First Cleansing Flights

Eight degrees, no wind for once, and by eleven o'clock the air in front of both hives was full of bees making their first wide, wobbling orientation loops since December. Cleansing flights are the least glamorous good news in beekeeping — the colony is alive, the cluster can break, and the roof of the Cordage Works gets speckled in a way I will not describe further.

Lark flew first, which surprised nobody. Her entrance was busy by half past ten, and I counted foragers coming back with pale grey pollen — gorse, almost certainly, from the railway cutting, the one shrub in Saltmere that ignores the calendar. Pollen in February means the queen is laying, or about to be, and the winter bees are betting the colony's protein on it.

Vesper took another hour to wake and flew maybe a third of Lark's numbers. That fits her character, but I hefted her anyway: still reassuringly heavy on the back, lighter on the left. I slid a 500 g slab of fondant over the feed hole as cheap insurance. Hefting is a crude instrument — you are weighing a guess against a memory — but done every fortnight it draws a curve, and Vesper's curve has flattened, not dived.

Chores done while the bees were airborne: entrances cleared of the winter's dead with a bent piece of wire, mouse guards checked and left on (February is exactly when a wet mouse wants a warm hive), straps re-tensioned after last week's gale, and the scale under Lark re-zeroed. Neither brood box was opened. Nothing that happens in February inside a hive is improved by my looking at it.

The plan from here is written on the workshop wall: fondant checks fortnightly, first proper inspection when the forecast gives three consecutive days over fourteen degrees, and a new brood box scorched and painted before April, because if Lark builds this spring the way she built last spring, swarm season will not wait for my carpentry.