Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey lost his Valley Apiary in North Wales to flooding from Storm Dennis. His hives sit on a floodplain that floods 6-8 inches regularly. He stacks plastic pallets under wooden ones to keep hives above water and is considering moving some to higher ground.
Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to a very wet and soggy episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. So I moved all my hives over the weekend to a new apiary. This is our Valley Apiary, and it's living up to its name because there's a stream running pretty much right next to it, and as you can see, it's flooded. So all of the water's kind of been channeled down into this valley. Um, and it's flooded. But it just goes to show, we knew about this earlier in the year. Um, so if you kind of cast your minds back to the setting up an apiary video I did, this is the apiary that we were in. Um, we know that it's in a floodplain, we know that there's a stream running through it, we know that it floods, but it doesn't actually flood that bad. It's probably like 6 to 8 inches deep. That's the absolute worst of it. You can see where the water comes in. You can see it's got plenty of room to kind of Floods that way, it all kind of flows down into a river much, much further down the line. So I'm always pretty confident that it's not going to flood too bad here, but nonetheless it does flood pretty much every year, and there's not a huge amount I could do about it. It's a really, really nice apiary, hence why I kind of persist with it. Behind the camera there, I've got a line where the ground's built up quite about 2 or 3 meters above the land you see behind you, and that's absolutely fine. So potentially I might move a few of the hives kind of further up there later in the year. I'll take them away, let them reorientate for a few weeks, and then bring them back here. But it's just to kind of give you a heads up, these are the things that we experience in North Wales, and I'm sure that everyone's experiencing across the UK at the moment. Severe weather conditions, storms bringing down trees potentially landing on your hives. You've got to deal with floods. I know in Yorkshire and Sheffield in particular They've got really, really bad flooding. All of the rivers are breaking their banks, and it seems to be kind of becoming more and more frequent. So it's not a 1 in 10, 15, 20 year— it seems to be happening kind of once every 1 or 2 years. So we need to prepare for it. So what I'm going to do in this apiary, and you can see it on a couple of them there, I've doubled— I've doubled up the pallets. Um, I'm not going to build any specific stands to kind of take them up any further than that, but what I will do is I'll get hold of some secondhand used Plastic pallets, and I'll lay them down on the base, and then I'll go put a wooden pallet on top of that, and then another wooden pallet on top of that. So I've got three pallets stacked upon each other for each of my hive stands, and then the plastic should give me enough clearance so the wood never gets wet, and then it'll make the pallets last a lot longer, and I'll be safe from ever getting the hives flooded. So it's getting a bit windy here now. I just want to get out of the way of these trees, but I thought I'd do a very, very quick video just to kind of show you some of the issues that we're experiencing on a week by week basis here in North Wales in the winter. So thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.
