Hi, I’m Stewart Spinks and welcome to Episode 92 of my podcast, Beekeeping Short and Sweet.

Happy New Year, My first podcast of 2020 and a chance to update you on the top bar hive project, Winter feeding and an exciting new collaboration for the coming season.

I know it’s a cliche but where oh where did that year go? And what on earth is happening to the quiet time over this Winter period! It seems we’re now rushing towards the beginning of the beekeeping season and with so much work still to do. Mostly due to my enforced downtime in the Autumn with the bad back but even so, I still see so much work to do and the days are racing past. With the start of the new year, I’ve changed the colour of the podcast title image to reflect this year’s queen colour, I’ll also be changing the colour on the video thumbnails to the same colour and if you’re still pondering what colour that is, well, it’s blue this year.

One of my New Year’s promises to myself is to have a daily jobs list to keep me focussed, and, apart from a couple of minor slip-ups I am still working to the list and adding jobs as I spot them or, as in most cases, remember I need to do them.

Currently, top of the list are jobs associated with the top bar hive, if you’ve listened to the previous podcast you’ll know me and Pete are busy building a top bar hive, something I promised myself I would do quite a number of years ago and to be honest, it’s been a bit distracting and more work than I had anticipated, but I’ll give you a full rundown on that in a few minutes.

I’ve been popping around the apiaries checking up on flooding risks and adding fondant, again more about this task later but I wanted to start the podcast proper with some exciting news for us here at the Norfolk Honey Company in that we have recently agreed to a season-long collaboration setting up an apiary from scratch and installing a dozen Honey Paw Langstroth Hives and accompanying nucs.

As you may know, we collaborated with Paul Beardmore from Happy Valley Honey a couple of seasons ago with some Honey Paw Hives and the manufacturers have been in touch to ask if we would again use their hives to collaborate in a series of videos to last the full active season showing the full range of Honey Paw Poly Langstroth hives and associated kit such as pollen traps.

I’ve been very impressed with the Honey Paw hives we’ve been using that Paul at Happy Valley Honey supplied us so I didn’t hesitate in agreeing to create another series of videos for the coming active season using the Honey Paw hives. We’ll be receiving the hives in flat pack form and I’ll be using my renowned DIY skills to build the hives, in layman’s terms that means glueing them together as I’m sure you’re aware.

Then we’ll be painting them and making up all of the ancillary equipment in preparation for the start of the new season. Once we’ve got them built and painted we’ll be setting them out in a brand new apiary site that I’ve just established close to our Bluebell’s apiary. It’s a lovely site in the corner of an open meadow with great access for the Ranger so we’ll be able to get all of our gear to the apiary without any heavy lifting.

Check out my blog for the full transcript of this week's podcast.

Well, that’s it for this week, thanks for all of your comments and support,

If you’re not yet familiar with Patreon, Do catch up with more of my beekeeping journey by checking out the content list on my creator page www.patreon.com/norfolkhoney

Have a great week, and thanks for hanging around until the end of the podcast.

 I’m Stewart Spinks

And that was Beekeeping Short and Sweet