Simon and I went back into the Training Apiary today to try to figure out what to do with the problem hives, but in most every case, the bees had decided for us, and we just got to look and be happy.

My second hive is now filling with brood.  We did have a queen last week after all, but as Simon had suggested in the comments to the last post, she was a virgin queen, and without enough good weather to get out and mate, she was stuck that way.  The better weather since then has allowed her out, and she’s now laying nicely.  The workers are getting to work building and filling up the comb with forage, and she’s laying more to help.

My main hive seemed quite quiet this week, and indeed Simon thinks it swarmed during the week.  There’s a swarm high in a nearby tree, and all of Simon’s other hives swarmed last weekend.  The bees left are still working hard, filling both Supers, and laying is taking place in the Brood box, so we have a new queen.  All is as it should be, but catching the swarm is going to be hard where they are.  We do have a slight problem here – the top Super isn’t sticking together very well, and a crack has opened up in the join of one corner.  Damp has got in and we have a little mould on the wood in that corner.  I’ll swap out the Super box next week, putting these frames in a newer one, and bring it home to repair it.  I’ll then swap it back, as it’s painted the same colour as the rest of this hive, and I’m an obsessive…

So then we moved on to the hives where we’d had problems with chalk brood before.  The older one is actually sorting itself out.  There was still some small signs of the disease, but the bees are healthy and cleaning it up themselves.  The comb is still old and we’ll need to swap it out soon, but right now the queen is laying well.

So we don’t need to do much here, just provide clean foundation at some point in the future.  We did make a discovery on the new frames we’d put in to replace the ones that had got badly mouldy though:

The workers have built this one out far enough that the queen is happy to lay in it, and there she is, marked with a white blob, running around laying.  We saw a number of eggs in these cells, but I can’t make any out in the picture.

And on to the hive that had a far worse chalk brood in the previous weeks.  He we’d put on a second brood box, in order to convince the queen up into the clean brood, so we can take away the bad stuff and leave them in peace to continue in the new foundation.  Last week I put an entrance between the two boxes in the hope they’d come in and go up, and leave the box below alone, but that’s not happened.  Instead she’s laying in both, and the workers are treating the top brood box as something of a huge Super as well.  They’re cleaning out the bottom box too though, so there was little sign of chalk brood left.  So we now pretty much have too healthy brood boxes on the go here with one queen.  So healthy in fact Simon is going to order a new base and we’ll turn this one big hive into two smaller ones.  Whichever ends up without a queen will create a new one, and we’ll have fake swarmed them.

Oddly we’re still seeing some strange building behaviour though.  In this case, the foundation from one frame had come loose and touched the foundation on the next frame.  And the bees got in and around and worked the two together.  Which was no fun working back apart, and in the end we damaged both beyond use, so Simon will need to replace them both.

But all good news other than that.  Work to do next week, but it’s all to help them grow as colonies, rather than dealing with real problems.  The Summer has arrived and the bees have taken to cleaning up after themselves.

First odd thing – some sun on a Bank Holiday Monday.  But it gave Emily and I a chance to go and see how the hives in the Training Apiary were doing.  And that’s when things got odder…

Our main hive is doing very well, lots of honey in both Supers, lots of laying in the brood box.  Our 2nd hive isn’t so happy though – no sign of any laying at all now, and the bees weren’t at all happy.  We didn’t see a queen, so no idea where the ones that hatched have gone.  Killed each other?  Flown in a swarm after all?  We took off the entrance moving contraption, and put it together normally – I think we’re going to have to merge a swarm in there to re-queen it.  Again?

Then on to Hive 9, where we’d seen chalk brood before, and had a bit of a surprise in how they’ve been building:

What on earth is that about?  There was little sign of movement from the bottom box, where the problem was, to the top, where we want them to move, so we put in my middle entrance contraption without the queen excluder, in the hopes that having an entrance above the trouble will cause them to enter and build up from there, and ignore the bottom box, where we closed the entrance:
Then we moved back to Hive 8, which had the mold last time.  That seems to be solved, but there was clear sign of chalk brood here now, too:

We did see the queen here, who’s marked white, but my 2 photos are sadly blurred, so here’s more chalk brood:

They’re still trying to lay here, but we need to do more to sort this hive – I need to talk to Simon and Geoff.  Maybe shaking this colony to merge into my 2nd hive, or a replacement in Hive 10′s place?

