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What a week, we’ve had all four seasons in one day, rain, winds, sunshine, hail, snow and, not forgetting Storm Ciara for our bees to contend with, listen in to hear how my bees survived. Also to come, the latest workshop update and yet another storm to contend with.

Blimey, what a week, at least we were forewarned and despite all the fuss nothing quite so dramatic here for us as compared to other parts of the country and certainly, other places around the world so we were pretty lucky really.

Looking back at the week, the big news was the impending arrival of Storm Ciara, we seem to have become accustomed to naming our storms now and Ciara arrived on schedule with some torrential downpours and gale-force winds. I looked out into the back garden to see fairy calm scene as I’d done something I’ve never done before, and that was to prepare for the worst! I’d moved all likely flying objects into the garage, the usual empty pots and trays from my gardening exploits, a couple of old honey buckets that I use for, well, use for pretty much everything in the garden these days, all except filling with honey of course. But I could see those sailing through the skies so they went into the garage. Plants in pots were moved to sheltered corner locations, bear in mind my back garden is only 5 metres by 7 metres at the most, maybe not even that big, I did a lot of fishing in years gone by so I’m quite good at over-estimating!

Anyway, everything was tucked away ready for Storm Ciara to arrive and she was perfectly on time. We didn’t get quite as much rain as I was expecting but it was very, very windy. My mind turned to the apiary sites I have and thinking which trees were in imminent danger of falling over, and there are quite a few. At the Alpaca farm, there’s a huge oak tree on the outside track that borders the farm and that came down about two years ago. Chris at the Alpaca farm had a tree surgeon cut down the bulk of it that had fallen into their property but the huge trunk ended up across the public bridleway and is still there. It stops me from driving up to the apiary from the back lane, not a huge problem as it’s always nice to say hello to the folks at the Alpacas but there are several other ancient trees that line that track that could easily have taken a battering this week.

I did message Emma, the owner of the alpaca farm, to see if they could check on the bees for me because this is the Honey Paw Langstroth poly hive apiary from a couple of seasons ago and I was worried the poly hives might have taken a tumble.

I needn’t have worried as everything was secure and the hives were all firmly strapped down. It’s the only apiary where there is someone on-site 24/7 so I needed to get around all the other apiaries as soon as possible to put my mind at rest.

The Bluebell apiary was my first stop, and beekeeper incompetence had intervened to cause one minor issue. At the last visit to feed Apipasta fondant, I’d forgotten to put the stone back on top of one of the BSHoney 2in1 nuc boxes and the roof had been blown off. Of course, the next step is trying to find the roof, it’s only a small rectangle of polystyrene and they can travel quite a long way in a good storm.

The Bluebell apiary, although set out on concrete plinths and wood chip floor is surrounded by long grasses, hedgerows and trees, idyllic on the right day but when you’re trying to find a thin slab of polystyrene it makes for a more tricky search.

The sensible thing to do is start at the hives and scan around searching the ground all the way to the hedge line and up into the bushes and trees that form the boundary. Nope, nothing there, perhaps a walk through

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