Pussy Willow.

A day of not very much; it was too cold (cold enough for a flurry of snow) to move the colony of bees that arrived last year in a battered old National hive into one of my apiary standard Smith hives. There are technical differences between the two that I find important, though I am in the minority on this one. One of the less important differences is that the National hive frames have longer lugs than those in the Smith, so they need to be sawn short with lots of bees trying to get in on the action. The reverse conversion is easy, you just need to fit spacers. However, I did take all the stuff needed for the operation to the apiary and found all the items of equipment that I’d absent-mindedly left scattered around the countryside on Thursday. My intention is to be self-sufficient in bees by the end of the year and so the problem should never arise again; in fact, since there is more profit to be made from selling bees than from selling honey, I aim to produce more colonies than I need for my own purposes (it also avoids having sticky carpets throughout the house).

 
This evening I ordered spares of everything that went missing the other day.
 
“Pussy willow” seems to be a catch-all term for any plant that is approximately willowish and bears catkins; the specimen in the blip is in Roslin Glen and is very popular with the bumblebees – but not on days when it’s cold enough to snow.