Episode 53: Crazy February Weather

Hi I’m Stewart Spinks and welcome to episode 53 of my podcast, Beekeeping Short and Sweet. As we head into the last week of February we’re expecting to be wearing shorts and T shirts as the crazy warm weather continues, the bees enjoy an early break from the Winter’s cold and I’ve finally found somewhere to expand and build my beekeeping business.

Welcome back to the podcast, the crazy weather continues, average top temperatures for February in our region are historically around 7 to 7.5 degrees C according to the Met Office data I was checking this morning and it looks likely we’ll double that this week with temperatures hitting 14 and possibly 15 degrees or higher. Winter hasn’t finished with us yet I’m sure, but I always look at February as the month where the Snow and Ice takes hold and we freeze our way into March but this year it looks like we’re on a mini heatwave as warm air is being dragged up from the Canary Islands and I’m sure lots of beekeepers will be jumping at the chance to have a look in their beehives.

This is where you expect me to say don’t inspect but I know some of you just can’t help yourselves so what I would say is make sure you’re going in with a plan and know exactly what you are looking for and why you’re inspecting. I’ve touched on why and how to inspect this early in the season before so I’m not going through all of that again today, just be sure to go carefully and quickly with your goal in mind.

I’ve been round all of my colonies and put fondant on the ones I wanted to feed. Everything’s looking good and with just the one colony currently being queen less we appear to heading out of February with plenty of strong hives for the start of the new season.

So I won’t be inspecting any bees this weekend, although I might have a quick look at the CBPV nuc I have at my allotment. I saw the bees flying from the nuc yesterday so they are still alive but I think the virus still has a firm grip on them. One of the benefits of living in the UK is we have a very active core of beekeeping associations all helping their beekeeping members to improve and develop their skills as beekeepers. One such association is the Cambridgeshire Beekeeping Association who hold an Annual one day event in March with guest speakers talking about a range of topics, this year I’m particularly interested to listen to Professor Giles Budge from Newcastle University who is talking about the ongoing research into Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus. This is the research to which I contributed a sample of my bees. Hopefully they can come up with a plan to help beekeepers who find this infection in their colonies.

The other reason for heading to the Cambridgeshire talks is they always provide a fantastic lunch! Food is never far away from my thoughts. On the subject of food, particularly food with honey as an ingredient, I saw a fantastic recipe for honey and peach pie on the tv last night. One of my favourite tv celebrity chefs, Rick Stein made this really simple dish so I’m going to give it a try and will post my efforts on video to the patreon page as normal. I hope those of you that have subscribe to the Patreon page have enjoyed my cookery exploits this Winter, I’ve certainly enjoyed making them. The Honey and Peach Pie looks really simple to make and has very few ingredients, I’ll post a blog with my efforts and recipe in the next couple of weeks so you can have a go too if you want to.

It’s going to be a busy couple of months coming up as I’ve been putting off some essential preparatory work for the new season. I’ve still not made up all of the frames and hive parts that I’ve recently bought and there is still some cleaning to be done. The reason for the delay is also the reason I have some exciting news to share this week. I don’t very often share personal stuff but it’s all relevant beekeeping challenges and I’m sure I’m not alone in the frustrations I’ve faced over the past few years.

As yo