Hedge cutting

Probably not the last visit to the apiaries before mid-December, but the last time I intend to do anything other than a very quick check that all is OK. So today was properly putting the colonies to bed for winter. This impromptu and very hurried snap was nothing to do with the hives, but it just happened to catch me in mid operation, so it's not a bad illustration

You will probably need to go large to get why I scrabbled to take a picture, and why the cryptic title. This kind of thing happens randomly in this area, a dozen or so times a year, and makes me deeply uneasy. Military activity out of nowhere on a bright, sunny autumn morning. The directionless sound of rotating engines; spotting the aircraft too late to react. It's the script of too many movies, and too many news reports. 'It could never happen here' doesn't ring all that convincingly for me any more

Winter preparation means putting sugar fondant on top of the hives (under the roof, above the ceiling), for them to take down inside if they run short of stores in the hive (unlikely, but better safe...). It's too cool now for them to evaporate water from syrup and store it safely, so fondant is something they can either store directly or consume if they need to. On top of the fondant goes what we dignify with the term 'insulation' - actually, as you see on the roof of the right hand hive, it's an old cushion and some felted wool that came as packaging around a friend's dog food! If the bees have something to help retain heat, they burn less honey/sugar keeping themselves warm. The floor of the hive is an open wire mesh, but the bees remain near the top in cold weather, and hot air rises

The final task is to configure the entrance to prevent mice coming into the hive while the bees are too torpid to stop them. On these hives the entrance becomes two or three wooden tunnels just 8mm in diameter. On other hives, I pinned a metal plate in front of the entrance, again with holes just big enough for a bee but too small for a mouse

Oh - and the final, final task: put something heavy on each of the roofs to minimise the risk of them blowing off in winter storms. Some pieces of an old sculpture made by our son come in useful here. Hopefully that is it until December - no helicopter parenting required