Bee Chronicles August 2012

Whew! What a rollercoaster spring?

July is coming to a close, as is the main honey collection period for Northeast Georgia. Once the sourwood stops most local beekeepers shift gears to honey processing and preparing the hives for fall and winter.

I understand that most beekeepers process honey as needed through out the nectar flow. Sometimes you have customers, or relatives who just need that new honey NOW! Sometimes you need the honey supers cleaned out so you can put them back on the hives. Now, with the end of the large nectar flows you can concentrate on slinging out the last frames, cap off the bottling, clean up, and store that set of equipment.

Some of the mountain beekeepers, and flatlanders who are in the know, move their bees to higher altitudes after their local sourwood ends. This year most of the sourwood in the elevations up to 2500 feet was touched by the mid April frost. Personnally, I was surprised. I thought the sourwood was not budding out far enough to be affected. Locally, around the north Georgia region, the trees were affected to different degrees, but all were damaged somehow. I had virtually no sourwood. That was after no tulip poplar. I was severely reduced on honey collection. Two miles around the corner in Union County, a beekeeper was reporting normal sourwood. Over in Clayton, GA, they were reporting early blossom drop (maybe 2 weeks of sourwood). Around Clarksville, GA the tops of the trees were blossomless. Cleveland, GA. and Jasper, GA. seems to have been fairly normal. This irregularity is just one of the challenges that mountain beekeepers face.

To help mitigate my loss of honey I moved some of my hives to 3200 feet where the sourwood nectar flow was starting around the 15th of July. This should have been the start of the normal lowland sourwood season. But in 2012 the entire spring was move forward 6 weeks. The principal of move the hives up hill works during any nectar flow that you want to extend your specific varietal collection. The uphill climate is generally cooler and comes a little later than the lower lands. You might more your hives three times if you had a specific type of honey you are trying to collect. It is good to know beekeepers in different areas. This is an excellent result of belonging to the Georgia Beekeepers Association.

As you remove the honey supers from the colonies you will notice a large number of bees that have trouble getting into the hive in the evening. You have just reduced the interior space of the colony. Before the bees put up excess honey for us in the honey super, they fill the brood area brim full. The queen is also vying for the brood space to lay eggs. As a good beekeeper, you have just created the perfect situation to encourage swarming. The hive is full of food, full of brood, crowded, and there is no work for the foragers. The queen makes the decision to stop laying eggs due to lack of space. As soon as she can fly (less than 10 days) the swarm is gone.

While you are finalizing honey processing in the honey house (or garage) you have to do population management in the apiary to avoid swarming. This is the queen you want next year. The fastest thing you can do is put an empty honey super on the hive to give the foragers something to do. My goldenrod is starting to bloom (20 July). This makes excellent fall food (pollen and nectar). The fall asters will bloom soon. Next will be the Joe Pie weed and Ironweed. These are excellent sources of fall honey. I leave this honey in my hives for winter food. Remember, this year the goldenrod is a month early. Be prepared for a dirth in September. If you are marketing medicinal honey, you might want to bottle some of the “goldenrod” honey as a fall hay fever allergy remedy. No one is allergic to goldenrod. They are allergic to ragweed which blooms at the same time. Most people can’t tell the two plants apart. If you do remove some of the fall honey from the hive, you need to make allowances for the loss of winter food. That means prepare to feed syrup while the bees are still very active in August and September.

Another game to play with your bees to stop swarming is to draw foundation into comb to be used as replacement frames for those that you are cycling out of the brood chamber and honey supers. You should cycle you comb out of the hive between year 3 and 5. The wax accumulates all the ambient pollution in the air. This can cause damage to the young larvae. Dark wax will cause honey to darken, so you want to keep pretty light colored wax in your supers. To accelerate wax production, I feed my bees sugar syrup because there just isn’t enough nectar to draw large quantities of wax. The bees are so regimented that they will use winter stores of honey to make the wax reducing their winter food supply. I think the syrup goes into wax before stored honey. This leaves the best nutritional food (real nectar honey) for the winter food.