But there’s some serious work needed as soon as the weather is better again.

And then, while typing this, I realized that when we removed the upper entrance to our 2nd hive, I didn’t remember opening the bottom one.  And nor did Emily.  So I grabbed an inspection cowl and my gauntlets and drove back.  And sure enough, we’d forgotten, and the hive was sealed shut.  So I pulled on my gauntlets, and put the cowl over my head, but didn’t bother pulling it down over my body and using the sleeves – I was only going to be popping the entrance restrictor up and leaving it in its normal position.  Remember I mentioned they weren’t happy?  And that I rarely if ever tuck my shirt in?  Well that, ladies and gentleman, is how I got stung on my upper bum.  And why I ended up running back to the car, and spinning around in circles waving a bit of floor mat.  I’m an idiot.

Due to the odd weather, Simon and I had discussed the problems in the training apiary, but not been able to do anything about it.  So today we initially met at the Newnham apiary, planning to go on to the training apiary when we were done.  And the above is the sight that met us.  All the hives had a mass of bees out front, charging around.  The nuke there already holds a swarm from the hive it’s next to, and first impressions were that the other hives were due to swarm too.

But it was just that the sun had just come back out, and they were queuing to get in and out through the obstructed entrances – set this way to keep mice and predators out.  Note the different colours of pollen on some of the returning bees’ legs.
The other thing you might note is that Simon had yet to switch his Brood and Super boxes back over for the Spring.  And this proved to have been a mistake, as we found as we opened each hive:

They’d built comb inside the feeder frames on top, between the plastic cover and the brood frames beneath, where he’d put bags of candy after Christmas.

Some just had honey in, so we could nick those, but some were brood, like that above, so we pulled a frame out of each Super, once we’d put the Brood Box back on the bottom, and emptied the comb of brood into that hole.  Once the brood have hatched, we can remove the bits of comb and replace the frame.

Other than that, each hive was healthy, well populated, and just busy.  We left them back in order, and went away with a lot of random comb:

So, then to the training apiary.  My main hive was doing fine, I did a quick full inspection, then added a second Super on top, having first “checker boarded” the frames in them – swapping empty and fully frames between the two Supers so that they’d work in both, but not think they were full enough to swarm.  Then onto my second hive, which last week I thought was due to swarm, due to the sealed queen cells I’d seen:

That Wotsit like lump lower-right is now open at the bottom, as was another just like it, and two I think may have been two small to really hold queens.  But they’d hatched, and hadn’t been able to leave.  And there was no brood anywhere in the hive, no activity in the Super, just honey in the outer frames of the Brood box.  So I think this wasn’t a swarm, it was supersedure.  This colony swarmed was from the main hive last year, so the queen here would have been the old one from there.  I think, having discussed it with Simon, that they’ve replaced her, and that we now have a virgin queen in here, waiting for a chance to go on a mating flight, meet fifteen nice, handsome drones, rip off their sexual organs in the act and return to the hive with them.  So glad I’m not a bee.

I’ve therefore reopened the main entrance of this hive, so she can do that.  We’ll see if she’s started to lay next week.

Simon, Elsa and I then approached Hive 8, to see what we could do about that mould.  And lifting off the lid, we could really smell it.  And it had visitors, too:

On the left, we have the Wax Moth, who had been laying in the old wax.  On the right, we have a slug, who had got in and was happily living in a damp corner.  This hive had got *very* poorly-sick.  We also found signs of chalk brood on the floor of the hive.

So we saved 4 frames of brood that showed no sign of any problems, put them in a fresh brood box of otherwise empty frames, and shook the bees off the old frames with no brood into the new box.  The foundation is all fresh, so no mould should be able to find a home, and we’ve removed the wax moth larvae with the mouldy frames.  Hopefully this still quite strong colony will now get on well again.  Simon’s going to put a feeder of syrup on top to help them build out the fresh frames.

We also started to look at Hive 9, to see how well they were moving up away from the chalk brood in the bottom box, to the fresh frames above.  They do look to be moving slowly, but the rain started before we could really check.  We’ll have to look properly next week.  And so, to finish, here’s another picture from the Newnham apiary of comb built in the open area where Simon had left them candy, where we removed the top plastic cheat and turned it over.

