8th March 2015 - Is Spring here?

Although not as tropical as the Met Office suggested, quite a nice weekend and warm enough for the bees to be flying.
Spent a lot of the weekend preparing for the season and in particular getting supers ready.
Since last year I have acquired a Burco  and set up a soda solution to clean the supers in. It proved to be very effective and they were then washed in cold water and left to dry.
I am aiming to have about 10 colonies this year and its obvious I don't have enough supers or feeders - yet more money.

Last year I went to the BBKA Apiary in Luton where the hives were painted green and I decided to do the same thing. In fact things have become a bit colour coded as the WBC hive has been painted blue and the others are green and I've painted the new hives and the old supers accordingly. Also I have marked some of the supers frames in red - more of which later.

My Son in Law Chris, who is a joiner, came over on Sunday and we went to see what could be done about the wood pecker damage to the Top Bar Hive. However the bees had discovered the honey frames inside the TBH and were helping themselves so we kept our distance but I'm giving the dimensions of the hive to him and he will try to find a solution to the damage and the bowing of the hive.

Last year as an experiment I tried to produce some cut comb. I tried a different way of doing it than I had done before and it was quite effective. I decided to sell it at the markets and its definitely a 'marmite' product and also very 'generational'.
At my very first market at Willington I took some with me and a lady with her teenage daughter became quite excited about it saying how she had it when she was a child and hadn't seen it for years [something I was to hear many times subsequently].
As she extolled the virtues of melting it on toast and then have the wax stick to her teeth, her daughter went from bored to surprised to disgusted.
Can't stand it myself.
At the last market I did someone asked me about it so I decided to do it again.
Because you eat the wax you can't use wired foundation supers normally have to give them strength. Also the foundation is thinner than normal foundation.
The wire in normal foundation also allows it to be pinned to the wooden frame and last year some of the foundation slipped out of the frames I was using for the cut comb.
So this year I have dripped some wax into the corners to hold it in and painted the top bars red to distinguish them from normal frames.