For our March 2nd Monday meeting Tracey at The George in Brailes kindly agreed to open just for us as they are normally closed on a Monday in the winter. For a cold March we had a good turnout of members and it was lovely to see some members who had not been able to get to a meeting for a while.
The topic for the evenings’ main talk and discussion was ‘comb change’ given by David Blower MB, just back from his family trip to Australia.
Having given some hints and tips on how to identify comb that should be replace (‘if light doesn’t come through it if you hold it up to the sun’) David then took us through how to change one or two frames at a time, Bailey comb change and a ‘Shook swarm’, where the bees are shaken onto clean, new comb (in a clean brood on a clean floor). The details of how to do these are well documented, for example here on BeeBase, so David didn’t go into the detail but rather we discussed when the different approaches might be relevant and even ‘what constitutes a strong colony’ for a shook swarm.
During the general Q&A session after Comb Change the issue of wax moth damage to stored comb came up and, as it happened (!), David had an example of what a really bad wax moth infestation can do to a wooden brood – who would have thought they could be so destructive.
Our next 2nd Monday meeting is on Monday 10th April 2023