Bee Chronicles Oct 2011

It is the 15^th of September. The honey is all gathered. My main thoughts now are to get the bees ready for winter. But,Whoa there nelly!! An interesting situation. You really do not have to worry about your bees for the winter, You need to worry about them for the spring. But, that worrying needs to start now.

If you can get your bees ready for spring now, you will not have to worry about them through out the winter. Right now you have many bees in the hive. They can do a lot of work. Most of them will die over the winter so maximize their ability now.

The varroa mite population is spread over 30-60 thousand bees. As the bees die the mites will become concentrated on fewer bees, causing more ill affects to those bees. Especially young bees as more adult varroa enter each cell to parasitize the larvae. The bees will hatch out weak and deformed. The most obvious body damage will be crinkle wing. Small deformed wings. The weakened bee might do some house chore duties but cannot fly and will die early. Use you favorite mite control technique. This could be do nothing and monitor mite populations. It could be the powdered sugar dusting method. If you are related to a pesticide control company, you might want to use chemical.

A good strong queen should still be laying a goodly number of eggs. If possible you might fall requeen a weak queen. You might not be able to get a queen, so you might go ahead and kill the weak queen now, and combine the currently healthy bees with another mediocre hive. This gives you a stronger working hive going into winter and it might survive till spring. You are going to replace the queen anyways so you loose nothing. The stronger hive might do real well next spring when you can divide it and add the new queen. This recreates the hive you lost.

You want to make sure your hive have about 90 pounds of stored honey and pollen. It is a guess. Can you easily lift the hive body? If so it is not 90 lbs. Do you need 90 lbs or 130? You won’t know until spring comes late next year and you think maybe you should have put up a hive body and a honey super for winter stores. I go with more now, hopefully less feeding in the spring. If your bees have lots of fall flowers you may not need to feed now.

How can you ensure the health of your bees in the fall? Feed, mite control, and lots of bees. So the hive is heavy and the mites are under control. To help go into winter with healthier bees, go for fat. I like Florida patties from Dadant (Florida office). I have heard you can see the fatter bees. I must need better glasses. The bees do contract diseases less easily. You might do a fumigilianB treatment for nozema. A test was done in Florida with bees on Florida patties and they would not contract nozema cerana (the new bee killer). You might want to treat for foul brood with terramiacin and powdered sugar. Well kept bees don’t seem to be getting foul brood like the used to. That may be luck. However, the foul brood could become terramiacin resistant. The new talk is to wait until you get foul brood and then treat quickly and heavily. If the bees survive, good! If you can’t clean the hive up then destroy it. There are bee keepers currently doing nothing to there hives except being diligent, raising tougher survivor bees, and hoping a lot. They have the same success ratios as keepers who spend money on treatments.

Large hive populations are essential now. Population leveling is essential. There are many ways to move bees from one colony to another. They all work. You are wasting effort trying to keep a small hive alive. It will die next February. All hives loose their older bees throughout the winter. If you start with a small population it just doesn’t work. If you are adventuresome and cheap, you can try to keep a double queen colony through the winter and them separate it next spring. Combine 2 hive bodies with separate colonies one on top the other. Place two queen excluders between them. In theory the 2 queen scents combine and become the scent of the colony. There are instances when 2 laying queen have been found in a large colony.