Something else to consider under swarm management is to make fall splits. Chances are you will have winter die off to some degree. Use the extra bees at the end of July to make new hives to winter over. This way you will not (maybe) have to buy so many packages next spring. I like to pull of my current queen and five frames of mixed food and brood. It is very disturbing for the bees to go queenless. I want the new weaker hive to have the most advantage. After a few days I will introduce a new queen into the old hive. This is just fall requeening. Make sure there are plenty of worker bees in the new split. They have to pull 5 frames of brood comb and put up food. I feed syrup and brood builder patties since there is a shortage of pollen. If all the stars and planets line up correctly the hive will grow fast because the queen was already up to speed laying eggs. You might get a brood box full and a little in a honey super to winter the bees over.

Fall requeening is a good thing to think about. Usually there are queens available in early August. If that queen can get settled in and start laying eggs, she will start out laying more eggs next spring that a new spring queen. You do have the consideration of “will the hive over winter”? That is a concern whether you have bought a new queen or not. I want my hives to get the best earliest start possible in the spring.

If I do fall/winter feeding I want to avoid pure sugar water. I don’t think high fructose corn syrup is a good idea either. So what are my options? First I mix Honey Bee Healthy with my syrup. It has minerals, vitamins, and a floral smell which mimics nectar. This is better than nothing. Then I feed like crazy during the goldenrod season so the bees will mix the nectar and the syrup as they make and store honey. There also will be natural pollen mixed with the honey as it is stored. I believe this makes a better food next spring than straight syrup. You have to do your spring feeding in the fall. Let the bees put it up in storage. If you have to feed next spring I consider it an emergency situation. The weather can hinder the bees going to syrup feeders in the spring. Then the straight sugar water isn’t as healthy as ”real” honey.

Fat bees are healthy bees! I can’t see which ones are fat either. However, folks I consider experts say they can. Does it matter. We want to create the healthiest bee we can. I like Dadants Hybrid patty to fatten my bees. The basic recipe was developed by a very large commercial bee keeper that would let his bees rest between pollination contracts. During their rest the bees were fed “Florida Patties” while they collected nectar. The bee keeper felt incidents of disease went down, resistance to mites went up, and those mystical pathogens we all fear had less affect on the bees. I’ll try anything if it will keep me away from harsh chemicals in the hive.

The last important thing (or should it have been first) is implement your varroa mite control program. Us sideliners don’t like to think we are caught up in scientific bee keeping. This is just a hobby. We all practice “Integrated Pest Management” whether we know it or not. We look at our bees and try to guess if the mite population is too high. Are there signs of deformed wings? Can I see the mites on the bees? Maybe we do some kind of a “roll” or sticky test just so we won’t be embarrassed when someone asks us why our bees died. Perhaps our friends intimidate us into using the newest natural chemical. Do you know that arsenic is natural? I think the idea is to analyze our individual hives and treat as necessary on an individual basis.

First use the strongest bee stock (population and race) you can get. These may not be fancy bees. They may come from down the road but they don’t die easily. Make sure you have a lot of bees in the hive. If you have two small hives, combine them and sacrifice a queen. Otherwise you might loose both hives. If you want to help your bees with might control because you are not comfortable just hoping they have some natural resistance try sprinkling them with powdered sugar. This is natural (kind of) and it is not arsenic. It does not take a lot of powdered sugar (maybe ½ cup per layer of topbars). Dust the topbars, then brush it into the slots letting it fall down on the bees. The bees will start cleaning them selves and knock the mites off each other. Some say the mites can’t hang on when sugared. Does it matter as long as the fall off. Do this 4 consecutive weeks. Then do it again in the spring. As your bees die off naturally in the winter the mites density per bee goes up. Then in the spring (if your colony survived) when the queen starts laying eggs again, all the mites in the hive will try to get into the few larvae when they hit that 6 day point. Hence, the first bees born are all mite deformed. As more larvae become available for the mites to breed on the incidents of deformity go down. Try to save that first batch of baby bees by eliminating the mites in the fall. Your bees will survive better through the winter.

Remember, if your bees are flying in the winter and there is no nectar or pollen, they will come home and consume extra food. These early warm spells is where the food goes which causes spring starvation. Make sure your bees have stored up that margin of extra food before winter.