Bee Chronicles Sep 2012

September is arriving and all the missed summer rain is here. It will be interesting to see the September weather pattern. We should have sunny days with afternoon thundershowers 2-3 times a week. Goldenrod, asters, joe pie weed, and ironweed should be our main sources of nectar and pollen. This is good winter food for your bees.

The way this squirrelly year went you may have some serious management decisions to make about your bees. With the early bloom season (6 wks ahead of schedule) coupled with the dryness all year long your hives may not have enough food right now. This dryness is relative. It is not a question of rain, but a situation where when the blooms were on the plants there was little to no nectar. This is supported by beekeepers only collecting about 1/3 of the honey they should have.

Couple this low food collection with the bees doing very well and you have a lack of stored food in the hives. A typical hive requires about 90 lbs of food for the winter. If you can lift the hive body without grunting, you do not have 90 lbs. Typically if you are a one hive body beekeeper, you will want a honey super nearly full on top of that hive body. It doesn’t really matter if it is a medium or shallow super, it is extra honey to help get to the 90 lbs. The hive body currently has a large area in the middle called the brood chamber. There should not be any honey mixed in with the brood yet. That happens when the queen slows down on egg laying. You need somewhere for the bees to be putting that honey, hence the honey super.

You want you queens to still be laying eggs at max capacity. The young bees born at the end of the season will be the ones that survive until next spring. I like to see a football sized pattern of brood in the hive Thanksgiving weekend. It will take a lot of honey and pollen to keep that much larvae coming on through the fall. It becomes incumbent on the beekeeper to trick the queen into thinking there is a nectar flow and associated pollen so she will keep laying eggs. Whenever there is a slow down in nectar and pollen collection the queen will slow egg laying to match the incoming food for the larvae brood.

When you see the layer of bees resting on the front of the hive it is fun to admire how well us beekeepers have done to create that many bees. Success can back fire. Bees and brood need to eat. If they are on the hive they are not foraging. The scout bees have not found enough to alert the foragers to go to work. To save energy they hang out on the front porch. Sounds like mountain folks on a nice Sunday afternoon. The food inside the hive is consumed by the brood. The queen is slowing down on egg laying. If there is a decent fall nectar flow, the queen may not resume “full” egg laying capacity. Some of the foragers died of old age on the front porch. There will be a net loss of food replacement in the hive, causing the colony to go into winter short of food. You may not notice this situation until mid October when it is too late to rely on nectar flow for replacing a large quantity of food stores.

All through the summer the varroa mite population has been increasing. When honey bee egg laying decreases the varroa mite population continues to increase at between 3-5 times faster than the honey bee population birth rate. If you have 3-5 mites born on every honey bee, it won’t take long for the mites to overpower the bees making them weak and unable to collect enough winter food stores. If your colony doesn’t collapse this fall or early winter it will in the spring. Now is the time to put “Integrated Pest Management” into practice. This is just a technique to analyze your mite population to see how bad it is. Then you can make the decision, which can span the range of doing nothing to using strong chemical, to try and save the colony. In between you can use soft chemical or even the powdered sugar trick to reduce the mites. Using solid or screened bottom boards may have some impact on how you attack the mites.

Do you want to feed your honey bees? This becomes a management decision. What do I feed them? Wet or dry feed, or pollen substitute, another management decision. I think there are more management decisions required in the fall than any other time of the year. You are making fall decisions and spring time decisions.

I say feed your bees in the spring, in the fall. The food needs to be in the hive so you do not have to feed in the spring. During early spring when you are trying to feed the cold days may prevent the bees from breaking the cluster and moving the food (dry or syrup) from the feeder to the brood area where the cluster is. This can result in near starvation when you must use “starvation emergency” feeding techniques or actual starvation where you loose the colony. Neither of these are a desirable result. You want to go into the winter (after Thanksgiving) with fat and healthy bees. I can’t tell the difference either, so I do all the things I have learned to tip the scale in my favor helping the bees.

I think the bees live higher up in the hive if there is a screened bottom board. This reduces the amount of food stored above the cluster area. Bees have a tendency to move up throughout the winter, moving onto new food. If they live higher up, there will be less food above. To counter this you can place your extra food honey super below the hive body. If you are a double hive body operation make sure there is enough nectar brought in to fill the top where the bees live and the bottom. This is a lot of syrup. The bees will move syrup up to the cluster in the early winter slowing the movement up of the whole cluster. This technique might not work as most all things we do in the hive are iffy.

Do you want to combine two weak hives and sacrifice one queen so you do not have to struggle keeping them both alive? A weak colony may not have much of a chance to survive a hard winter. We won’t know if it is a hard winter until too late. A combined strong hive has a better chance. It is cheaper to buy one queen than two nucs. The stronger hive has a better chance of collection adequate winter food this time of the year instead of waiting longer to make the decision. This time of the year another of your hives may need fall requeening so you can use the queen instead of killing her. Or maybe you can sell her to your neighbor that needs a fall queen.

There are enough opinions on these management techniques for everyone to choose a way to keep bees that they are happy with. This tells me that you can do your management about anyway you want and your bees might survive. The good beekeeper is the one that doesn’t kill his or her bees too often. The important thing is to analyze your individual situation and make a reasonable decision on what to do. Ignoring the bees or not understanding what is going on is just asking for a dead colony. That will cost you $150 for a new nuc next spring. All management techniques are cheaper per hive.

Attached to this article is my writings on Bees and Bears. I am republishing it because this will be a bad bear year and it will start early. Like maybe last June. The spring berry crop was dehydrated and slim. The late frost killed some wild berries. The bears have been living on grubs and lost children all summer. They are hungry and want to put on 100 lbs. this fall. The more successful you are as a bee keeper the larger the brood area in your hive. The bear can tell a “good” brood chamber from a weak one. Sometimes they don’t bother the weak hive. Well, not on the first two visits. Make sure you electric fences are working well and the dog is out and barking.