Roaring Bees

Hi, you might have read about hornets raiding hives. I don’t think I had ever seen a hornet close up until the other day when one kidnapped and killed one of our bees. We were right there when the brazen hornet hussy marched up grabbed a bee and pummelled it directly in front of us.
This hornet was nearly the size of a small shrew and I have to say me and hubby stepped back out of fear ourselves. The whole hive was roaring too, this is the loud hum that the bees make to communicate to each other that there is an incident taking place or there might be a threat. We felt very protective of the bees and like they had our back too. They were very upset as you can imagine and a few of them gathered at the hive entrance I think probably from shock but certainly they were the guard just checking out for further threats.

This is the size of the blighter though those are not my fingers, not hubby’s either. I don’t wear beige. There are a great many mug shots of offenders out there and this one as the showed the greatest likeness so I have borrowed it.

Do you recognise this hornet?

So, last time I said we hadn’t seen any Varroa on the bees. Mmmm, so I shouldn’t have said that aloud because nearly the very next day there was one! I like to think it was just one, you know like there is only ever just the one rat in the garden or one lonely mouse in your kitchen?

But off we went into overdrive to eradicate (it will be too late) varroa in our hive. Taking some advice from a nice lady at Thornes (feel free to sponsor or advertise on my blog, Thornes!) whose job is to be a Bee Expert, we ordered Apistan to put into the hive.

You might remembered that we said we should have treated in August so Apistan is the treatment you can give a bit later in the year. It is a sheet of sticky plastic that hangs in between the frames giving off a pesticide. Sounds awful right? It is the least scary of the ones we researched, apart from treating with icing sugar but we were too late for that.

Icing sugar can be used for varroa because the bees are sprinkled with it and then try and groom to clean it off (and of course they like anything sugary) and in the process they brush off the varroa mites and they reduce in the hive.

Fingers crossed, we are due to remove it in a couple of weeks. We won’t know if it has worked until spring!!

Whilst we were away our apiary manager looked at the bees for us and recommended we feed them a bit more sugar solution. If forage is low we need to make sure that there is food available for the bees to build up for the winter so that they survive.

Winter talk already! I’m only just into Autumn! School term has started, the little one has begun school for the first time and we are shortly to be in the full sway of music practice, swimming, gymnastics, ballet, cubs and rainbows. Luckily the bees don’t take much time as they are much less demanding right now. I might live to regret having said that.