My main hive continues to be very healthy – I think I’m going to have to put a second Super on next week.  The current one was close to filling up on the outer frames already.  The above was a brood box frame, lots of laying going on, but no sign of queen cells, despite all the drone cells as in the lower middle here.  Below was taken as a peak into the Super – I didn’t want to disturb them too much, they were so busy, but I did take one frame out to see how they were doing.  The weather was looking difficult to start with, so I was careful not to leave any hive open too long, and knew I had work that needed to be done, so moved to those hives quickly.
So then I moved on to my second hive, which although it has a far smaller colony in it, was showing signs of wanting to swarm last time.  And again this week, while there wasn’t much activity in the super, the bees got very angry at my intrusion.  I therefore only looked at half the brood frames, since I was working alone, and found one sealed queen cell on one of those.  So they’re definitely planning something.

So I put on the swarm prevention device I bought from Modern Beekeeping last year.  As described there, it basically moves the entrance up above the queen excluder, so the workers and drones  can move about, but any queens are staying home.
The bottom entrance I completely blocked with that yellow plastic door, that’s usually high enough to let the bees in and out, but keep mice and maybe wasps out.  They got a bit confused at first, but started using the new upper door soon enough.

Next week will be interesting.  If any new queens hatch, and the old queen can’t leave, there’s going to be a fight.  But we should be left with the healthiest queen, and I won’t have lost half the bees from an already weak colony.

Then I moved on to the other plastic hives in the Apiary.  Geoff had done the wooden hives earlier in the week, and he and Simon had been to a husbandry course today, so I was trying to manage on my own for the first time.  The main job there was to put a new brood box on hive 9.  This is the one that has the beginnings of chalk brood, so by putting a fresh brood box on top, the bees will move up, the new brood will be born and join them, and the workers will build out and start working upstairs.  The queen should then start laying there, and we’ll end up with the bottom box empty, so we can take it away and dispose of the diseased comb.
I only did a cursory inspection, as the clouds came over again, but by the time I had it all back together, the sun was back out.  So I moved on to quickly inspecting the other two hives, starting with the weakest, Hive 8.  And what I found was bad news:
This was fairly old comb, but when we looked here last time, it was clean.  Somehow some mould spores had got in and found a home.  About 20% of the comb, mostly the lower right hand side of the brood box, has gone green.  Simon has always said we should replace comb regularly, 3-4 years apart, but some of the frames in here were marked 2007, so they’ve been left too long, and this has happened.

There were still bees here, and some small amounts of brood on this side of the hive, but we need to act fast, and I’ve already been talking to Geoff and Simon about it.  New frames and foundation need to be built and put in here, but I’m not sure what we can do to keep the mould from travelling over with the bees.  I need to rely on them for that information.

Having touched all this, I could scorch my hive tool, as I have been doing between each hive so far.  But I had no way to clean my gauntlets properly, and didn’t know how this mould travelled, so I didn’t inspect the last hive, number 11.  It’s been the healthiest of these for some time, so there’s little change of a problem there.  I’m just concerned for hive 8 now.

It is with great sadness that I must inform you that we lost a Hive in the Apiary in the last few weeks.  Above you can see Emily and Simon standing over the base, covered with dead bees, as another bee does a respectful fly-past.  There really weren’t that many bees still in the hive, but there was a big bag of candy still on top, and the brood box was heavy with stores, so it’s hard to be sure what happened.  We can only guess that the queen died over the winter and so no new brood were laid.  There was a small batch of capped brood in one frame, but it was all dead.  No sign of attack, no sign of disease, just gone.  Many of the bees must have died elsewhere.  Very sad.

It was the first dead hive Emily and I had seen.  The other hives we checked, but for one, were all healthy.  Geoff had done his side already, as the brood boxes were at the bottom and the woodpecker protection cages were all off to one side, like mine.  We were just working our way through SImon’s side, and my two, to check them all properly.

And Hive 9 was alive, but showed the early signs of Chalk Brood.  The frames in here were a few years old, and Simon was planning to shake the bees off onto fresh foundation this Spring anyway, but it looks like they were left too long.  Initially, the hive looked healthy – we opened up the lid and found they’d cleaned out the big bag of candy Simon had given them, and started building comb to fill in the spaces – what you see inside the plastic bag on the left is new comb, as shown on the right:

But once we started working through inspecting the frames, we found white, dried out cells in one of the frames, and the bottom of the hive, once we lifted the Brood Box off, looked like this:

Those lumps of white among the dead tell the story.  We’re going to have to shake these bees into fresh foundation so they can start afresh soon, before we lose another colony.  It’s in its early stages, we’ve caught it in time, but still sad.

