Despite the high winds and horizontal rain showers I decided that today would be a good day to sort through kit in the apiary and work out if there was anything more I needed as I got around my apiaries inspecting over the next couple of weeks. Surprisingly, despite winds gusting to 40mph+ there were still bees flying.
I’ve put together three bait hives, but I need to recover bits from a couple of apiaries to make up as many as I want. If the weather calms down a bit I shall do that this week. I also want to swap some colonies into new brood boxes (double broods, in fact) with insulated dummies that will give them a “nine over nine” configuration, which is a smidge more space than in brood-and-a-half. Again I don’t have enough, but this time it’s down to brood boxes being used to store old frames. I’ll need to find somewhere else to put those. I reckon most can probably go in my “double decker xylophone” as I emptied an awful lot of frames out of that last year.
I found a few boxes that need a little light repair work, and four old section boxes that are no longer useful as section boxes, but two joined together with rails inside to support frames might well work as a bait hive brood box, meaning that the brood boxes I was using can now be used for “proper” hives. All those, together with four as-yet-unassembled roofs have been brought down to the workshop so I can work on them tomorrow when it’s also supposed to be very windy.
I’ve found another couple of brood boxes that are probably beyond repair, but I’ll hang onto them for the moment and see how things go. I might yet be able to repair them sufficiently to use them as boxes for bait hives, too.