The following are images of our Dippons lane apiary which is situated in the badlands between Wolverhampton and Perton which is in South Staffordshire. It is several acres of fields mostly down to pasture for horses but some newly under cultivation, with ponds, woodlands and a tributary of the river Penk running through. On either side are housing estates and beyond Perton there are fields frequently planted with Rape and field beans.
As you may work out from the marram grass which inhabits this site, the ground tends to be on the damp side! Wellies are definitely required. It looks loke a rural idle, pasture with a public footpath which leads to the Staffordshire way in the distance, and surrounded by buckthorne.
So far there have been no issues with Green Woodpeckers, though we frequently hear them when visiting. This is quite a productive site and our bees generally do well here. It is the closest site we have to our home, handy for dropping of collected swarms.
All the hives here are currently poly hives of one type or another, as many of you will know we favour poly hives, and we have three different brands, four if you include the new design Abelo/Lyson have introduced this year.
The astute poly hive officianados amongst you wil no doubt be able to spot the two types of poly hive we have on the site. (There are no prizes for the correct answers sorry!). These images were taken on the 27th of September 2020. The sun was shining and the bees were busy in all the hives. Most hives have Jumbo feeders in place but you will notice some have a second or third super in place and at least one has a second brood box. They are all undersupered and we have been removing empty frames and moving full frames to the under super. However some of these colonies are relucant to move the food to the brrod box, it does mean we have not had to feed them.
One of the problems with the Paynes hive is that it does not allow the use of Paynes supers to be placed under the super without adjusting the floor with a knife, standard sized wood or poly supers do fit as can be seen from the pics.
Paul Twibill