The rest of the Hives were doing very well.  My main FreeBees hive is exceptionally strong, loads of stores, loads of brood, and as yet no signs of them wanting to swarm.  Drones, but not queen cells with anything in them.  I knocked down a practice cell just to stop them getting ideas, though.

My second hive, with last year’s swarm in, seem to have other ideas, though.  There were far more drones, Emily had to knock down two occupied Queen Cells, and there was no sign of any laying for the last 4 days or so.  One of the Queen Cells had a small larvae in it, no more than 4-5 days old, so she was still laying after I worked on the hives last week.  And we didn’t find the Queens in either Hive, so that was good to know.  But they seem to be preparing to fly, so I’m going to have to take some counter-measures next weekend.

Simon suggested buying some new Hive parts, so we could try out on of the new techniques we’ve been reading about, but Modern Beekeeping are currently out of Jumbo Brood boxes, which is all I have frames for, so that’s out.  I do have the swarm prevention entrance thing I bought last year, mostly to act as a spacer for when I fed them, though, so I’m going to try that.  Basically, you close up the entrance below the Brood Box, and this thing lets you create a new entrance above the Queen Excluder instead.  So the workers can get in and out, but the queen can’t leave.  This hive is just too weak to split, I believe, so I think this may be the best bet.

Interestingly, and also pointing to this hive preparing to swarm, the bees that left the hive while we worked it all gathered in a big mass on one of the fence posts around the hives.  Whenever Simon or Geoff have had to kill a queen, they’ve made a point of doing so against this one post, to leave queen pheromones on it.  Whenever we’ve had a swarm in this Apiary, except for the one that built itself under my main hive and became the colony in my second, have gone way up into one of the orchard trees, and thus have been near impossible to get to.  It’s good to see that Geoff and Simon’s little trick is working, and that hopefully any swarms we do get will be available at head height for easy capture.  It’s just a concern that my bees were already ready to gather there…
So, next week we look at swarm prevention, and once again try to find my queens.  While Simon works on cleaning and replacing Hive 10.  Maybe any swarm we get can be re-homed there.

My wife and I finally got back to see the hives this fine afternoon, after two hours working on her allotment with her.  And they look very strong – both hives.  The above picture is from the first hive, so it’s more populous, as it’s older.  But that’s also why the comb is darker.  I’m going to need to cut out some of these frames over next year and put new foundation in, to guard against disease.

But what you see here is honey across the top edge, with the whiter caps.  The dark yellow/orange caps are brood, and I think the more domed ones top left of the picture are drones – they’re getting ready for mating flights early.  I didn’t do a full inspection, but saw no sign of queen cells.  I’ll look more completely next time.  The bag of candy on top of this one was almost completely empty, but I didn’t replace it as there was still plenty of stores, and as you can also see here, they’ve begun filling cell with pollen too – the open yellow ones.

The real reason I was there, other than checking their health and stores, was to swap the Super and Brood boxes back over again.  We’d put the Brood on top over winter, as they prefer to start at the top and work down, and it made dripping in the acid that helps deal with the Verroa mites easier.  But we needed to put this right, and put the queen excluder in, before she got the chance to start laying brood where we want to be harvesting honey later…

So I dismantled the hive, cleaned the base, and put it back, Brood box first, then Super, with the queen excluder between, seen on the ground in brown above, and then checked to ensure she wasn’t already in the Super.
As you can see here. the comb in the Super had been eaten clean over the winter, and was ready for re-use, but had yet to receive any new stores.  Perfect timing to switch it back to the top.  They have plenty below, and prefer to store from the top, so should now start putting honey up here.

This hive then had the lid put back on, and we moved to the second one:

Given the colony was newer and went into the winter a lot smaller, it was still doing very well.  There was more candy still in the bag under the lid, which I emptied onto the frame tops for them to deal with as they wish, and checked the Brood frames.  The first I checked was pretty much empty, nearer me in the pictures, as shown below.  But as I pulled out a frame from the other side I saw what I was looking for – plenty of new brood activity, as with the main hive.  The frames in the Super though were also clean, so we switched those boxes over too.

