On a cold January Saturday morning I visited the apiary to check the hives were upright and had plenty of stores. From the outside all seemed quiet.  Whilst bees are cold blooded, they aren’t that active during the cold weather. Time would tell.

Estimating how much stores is left is a process called hefting. You are supposed to lift the hive and know if it is light of stores of honey or not. Yeah right. It’s something I find quite difficult to do. Some people use a luggage scale but I’ve not ventured into that particular piece of technology yet, perhaps next year.

I tend to add bakers fondant to my hives in December to ensure they have enough stores. This amused the neighbours back in December when the BAKO catering man arrived with the order of ten boxes of fondant, around 125kg in total! Not all for me I might add.

The bees tend to work upwards through their stores during the winter months, as a cluster, so if they are hungry then they’ll be at the top of the hive. A bit like children, it varies between strain of bee and how cold it has been, on how much they consume.  You can see from the photo one hive had consumed quite a lot of fondant since Christmas Eve.

Lots of activity inside the hive!

The native British black bee needed very little stores during winter by all accounts. However as a common strain they died out at the turn of the 20th Century. The bees we have now are a mixture, mongrels, imported from Italy and other sunny European countries.

All the hives seemed happy, with some not consuming very much fondant at all.

Fortunately the job didn’t take too long and I was able to get back into the warm very quickly.