The books / Pests, Predators and Robbing / chapter 14 of 14
Leaving them alone
All chapters
- The dangerous weeks
- What a dearth looks like from the hive
- How robbing starts
- The beekeeper rings the bell
- Recognising it
- The entrance reducer
- The robbing screen
- When it is already bad
- Wasps through the year
- Strong colonies repel, weak ones fall
- The trap that works is the spring one
- Mice in October
- Bears
- Leaving them alone
Everything else in this book is about doing something: reducing an entrance, hanging a screen, checking a mouse guard. This last chapter is about doing less.
During the dearth, and especially once robbing has started nearby, every minute a hive sits open with its scent in the air is a minute of invitation, and a routine inspection that could easily wait a week is not worth the risk it creates.
The instinct to open a hive and see what is going on is strong, especially when you are worried, but a beekeeper who leaves a nervous colony sealed and reduced for a week during the worst of the dearth usually does better than one who keeps checking on it.