This hive was then also put back together and strapped up tight.  Next time I visit I’ll do a full inspection – hopefully with Emily there to help.

Not had much to say for some months, but I’ve been back to the FreeBees three times now since the last post.

The first two were to give them more food, and since it was getting so cold, this time it was candy, not syrup.  The bees can’t work the syrup once it gets too cold, so you know that stuff bakers put on top of buns?  Yeah, that:

I’d bought a big bag of it some time ago – the Summer BBKA show, I think – so it was just a matter of breaking it up into portions, putting it into sealable sandwich bags, and rolling it as flat as I could, so it would fit in under the lid.  The second picture is of a bag in situe, with a bag they’d previously emptied on the right.  You lay it on the frames, take out a craft knife, cut a big diagonal cross in the bag corner to corner, flip it over so the cut is down over the frames, and put the lid back on on top.  All done, little bother or heat loss to the bees.

On the second visit, the main hive had cleaned out that bag, so I gave them another.  The newer hive had only half-eaten their first bag, so I left them to it.  This third visit today, little more had been taken by either, so I just left them where they were – the hives were very dormant, so they’ve not needed much yet.  This early spring had worried me, but my hives haven’t really woken up yet.

The first thing that met my eyes on reaching the apiary though was the damage done by last week’s wind:
Fortunately I had some cable ties in the car (I’m an engineer – I’m never far from gaffer tape, cable ties and WD40).  So I repaired what I could, using some of the thin bamboo rods stashed at the entrance to try to hive the fence some more strength, like this:

It needs more work, but the wind has died down now, so it’ll do until the weather’s better and I can talk to The Powers That Bee™ about how to fix it properly.

On to the Hives.  I removed the anti-woodpecker wire, noting no sign of attack, opened them up, saw the bees still there (relief) but dormant, and then trickled in some of the acid into each gap, gently trying to get an even run onto the bees all the way along.  I did the main hive first, and put it all back together again before remembering the camera, so all these shots are from the newer hive:

And so that’s what you see here.  The bottle contains the acid.  You squeeze it to fill the little 5ml reservoir at the top.  The nozzle is an unscrewable thing, so you loosen that, and then tip it so that just that 5ml is poured slowly into the gap, onto the bees.  Both hives took 1.5 of these bottles total.  The acid has no affect on the bees, we’re told – and none noticed in the years this has been used by my friendly experts.  But it melts the legs off the mites…

This time of year, there is no brood.  Verroa prefer to live in the cells with growing brood, feeding off them, but outside of season, they have no choice, and life on the backs of the bees in the colony, feeding directly off the adults.  This sticky acid dropping on them then has two effects.  One, it melts the Verroa’s legs, making it far harder to hold on.  Two, it gets the bees to clean themselves, hopefully knocking the Verroa off and out the bottom of the hive.  It should do a better job than anything else in our armoury against them.

Both hives are now back together, treated and fed.  And I’ve patched the fencing.  It’ll be a few more weeks before I return.

One Last Thing – this is a great video of a hornet attack on a beehive.

I went back quickly to the bees this Sunday afternoon, since the weather was fine, and I needed to give them some fondant – it’s too cold now to give them syrup.  I’d bought a big bag of fondant at the Spring show, to get ready, and we used some of that to do the re-queening some time ago.  I also have two boxes of stuff that has pollen in the fondant, but I’ll be using that in the early spring, when they’re waking up.

I cut some of the fondant off, dropped it into a couple of press-lock topped sandwich bags, and rollered them flat.  These I then took with me to the hives.

The original hive seemed happy and healthy, so all I did there was take the feeder tray off, put a bag of fondant on the top of the frames, cut a deep cross corner to corner into it, and then flipped the bag over and left it there.  The clear plastic cover went on that, then the roof on that, and I strapped it back together, and put the woodpecker protection cage back on.

The newer hive was more interesting though:

Sorry about the weird warp in this shot – it bent my photo of the fondant bags even worse, which is why there are none here =O(  But see those bodies on the floor of the feeder tray?  They’re all wasps.  There was one alive in there too – well it was alive for a few seconds after I noticed it still.  Then it was squished.  There’s obviously quite the story here.  How did they get into the tray, how are they all dead (but that last one, which was quite poorly) and how come any bees that had died in the fight were gone, but all the wasp bodies were still there?  I can only surmise that the wasps had got in, smelt the sugar and preferred the idea to the honey, got up there, and then in the sticky open space had lost the battle.  I cleared the tray out and put it to one side, and gave them a bag of fondant too.  I hope they can fight off any other intruders, but wasps seem to be dying off now anyway, and the front door reducer is hopefully keeping mice out, so hopefully they’ll be OK.

