Autumn tasks around the apiary

As the days shorten and the leaves turn yellow and begin to drop, your bees start to search around for flowers still providing pollen and nectar. There is a last licking to be had from cosmos and blackjacks. The black ironbark gums, Eucalyptus sideroxylon, with their large pink, red and cream blooms will be a bonus for those bees able to feed off them while the warm autumn days persist, but the cold frosty nights of June and July put a stop to the nectar flow, even while the flowers continue to bloom. The grass is now drying off and so the fire season starts, which compels the beekeeper to clean away long growth around his hives, as beehives, made of wood and filled with wax, are highly flammable. Bees are very sensitive to the shortening days after the equinox( 20 March) that heralds the start of autumn and winter and as the availability of pollen and the flow of nectar diminishes, the queen reduces her daily egglaying process. Brood rearing diminishes and the vacant brood cells are then filled by the house bees with honey, to create an insulation against the cold in the brood area. The brood rearing area, too, becomes smaller, but does not cease completely. The beekeeper should thus set about removing some of the last of the summer honey, to leave sufficient space for the bees for the winter period. He visits each hive and gently smokes the entrance and prises off the lid. Next, he smokes the bees down from the open super and removes only some of the capped honey frames. Depending on the strength of the swarm he would leave two to four frames as winter feed. He will move these frames to the centre of the super and fill the resulting vacant spaces on the outside with previously extracted drawn comb frames, or with frames fitted with full sheets of foundation wax. The metal queen excluder between the brood chamber and the supers will draw cold into the hive and should be removed. In fact the modern trend is to do without queen excluders altogether and allow the queen to move freely up and down the entire interior of the hive. Feral catch swarms sometimes occur at this time and should be placed in brood chambers that themselves are in sheltered places in the apiary. These bees still have time to harvest last flowers but will not have time to gather and store sufficient honey for the duration of winter, and the beekeeper will thus have to

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