Today I undertook the first real "beekeeping operation" of this new season - changing the hive floor. I have spares, so was able to swap a clean floor and landing board for the old floor and landing board that had been on the hive since last year. The purpose is to remove any debris that built up over winter, and “reading” the old floor (in the manner of reading tea leaves) also provides some clues about the state of the colony.

Wonderful to be lifting hive boxes in the sunshine again! It’s simple enough to change a floor:

dust off a clean floor and landing board
put the clean floor next to the hive
lift the hive up off its floor, move it sideways and gently lower it on to the new floor
move the old floor aside, quickly scanning to see if the Queen is among the bees on it
slide the hive, new floor and all, back to its original position.

Let’s have a look at the old floor. It has some bees and stuff on it:

The floor is metal mesh with a yellow plastic sheet underneath to catch debris that falls through the mesh. Some fragments of paper are lying on the floor, and most of what’s on the yellow floor screen underneath is, I think, sticky chewed up paper. This paper will be from the bag of sugar that I put at the top of the hive over winter because the bees’ own stores were very low. There are also some crystals of sugar lying around. And bees of course - mostly healthy-looking adults though there is one worker lying on her back apparently dying. But what we are not seeing here is a carpet of corpses. Which is good - it means the colony is strong enough to carry out its dead. Because there certainly will be many old winter bees dying. Also noticeable on the floor are some black and white lumps. These I think are chalkbrood mummies - the bodies of larvae killed by a fungal pathogen. The bees pull the dead bodies from the cells. Chalkbrood is apparently quite common and not usually a serious problem, so hopefully it’s nothing to be too concerned about.

Then at my leisure, with the bees now installed on their new floor, I was able to clean up the old floor, landing board and floor screen, ready for re-use.

The bees did not seem to be too disturbed by this operation. The hands on hive part only took a couple of minutes. Here are the bees flying to their new landing board - it looks much the same as their old one, being similarly weatherbeaten.

P.s. I was trying to think of a witty or catchy title for this post, but I’m afraid I didn’t come up with anything. “Take Floor” is an homage to the Mike Oldfield album “Take Four”, which has no relevance to any of this at all, but did inspire me to listen to Mike Oldfield while writing.