to grow the colony under the new queen, Lorde. Unfortunately, the weather has been against them. Cool, wet conditions prevent bees from foraging for nectar and pollen. This means it has been particularly hard for our ladies to build up their stores of honey for the winter. This also means that we may not get a honey harvest this year.
As some of you may know, a modern hive is made up of several layers. The bottom layer is called the brood box. This is the layer where the queen lives and lays her eggs (brood). The bees also store honey in there to get them through the winter. On top of the brood box we place a queen excluder. This stops Queen Lorde venturing into the upper part of the hive, keeping her and her eggs in the one place. The upper layers are called supers. These layers are set up exclusively for the bees to store honey and is where we would harvest our honey from.
However, because we had an unproductive queen (RIP Queen Beyonce) and a very wet summer we have been unable to add more than one super to the hive. We won’t know until mid-September whether or not the bees have stored much honey in the existing super or if it is worth our while adding the second. If they have not laid down much honey in the super we won’t be able to harvest any at all, or we would risk starving the colony over winter.
So get those fingers crossed for a gloriously sunny September so our ladies can get a last glut of foraging done before winter.
