Episode 409: Heatwave After Heatwave

Hi everyone and welcome back to the podcast another week and another heat wave.

This week we've enjoyed or endured 33 degrees celsius.

Not conditions I'd choose to be inspecting honeybee colonies in to be honest and Thankfully, I'm able to defer most inspections currently for a week or two.

I've started writing this week's podcast on Thursday evening and rather alarmingly, we have the smell of fire smoke, woodland burning smoke, drifting into the office from our local heathland.

This area is known as Mousehold Heath and somewhere that I grew up on as a lad.

It's a really sad situation to hear that it's on fire once more, but it seems to happen regularly.

This really brings home the threat of fire that so many people around the UK, Europe and more generally the world are facing right now.

It's simply too hot to be wearing a bee suit and Wellington boots right now, and we do seem to be having week after week of very high temperatures and consistently blue cloudless skies, although there does seem to be some small hope that we could get a very small amount of rain next week.

Oh, and some cloud cover.

And that might drop the temperatures a little bit.

The temperatures do look set to drop back to the low to mid-20s level.

That's Celsius, of course.

And we may even get more and more cloud cover.

So it's going to feel much more comfortable than in recent weeks.

Because of the high temperatures...

I've actually held off adding treatments right through to this week for most of our colonies.

Some nukes have had treatments added, but for the most part, we're only really just getting started with them.

It's no big problem, and as long as the treatments stay in the hives for the full treatment period, they will all do very nicely.

I'm not seeing a huge amount of Varroa damage in any of our colonies right now so I think we're okay with that.

Thinking back to the dangers of this extreme heat and this may be a little too late but if you haven't already got a smoker box I would certainly recommend one.

It's not going to cost a great deal more than a few jars of honey and it may well be the thing that that stops you from setting fire somewhere.

We have a large metal box, a large metal smoker box from Thorn Beehives.

The smoker fits nicely inside and the lid has a seal all the way round to prevent the smoke getting out and that effectively shuts down the smoker through a lack of oxygen getting into the box.

The type, the style that we have is a little too large for my personal preference.

It's the one with the extra slots on the outside for hive tools and bee brushes and the like, but not something that I really need or actually want.

Hi everyone and welcome back to the podcast another week and another heat wave.

This week we've enjoyed or endured 33 degrees celsius.

Not conditions I'd choose to be inspecting honeybee colonies in to be honest and Thankfully, I'm able to defer most inspections currently for a week or two.

I've started writing this week's podcast on Thursday evening and rather alarmingly, we have the smell of fire smoke, woodland burning smoke, drifting into the office from our local heathland.

This area is known as Mousehold Heath and somewhere that I grew up on as a lad.

It's a really sad situation to hear that it's on fire once more, but it seems to happen regularly.

This really brings home the threat of fire that so many people around the UK, Europe and more generally the world are facing right now.

It's simply too hot to be wearing a bee suit and Wellington boots right now, and we do seem to be having week after week of very high temperatures and consistently blue cloudless skies, although there does seem to be some small hope that we could get a very small amount of rain next week.

Oh, and some cloud cover.

And that might drop the temperatures a little bit.

The temperatures do look set to drop back to the low to mid-20s level.

That's Celsius, of course.

And we may even get more and more cloud cover.

So it's going to feel much more comfortable than in recent weeks.

Because of the high temperatures...

I've actually held off adding treatments right through to this week for most of our colonies.

Some nukes have had treatments added, but for the most part, we're only really just getting started with them.

It's no big problem, and as long as the treatments stay in the hives for the full treatment period, they will all do very nicely.

I'm not seeing a huge amount of Varroa damage in any of our colonies right now so I think we're okay with that.

Thinking back to the dangers of this extreme heat and this may be a little too late but if you haven't already got a smoker box I would certainly recommend one.

It's not going to cost a great deal more than a few jars of honey and it may well be the thing that that stops you from setting fire somewhere.

We have a large metal box, a large metal smoker box from Thorn Beehives.

The smoker fits nicely inside and the lid has a seal all the way round to prevent the smoke getting out and that effectively shuts down the smoker through a lack of oxygen getting into the box.

The type, the style that we have is a little too large for my personal preference.

It's the one with the extra slots on the outside for hive tools and bee brushes and the like, but not something that I really need or actually want.