Bring Out Your Dead.

The weather was so warm this afternoon that I opened up the hives in the garden both to see what was going on inside and to do a little spring cleaning. Traditionally, the first task of the year is to clean the floors and the Blip illustrates why – though it is not something I have ever seen before. The bees go into autumn with several tens of thousands of bees in each colony; in the following six months, all of those bees – apart from the queen – will die, and here they are. This is where I must start speculating but, with the repeated prolonged spells of miserable damp weather that we’ve had, they have not been able to get out much to dispose of the corpses. In a normal year, it would be another three or four weeks before I could look inside, by which time, most of the bodies would have been removed. At the moment, the priority is to raise brood and there are eggs to show that the queen is laying – just not very many. With a full working force to support her, she can lay a maximum of about 2,000 eggs a day. However, even the strongest of the three is producing less than a hundred a day; you can make a guestimate of the number of cells containing brood and divide it by 21, the number of days between the egg being laid and the adult bee emerging, to calculate the production rate.


The one slightly worrying thing is the lack of pollen in the hives, there should be plenty around as shown by the pollen sources in the extra, about 2 metres from the hives.`


Note: "Bring out your dead" was, I believe, a street cry common during outbreaks of the plague.