Bee Chronicles May 2012

As mentioned before, beekeepers need to keep a journal. Remembering what happened in the bee yard may not be too hard. Remembering which year it was is harder. Remembering the exact symptoms and reactions in the hive is nearly impossible. But the journal allows you to flip back and refresh your memory.

In over 15 years of bee keeping I have only had one other spring that was early, but not this early and not as continuously warm, and not with such a mild winter before hand. So how did this combination of weather affect the bees so far, and what is happening in the hive, and what can I anticipate will happen.

The warm winter caused the surviving queens to start laying eggs in February. That is 4-6 weeks early for our mountain area. The first thing to worry about was the increased food requirements to raise the new brood. This could have caused good hives to starve to death. If we got through that problem, our hives will be large early and we have to start swarm management earlier than usual. Normally the hives are ready to swarm mid to late May, just as the blackberry and tulip poplar start to bloom. Well, look outside, We are about into full blackberry season and tulip poplar is about ready to open.

Swarm management dictates that if the hive has work that needs to be done, draw comb or put up food, there is still room to lay eggs, and the bee population is not too crowded they won’t swarm. 1. Put on a honey super, more room to store food. 2. Put brood or honey frames with foundation that needs pulling. 3. Take some bees off and put them into one your weaker hives. 4. If there are queen cells kill them, or I like to put the frames with the queen cells in a nuc box with a few other frames of brood and food and bees to make a new hive. Put brood frames with foundation in the strong hive to draw out new comb.

Level the population of your hives if you are interested in getting the most honey. There are several ways to do this. One is switch locations between the strong and weak hive letting the foragers from the strong hive go into the weak hive and vice versa. Two is to place an empty honey super on the strong hive. In 24 hrs. take it off with all the bees in it and place it on the weak hive. Separate the two groups of bees with one sheet of newspaper, with small slits in it to keep the bees from fighting until the queen pheromone mixes in the honey super. The bees will eat the newspaper in 2-3 days mixing themselves up. A Third way is pull some frames out of the strong hive with brood and nurse bees. Spray the frame with sugar water to calm the bees and give them something to do. Spray the bees in the gaining give with syrup to dampen their smell and give them something to do. Maybe they won’t notice the new bees until they are all friends from cleaning up the mess you made with the syrup.

Check your hives weekly. Queens hatch out in 16 days. If you check every two weeks you will miss a queen cell and have a supersession. Is that Bad??? Maybe not. The bees know best when to supercede. But you can check the quality of your queen. Is she laying too many drone cells? Is she ambitious, laying lots of eggs? If she is not doing right, you can kill her or take her out of the hive to stimulate the hive to make a new queen. I like to put the old queen in a nuc if she is laying good eggs just for back up insurance. The hive might not figure out about making a new queen and you need to put her back in to get some fresh eggs. Then I take her out again. Hey, I like playing with my bees. Just remember, the more you play with them the more disturbed they are and they have to get undisturbed and go back to work every time you mess with them.

Thirty days before I want to start collecting honey I do not mess with my bees except to look for queen cells and to ensure I have a queen laying. It is too late to worry about varroa mites during honey collection. You should have already knocked down the population of mites. The population of bees should be so large that you won’t notice the mite problems until fall. I take out the green drone frames and put in a pulled comb brood frame so the queen can lay a couple thousand more worker bees for nectar collection.

Do not split a hive or add an empty hive body within 45 days of honey collection. It will take so much energy to prepare the empty hive body that the bees will not collect any surplus honey for you. If you want more splits wait until honey season is over and then do it.

You will know your bees are ready for honey season when: in the evening on a one brood body hive there is one quart of bees hanging in a cluster on the landing board. On a 2 brood body hive there will be 2 quarts of bees. Literally, this is a large cluster of bees hanging onto each other and hanging down. They don’t want to go inside because it makes the hive too hot. The nectar flow keeps this hive from swarming. Once the nectar flow stops “Katie bar the door!” they are gone. So, between tulip poplar and sourwood you are back into swarm management and population leveling. There is not enough time to make a split but you can draw off frames for leveling or making nucs that will grow to 10 frame hives before winter.

May good beekeeping pay off for you this summer.