February 2019
Pant Derwen Apiary
Its been a busy month here at Pant Derwen Apiary. Plenty of work completed and plenty more to be completed in March.
We started the month joyfully and ready to work by sorting out the bee boxes ready for the bees when the season starts again. We sorted just under 300 boxes ensuring that the beeswax is ready to store honey!
One problem that we face here at the apiary is storage. Unfortunately, we can't extend our facilities so instead, we invested in some new shelves allowing us to store equipment as high as possible!
One of the main jobs for the beekeeper during the winter is making up new frames to replace the old ones! With a large number of hives, you will find that making up frames take an extremely long time and unfortunately for us, we don't have much time. To fix this problem, we decided that we should hire an apprentice. This apprentice was my 12-year-old brother who is very good at making frames and has just started beekeeping!
Although a lot of time is spent in the workshop during the winter, winter is also the time where you get a chance to attend courses. In this case, Richard from Pant Derwen Apiary travelled up to the national agricultural centre in Stoneleigh to touch upon swarm control. 
We also went and visited the Bee Farmers AGM where we had a great talk about the importance of drones in the hive!
As many of you would have experienced, we had 1 week of very good weather here at the apiary. Temperatures in some areas reach 20 degrees c. With this, the bees were very busy and the queen started laying which is fairly rare in mid-February. Here is a photo of one of the big colonies during this mini February "heatwave".
Thankfully the temperatures here in south Wales have risen so that gives us a bit of time to get out to the apiary and do some housekeeping.
While writing this we are in the very busy mid-march during storm Gareth which seems to be battering us here in beautiful South Wales. We are one step closer to the start of the season and so I will see you next month!
Thanks For Reading
www.welsh-honey.com
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