Impatience

A house smelling of warm beeswax, which means smelling like an open hive, really. This is the time of year when beekeepers start to get twitchy. The online forums become overheated crucibles of ill-tempered dispute and ad hominem argument. Neophytes start asking if it is to soon to do this or that hive manipulation (YES!!). The well-seasoned rearrange and catalogue their equipment unnecessarily, and assemble the dubious additions they have bought in the January sales

It is four months or more since any of us have done detailed frame-by-frame inspections of our colonies, stood amid the hum of hundreds of contented (if slightly confused) bees or felt the flood satisfaction on spotting a queen making her way across the face of the comb. The truth is we are all missing it, and the grumbling the fidgeting and the poking is just displacement activity. I expect we have at least another 6 weeks to wait

The bees themselves are no doubt perfectly content to be left alone. In the current cold conditions, they will cluster together near the top of the hive, where the air is warmest. Of course the hive is split into vertical canyons by honeycomb, so they cannot cluster into a contiguous ball of bees, but they arrange themselves across the spaces between several successive combs to create a ball with several slices of honeycomb cutting through it. Some of the comb will probably have a small number growing larvae in it, even at this time of year. If the queen stops laying at all during winter, it is often only for a few days around the solstice. The larvae must be kept warm to grow, and the colony can generate extra heat as necessary by vibrating their wing muscles, without actually moving their wings, producing heat just as we do during vigorous exercise

I have posted pictures of finished candles before. This is the rather messy process of creating them. Here, molten wax is seen setting in the moulds. It solidifies from the bottom up - like most substances, with the glaring exception of water, the solid form is more dense than the liquid. A secondary consequence is that the wax therefore shrinks as it sets, which leaves a depression, or even a significant hole in the bottom. To win prizes at a show, or impress potential buyers, you can carefully pour in more wax, but it's fiddly, makes no functional difference, and these are destined for our use or as gifts to friends who will not be hyper-critical. Mrs M rightly thinks there are better ways to spend her time