Wiggly mites, waggly dances, and queen cell cups

It's as if a switch has been flicked.

A month ago I was sweating profusely while heaving the weighty supers from the hives, stacking them in the shed, and subsequently extracting bucket after bucket (after bucket 😄) of sparkling, golden honey.

In between times, I was replacing the pilfered stores with heavy blocks of fondant, uniting colonies, and moving nucs from their summer quarters to sheltered apiaries for the winter.

It was a lot of backbreaking work, but I was accompanied by the constant mewing of dispersing buzzard families, the now-mute warblers in the hedgerows, and the swallows constantly flitting about overhead. When I stopped for a breather, there was always something to distract me from the 'hard graft'.

The weather was still warm — it still felt like summer — and the foragers (at least those lucky enough to be within range) were absorbed with the Himalayan balsam along the river.

But, in a few short weeks, that's all changed.

All the resident swallows and martins have gone, and those still overhead — as singletons or small groups — are just passing through, resolutely moving southwards for the winter. I get the impression that the adults leave first, with the young of the year — those lacking outer tail streamers — following along later.

The stubble has also gone. In the last fortnight the field in front of the house has been ploughed, harrowed, fertilised, sown, and rolled. There's been a constant procession of expensive machinery trundling past, followed by its undulating cloud of gulls, crows, and buzzards. The deer and hares that crept out into the stubble every evening now skulk in the field margins … and will stay there until the new growth appears.

The hives are appreciably quieter now, with activity restricted to the warmer parts of the day, as both the conditions for foraging and the forage that is available deteriorate.

Although the beekeeping season still hasn't formally finished, it's clearly finishing … and I, for one, am quite relieved.

Too much of a good thing

If you have any more than a few hives, and particularly if you get involved in more intensive activities like queen rearing, beekeeping means you are busy for most of the summer months.

There's always something to do, or in my case, something I forgot to do that I must make a note to actually do next time I'm in the apiary.

Nucs to feed, frames to build, queens to mark, supers to add, hives to unite, laying workers to curse, and the million and one minor tasks involved in our hobby.

These provide both a physical and intellectual challenge, and what make beekeeping so engrossing.

But it's unrelenting.

Miss an inspection, or a queen cell, and things can quickly spiral out of control. The situation is usually recoverable — and I can't stress enough how much clipping your queens helps — but, if you're anything like me, the errors and the bodged 'fixes' increment as the season progresses.

Not every hive, and not even in every apiary, but enough to make me grateful for the enforced halt to proceedings precipitated by the end of the summer nectar and the falling temperatures.

It's about now that real beekeepers go on holiday.

If they've been fed and treated, the bees won't miss you.

It's still hot enough on the continent to swim in the ocean, get a tan, or sit in the shade with a cold beer.

My life is a holiday, so I'm not disappearing abroad … instead, I'm already making preparations for the season ahead 😉.

Or, so far, a single preparation … the fondant I ordered last Friday was delivered first thing on Monday morning {{1}}. My back, still twingeing from moving supers, was tested to near-destruction shifting the boxes to long-term storage.

In the interests of giving my back a rest, and with all colonies now busy chomping down their fondant, I've concentrated on catching up with some beekeeping news and background reading.

Let's deal with the bad news first …