It’s official, the team and I are overworking ourselves to the point that we’re almost broken! Only physically though, we’re all mentally hanging in there (‘Speak for yourself!’ – Sian). During this time of the year Sian and I are usually holed up in the office ensuring all our nuc and queen orders are all on the spreadsheet, doing our sales analysis and Sian is undergoing the long process of last season’s analysis of our nuc and hives productivity. However, with Gabriel still in New Zealand there is a lot of prep work left to do for the upcoming season, you know the drill, making frames, boxes, rewaxing frames and cleaning.
Another huge job that we’ve undertaken is redoing our honey room floor which has been causing us endless headaches last year. We removed all of our equipment from the honey room and now the yard is looking pretty cramped, hopefully it’ll be all spick and span before Gabriel’s return. It’s taken us about a whole day for Sian and I to manually scrape off all the paint before I had to acid wash the floor, then wash the floor multiple times. Now our backs are hurting and we’re feeling old. Rob helped us for about 30 minutes before calling it quits and he continues to work like he’s a young man!
Lambing season is upon us so Rob has been on his flock’s beck and call so we may see less of him the next couple of weeks. So far 4/98 have been born!
We attended last night’s wonderful talk by Chris Bird at Andover Beekeeper’s Association. Another huge turnout which was really lovely, some new faces too. Chris spoke about tree and plant health, diseases and pests threatening them and the implications of importing and planting non-native varieties. We held a raffle and I won Sian this little mug, she was extremely excited! She will now have to drink coffee more often in the office and stay motivated when doing her analysis of last year’s season!
We’ve been keeping up with our fondant feeding, we’ve noticed certain hives going through the feed extremely quickly so we’re doing our checks fortnightly now. Another huge job to make our work a little easier by converting to a traffic light system with our bricks as well as pinning all of our nucs to indicate which breed of queen are in the nucs.
Not much of an update really, but we do hope that everyone is enjoying the relatively mild weather that we’re experiencing too.
Beckys Beezzzs 