Yaniv van der Stigchel

Thom Bri wrote:Very low honey production this year. I am feeding them, and will put sugar blocks on to the frames this winter.

Sorry to hear the honey was so low this year. Sugar blocks on the frames sound like a good safety net for a long winter. Do you make the blocks yourself or use fondant? I hope all four come through to spring.

Thom Bri wrote:The last two years have had poor springs. Bad weather and also weird weather due to Canadian forest fires causing weak sunshine.

That's interesting. I hadn't thought of the smoke, but it makes sense that hazy days could cut down mating flights the same way cold or rain does. Did you notice it in the foraging too, or mostly in the queens? Fingers crossed for a proper spring next year.

That makes sense. With a handful of hives you're really keeping your neighbours' genetics. Sorry the last two years have been so rough. Splits that look healthy but won't raise a queen must be really frustrating. Earlier in this thread Cécile mentioned drone shortages near her. Could something like that be going on, or a run of bad weather during mating flights? I hope all four of them make it to spring.

Thanks Thom, that's a really honest answer. Lots of splits and letting the weak ones go sounds like a kind of selection in itself. Over the years, have you noticed whether the colonies that make it through tend to come from the same lines? I'm curious whether you've seen your survival rate creep up as the survivors become the stock you split from.

What a turnaround, Oguz. Losing both colonies and then filling both hives again from swarms, one of them moving in on its own, plus honey at the end of the season. Congratulations, that update made my day.

Alessandro mentioned varroa as the most likely cause last winter, so I'm curious: are you doing any mite counts this autumn, even if you don't plan to treat? A sugar roll doesn't hurt the bees, and it would at least tell you what each colony is carrying into winter.

Full disclosure, I'm asking partly because I'm building a small beekeeping app called Smokebook. You log an inspection with a few taps, it turns a sugar roll or sticky-board count into a mite load and compares it with the guide value for that month, and each hive keeps its own curve through the year. Whether you treat stays entirely up to you. Most apps assume you treat, so I'd really value feedback from someone keeping bees the natural way, and honestly I'm not sure yet how well it fits a Layens hive. If you or anyone here would like to try it, send me a purple moosage and I'll email you a free code.

Riona's point about the equinox and solstice paths is the one I'd underline for a spot ringed by mature trees. The winter sun runs so much lower that a tree line which hardly matters in June can shade a bed for most of a December day.

Taylor, I'm curious how it's going now that you've had a few more weeks of watching the light. Has any part of the yard surprised you?

Full disclosure: this is exactly the problem I've been building an app around. I'm a solo developer and it's called Heliodial. You hold your phone up and it draws today's sun path over the camera view, with the hours along it, so you can see whether the sun clears those trees or drops behind them. You can also enter a height, like a tree or a fence, and it shows how long the shadow is and which way it points, hour by hour and at noon for every month. It's no substitute for a year of observing, but it does let you peek at December in October.

If you (or anyone here planning beds or a food forest around big trees) would like to try it and tell me what's missing for this kind of planning, send me a purple moosage and I'll email you a free code. I'm still shaping it and would love to hear from people who actually do this.

Thanks for sharing this. Besides pollination, temperature seems to be the other big one: from what I've read, eggplant tends to drop flowers when nights get below roughly 15°C or days go above the low 30s. Sun hours matter too, 6-8 a day. I'm building an app that shows how many hours of direct sun a garden spot gets through the year, and afternoon shade turns out to be what people underestimate most. Did yours get full sun all day?