Welcome to the Bee Temple! This past weekend I finally readied the hive for winter, by adding straw bales to the north and west sides (which are in shade) and placing two bales on top. Insulation for winter. I went by intuition on the placement… It might be my imagination, but the bees have seemed far more active since I did this. I interpret this to mean that they are cozier at night, and need less time to warm up and get to work in the morning.
Artemis, who normally sits atop the hive, has been relocated to the front entrance. She’s the greeter, now.
In early October I had to kill my original queen – she’d stopped laying eggs, which is really bad news. My hive had honey, but without a fertile queen to make babies, it didn’t matter. My ever-generous mentor, Jessie Brown, shared a tiny trap-out colony, which had a newly fertilized queen but no honey stores for the winter. So we merged them, after smashing my queen. (Yes, it was stressful.) Carnage ensued – lots of dead bees – but within three days my hive had accepted the new queen and her remaining workers, and the newly merged colonies had cleaned a pile o’ corpses out of the hive. There were eggs and larvae and I saw the queen moving about with purpose, as if she’d owned the place for years.
Here’s hoping the girls can hold it together through a La Nina winter!
