Bee Chronicles Jan 2011

The new year has arrived. It is cold and breezy. All my bees are asleep, or dead. How can I tell? What can I do? About what to do? This is the time of the year to be working on your equipment and wooden equipment. If you are working in a cool (cold) shop, work on your frames. Clean them and string new wire if that is your style. I don’t like to work with bees’ wax foundation when it is cool and brittle. You can always do the cool work and then bring them in the house to put the foundation in. My wife really likes it when I do bee work in the kitchen. Clean and grease your extractor as necessary. Check you mechanical decappers. Why do it now? If you need to order any parts now is the time to do that. Try to remember how busy it gets toward the middle of April.

Have you ordered your queens and replacement bees yet? The bee producers did not get caught up with the total demand last year. So, there are still many commercial operations that will be expanding (back logged replacements) this year. If you are planning to do splits order your queens for later delivery. The queen producers like to be able to spread out their deliveries.

About your “sleeping bees”. How do you check at this time of the year? On a very warm afternoon, the bees don’t have to be flying, place your ear on the side of the hive and rap it with a hammer. Don’t hit it hard enough to knock it over. A sharp rap is needed to excite the bees inside so they will buzz. Or maybe, come out and sting your face. Then you know they are really alive. If they have died in place you won’t know till next spring.

You need to check your hives for adequate food stores. You can use the tilt test. This is a very scientific procedure where you lift one corner of the hive and guess how heavy it is. If you have to grunt a little then one hive body is about 60-80 lbs. and a two hive body is 80-100 lbs. If it is so light that you lift and flip the entire hive over there is not much food. Feed as required. For in hive feeders pop the tops on the warmest, no breeze days, and work fast.

If you are thinking about splitting your hives or just having them as full of bees as possible, you can start feeding the hive in January or February. If you are just trying to fill the hive with honey use 2:1 sugar syrup. If you are trying to wake the queen up and start egg laying use a 1:1 sugar water thin syrup. I do this when the red maple tree starts to bloom the end of February. The bees will work on any warm day in between the cold days. They can move honey and make honey from syrup when it is too cold to fly.

Remember: No rest for the BEEKEEPER!

Let me know what you think. This concept might be considered extreme, hard to do, and take too many people and too much money. This is the ultimate concept, it can be done in bite size pieces. What happens if the GMREC is closed and disposed of on short notice and no one has thought about all the what ifs. I was a Boy Scout, better to “be prepared.