So I put that hive back together again too, and was left with this:

Yes, the left hand doweling on the newer hive snapped while I was using it to lift the cage – silly me.  No sign of any woodpecker activity on either hive, but then the hives without any protection in the apiary look fine too, so all I seem to be achieving is scratches in my paintwork.

That’s it now I think.  I may need to check again, and maybe replace the food, but I don’t really want to let the cold in, and they seem fed enough.  Between Christmas and New Year we’ll re-visit, feed again, and use the mite leg disolving acid treatment thing on them.  More on that when it happens.

Another couple of weeks, during which Emily has headed off to University, and Lucy has gone to Marchent’s Hill with school for a week, so we’ve had a very quiet house.  But I’ve visited the bees a couple of times, mainly to do what Simon wrote about in his last entry here.  So I’ve now got the Supers beneath the Brood boxes on both hives, but once again I’ve over-engineered my woodpecker protection in comparison – mainly because I have chicken wire left over from building the chicken coop.

So last year, I had a bigger stand, and the wire could be stood on it too.  This year, all the Training Apiary hives have smaller stands that fit tightly into the base, and so I came up with this idea of using two doweling rods per hive to hold it up.  And I’ve not allowed the wire to get too close to the sides of the hive.  There ‘s a frightening photo in this month’s British Beekeeper’s Association Newsletter of a hive wrapped tightly in chicken wire, that a woodpecker just used to get a better footing when it attacked.  There’s a large missing section in the side of the brood box, with lots of comb exposed =O(  I don’t want that to happen to mine.

I also fed then thick sugar syrup again.  They seem to be lapping it up.  As you can see above, the feeder boxes are still on top of both hives.  And I removed the last of the ApiGuard, and topped up the powder in the bottom.   And that’s it.  A few more visits to feed them and check they’re OK, and we’ll be into Winter.  This Thursday is also the Fleet Beekeeper’s meeting and competition.  I’ve not decided whether to enter one of our jars of honey yet =O}

Today we were back in the training apiary continuing to prepare the bees for winter. The Apilife VAR anti-varroa treatments have been in place now for almost 5 weeks and the smell has permeated the entire apiary. The mite drop count has come down on all but the largest hive which still has a lot of dead mites appearing on the removable tray. Never mind, we will have to leave them until the Oxalic acid treatment in December.

Having hefted all the hives, last week we identified a couple that required feeding with syrup. Today all the syrup had gone and so we will top them up again later tonight. Those hives that have a full super of stores plus loads of food in the brood chamber were “flipped” with the super placed on the floor and the brood chamber on top. (Note how clean the floor is) We have done this process for a few years now and it pays huge dividends in a number of ways.

When the bees cluster as it gets colder they will start at the bottom (in the super) and work their way upwards into the brood chamber by mid-winter. When we trickle the Oxalic acid anti-varroa treatment into the hive after Christmas, the syrup will trickle straight onto the brood and be far more effective.

Also in past years, the Queen typically starts laying eggs in February when its still too cold to do an inspection and in the past that has meant that we end up with the queen laying eggs and raising brood in the super which is very difficult to deal with. With this method, the Queen ends up laying eggs in the brood chamber where we want her to. Rapid feeding is also easy as you can simply place a slim pack of candy on top of the brood chamber close to the bees if we need to. This method gives us time in the Spring to wait for a good warm day before conducting a full inspection at our leisure, reversing the hive back the normal way with the super on top and Queen excluder in between.

We have also had a report of woodpeckers attacking a members hives nearby and so we also showed how to protect a hive from these critters who can rip through a hive in seconds if they want to. In the past, I have wrapped hives in chicken wire, but whilst this works, it’s really difficult to store the chicken wire away from the hive.

So now I use plastic garden mesh (20mm) that is easy to cut to size and can be rolled up and put away when not required. The mesh is simply wrapped round the hive and secured with wire wraps as shown above. Heather Morss suggested a little twist at each corner against the hive roof to stop the mesh falling down. It also means that the wrap can be lifted off the hive in one piece if we need to get inside the hive for any reason.