Time to take away the varroa strips before the winter.Its important not to leave the strips in, as this can encourage mite resistance (which is already prevalent in many parts of England and Scotland).
It was also time to ‘bed in’ the bees for the winter - gave the poly bees an extra feed of candy as their stores are still very light, and made sure that mouse guards were fitted properly, strapped down the roofs and other such things. Hopefully there won’t be any problems in the hives over winter, but I will need to check for isolation starvation and general starvation in the poly hive.
Since we were tidying up for winter, we also took floorboard scrapings (from the varroa tray inserts) to send off for analysis. This is a free service provided by the Scottish Agricultural Science Agency to look out for bee diseases and monitor their spread.
