Pollen substitute and top up feeders

Sunday.  After a terrible Friday and quite a bit of rain on Saturday, conditions have mostly been good today.  It was warm and mostly sunny with only a brief downpour about six pm.  I hope our bees have had chance to forage today.

Liz and Hannah made up pollen substitue to the Scottish Beekeepers recipe.  It's simple to make and doesn't taste too bad.  In fact it is slightly like pollen (think I prefer it to the real thing).

Rather than using paper we have put the paste in mango chutney pots that are easy to fit in the hive and won't fall apart. We hope.

Hannah & Gil visited the hives in the afternoon.  There was lots of bee traffic into/out of both hives with many of the bees carrying pollen.  With a bit of luck they won't need our supplement but we feel happier with it available if need be.

Hive 1 had used four fifths of their feeder contents.  Bees were active in the feeder in hive 2 but had used only a third.  We will have to visit tomorrow to top up.

We added a few extra blank bars into each hives (outside the follower boards) so that there is no access to the empty sections from under the roof as Kippax had problems with the bees selecting the roof space.  So far we have not found any bees in the roofs although oddly there were two ladybird larvae.