The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Bees & Beekeeping => Topic started by: cloddopper on October 08, 2016, 08:56:54 pm
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Most of th ivy on next doors shrubs & trees has gone into over dive zillions of light khaki green 2" golf ball type clusters of it everywhere .
If it stays sunny & warmish ( 12 oC plus ) in the next few days expect an invasion of honey bees & wasps all over it .
Ivy pollen & honey is slightly toxic enough to give some people bad headaches and diarrhea . So my advice to anyone who is thinking of sneaking off with the bees winter stores is ..... don't do it , you may get more than you bargained for .
Now is also the about the latest time you can fed 1:1 sugar syrup with out thymol in it as a sudden cold snap will leave the uncapped sugar with too much water in it and thus liable to grow mould spores
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The ivy next to our bins has been out in flower for a good fortnight now and is now tailing off.
Looks like plenty berries for the c_____mas dec's.
Bee's are shut up for the winter now - mouse guards on, door blockers in.
Been reasonably cold up here this past 10 days - notice a big drop off in bumble numbers and also wasps too.
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Today I've been out in the garden in jeans & a tee shirt from 10.00 till 15.30 ( ish ) It was lovely & warm so long as I was in the sunshine . I watched a wasp land on the fence a fw inches from my head and start scraping off fibres.
Wallop " an ex wasp fell to the floor .
We still have plenty of bumble bees visiting the half a dozen or so fuchsia shrubs we have in the front gardens .
All the grapes on the eight year old vine that's wired to a south facing wall have now fully ripened .
Delicious black ones, quite big and so sweet, I sat a while and ate a bunch of them straight off the vine. Unfortunately the wasps like them too so I had to be very careful as to how I got them and ate them .
I didn't manage to get hold of the seedless varieties so ended up spraying the gardens with plenty of unwanted grape seeds .