Bee Chronicles Oct 2012

It is Labor Day 2 September. I need to write this down before I forget it.

I just lost my first swarm in 17 years of beekeeping. Is that a day to remember? Can you beat the “Busy Bees”? Saturday, 31 August, I noticed abnormal (too much) activity around 2 hives that I keep on a trailer of 8 hives year around. I could not stop doing what I was doing and it was getting late in the evening. My wife gets crabby when I am late to dinner. She does not understand farming. Hey, I am a good bee keeper. I will be busy tomorrow (Sunday) out of town. Monday is a holiday, I can check on the hives then. They are single hive bodies with honey supers. The bees have not been filling the honey supers very rapidly. I am feeding 1:1 sugar syrup, but not regularly. I let the syrup feeders run out and then fill them maybe once a week. Both hives have nice populations of bees with about 2 inches of bees, one layer deep covering the porch and 1 inch up the front of the hive on a hot humid day. I have time!

Well, Sunday while I was out of town, my wife call (about 3:30 PM) to tell me there is a swarm forming down by the garden. I am two hours away and busy. I hurry, get done with my work and head home. It is raining of and on most of the way. Three hours later I get home and they are gone. The swarm got sprinkled on and didn’t waste any time finding a new home.

What do I do now? I am done with my fall requeening. If I order one queen it will be expensive mail. I have already lost some of my new queens. One seems to have vaporized after getting out of the cage. One swarmed the day she got out of the cage. It is getting late in the year here in the North Georgia Mountains. I am going to try and let the hive progress naturally.

One beekeeper told me that she never interferes with supercession. I don’t know her philosophy on swarming. Be she says the bees know best. Okay, I can live with that, but! This is late in the year. Drone population is declining. Will a new queen get mated well? I am going to see what happens. There are good brood and young nurse bees in the hive. It can wait awhile. Maybe even a couple of weeks as I watch and see what happen. I will need 20-25 days to see if I get a mated queen. Around the first of October (a month) I can combine this hive with another hive if I need to. This hive will not be in any worse shape later as long as there is not an additional swarm from it led by one of the new queens. So I will look inside and reduce the queen cells now. I won’t put this off because it is a holiday and I want to recreate.

What else is happening in the hive in September? This is really a watching month. Your bees are busy in the goldenrod, asters, and fall clematis.

You DO need to monitor for fall swarming. For swarm management I like to level by hive populations. There are several ways to do this. Sometimes I like to swap hive locations. Move a strong hive to the weak hive location and vice versa. Do this during the heat of the day and the foragers will all change hives. This can stimulate a slow laying queen to perk up. This creates lots of young bees to last through the winter. You can swap frames removing brood frames with nurse bees from the strong hive and inserting them in place of honey frames in the weak hive. I spray the nurse bees and the receiving hive frames with sugar water to discourage fighting. Another trick: is to put a honey super on a strong hive. Spray the frames with sugar water to attract bees. Then remove the honey super and place it on the weak hive. When you remove the honey super I place a telescoping lid on the top and bottom to contain the bees during movement. On the receiving hive I place one layer of newspaper on the hive body top bars. Punch a few slits in the paper with your hive tool for air and scent circulation. Then place the honey super on top of the paper. Be sure to remove the top cover from the bottom of the honey super. Place that telescoping cover and the inner cover back to the strong hive where you removed the honey super.

Be practicing your tilt test. Get used to the feel of a hive body getting full of honey. This way you can tell when the hive body is running out of food next spring. The tilt test is a very scientific procedure. You have to have calibrated finger. Just step around behind the hive and lift it by one corner. Be carful! If you are Hercules you might just flip the hive forward off the stand. Just lift enough to get a feel for how heavy it is.

Feeding your bees is a management decision you must make based on how your last nectar flow was and how long ago it has been. The bees can eat a hive empty before winter ever starts. Should you feed pollen patties? Another management decision. I don’t know. But can it hurt? I think anything that helps reduce work load and stress in the hive can not be bad. However, any help we give our bees can cause some other reaction. If we are trying to raise “natural” bees, ones that live with no help from humans, we are hurting that effort. Pollen patties are good places for hive beetles to lay eggs. So you wind up raising hive beetles. Wax moths like pollen. Fall is a peak period for wax moth population.

Varroa mite treatment may be called for. Have you sampled your hives and taken appropriate action to reduce the mites before the bee population starts to decline in the colony?

Do you need to do Tracheomites treatments? I don’t. This is one area I want bees that cannot handle tracheomites to die. If you have Mediterranean type honey bees they might be to susceptible to tracheomites and you have to do something.

Do you treat for Nosema? I don’t. I think big fat healthy bees can resist it to some degree. Big fat healthy bees come from good genetics, good complete diets, and reduced varroa mites.

EFB and AFB: I monitor for but do not treat propholacticly. That means treating them before the disease is found. There is some evidence that the AFB/EFB are becoming resistant to Terramycin and Tylan is expensive. Incidents of the diseases seem to be few. If you have it in your area, Treat. If not wait and react to it.

Care and observation become more important the more you do to “help” your bees.

What you do want to do is have your hives go into the end of fall (that is honey bee fall, November) with large healthy populations, well stocked with food (honey and pollen). This will help them make it through the winter.