Bee Chronicles Jan 2013

Stalwart Bee Keepers,

Now is the time to man the bastions and gird ourselves for the onslaught of the unknown.

My prognostication will be that this winter will be similar to last year. Too warm, too early, and then too long. That will probably goof up the blossoms schedule for next spring and summer.

I observed the witch hazel blooming nearly 6 weeks too early. Others have seen forsythia blooming now, 10 weeks too early. Native flame azaleas have been observed blooming now, 10 to 12 weeks early. Will we go into a cold snap that will put things back on schedule? The stock market does not think so. What better predictor of our bees than that. The price of natural gas futures for heating and electric generation is going down in anticipation of a warm winter.

I have lost 17 of my 30 hives since early August 2012. The remaining 13 has one weak one, one I thought was a goner which is recovering and 6 with brood. Only three of my hives had brood in them at Thanksgiving. Wonderful, the queens are laying early.

Remember, we live in the North Georgia mountains. Cold snaps can happen.

The impact of brood too early is earlier starvation. A dormant colony will keep the brood area (center of the cluster) about 70-72 degrees. Once the queen starts laying eggs the nurse bees will try to keep the temperature about 92-95 degrees. This energy output requires significantly more carbohydrate food stores (honey). What are the food stores situation in your hives? The tilt test will give you a rough idea, BUT, one warm week will consume a lot of honey. Be prepared to supplement with syrup feeders.

If you loose track of your food situation for even ½ of a week during wild temperature swings your colony could die. The situation will develop where there are food stores at the outer edges of the frame but the cluster does not warm up enough to expand to that size and feed. Hence, the cluster starves with honey 2 inches away. This forces you to implement emergency feeding procedures when there is honey in the hive. You have to get the food right into the cluster. This can be done with dry feeding sugar. I prefer home made powdered sugar, but store bought will work also, maybe. There is cornstarch in commercial powdered sugar that does the bees no good. In small doses it won’t kill your bees, BUT, why take the chance. Home made powdered sugar just means run some granulated sugar through the blender. The bees can take up the smaller particles without so much water to desolve it. Winter feed patties are also available from the catalogues. These are higher sugar content than pollen patties. One step up from the most dire emergency food is fondant. This is powdered sugar frosting. You can buy it or make it. The best advantage here is that there is moisture in the food which the bees need. They can get the moisture without leaving the hive and you don’t increase the moisture in the hive as much as if you used liquid sugar syrup. Place the emergency food on the top bars right above the cluster. Some times you may want to spray sugar syrup on the top bars and on the inner cover. Don’t get too much on the bees and chill them. Don’t soak the inner cover creating rain inside the hive. Plan on spraying several days in a row. Do it in the middle of the warmest days available .

Boy doesn’t that sound simple? But, have you forgotten the small hive beetles wintering in the center of you cluster? You have to reduce your hive beetle population as much as you can. They will lay eggs in your emergency food ruining it for the bees. They also eat some of it. Then to really make you happy, they will start eating the eggs and larvae as soon as your queen wakes up and starts laying eggs. This will put a major hurt on how fast you hive builds up. I think the secret to beetle traps is to have an attractant mixed with the oil. Apple cider vinegar seems to work. You will are to experiment and talk to all your friends. Change your technique and trap style until you find one that works. It seems like all traps do well for different people. That means there is a secret to the attractant and the location of the trap relative to the beetles in the hive. HOWEVER, you must get your beetles down under 20 per hive. The bees must be able to corral them at the periphery of the colony or you loose.

Many things seem to add up to survivor colonies. One, the bees are alive. Two, the bees are healthy. And three, there are lots of bees. Oh, yah, tell me something I didn’t know! Secret four, DON’T give the bees more frames than they can cover.

All the time I give my bees a box of frames and let them grow into it. That used to work. With the varroa mite, the mites stay in the brood chamber area where hygienic bees can deal with them. This is also the area we monitor for mites. How many are on drone brood.

A new factor is the hive beetle. All reports from the Southeast seem to be 2012 was a bad year for beetles like no one had seen before. Some beekeepers are still saying they aren’t so bad. Well they will probably say 2013 was a bad beetle year. Start fighting the beetles early and stay ahead of them using every trick you have ever heard of to break their life cycle. But for now get them out of the hive. On a warm day go into you hives and pull out the frames toward the outside that aren’t being covered with bees. This is empty space the beetles can hide in when they are being chased by the beetle guard platoon. If it is warm enough to break the cluster (the bees are moving all around inside the hive) pull out the empty center frames and move the outside frames with pollen and honey inward. If the outside frames are empty just remove them from the hive. A strong hive may not need frames removed. Or maybe just number 1 and 10 (8). A medium strong hive may need 4 or 5 frames removed. In a weak but surviving hive you may want to reduce to 3-4 remaining frames. Save the frames and reinsert them as the population starts to increase and food storage area is needed. There seems to be a correlation between a healthy hive and the amount of comb frames the population covers. It can be a small healthy colony that is ready to expand with the weather and food. A small colony on 10 frames does not seem to expand as well as a “crowded” colony. You can leave the 5 frame colony in a 10 frame box.

Is there any good news here? Yes, at the current temperatures the wax moths should not be bothering your stored comb. Keep an eye out for them as the frosty nights diminish.

When is it too cold to look in your hive? Look any time you want. Manipulating (moving around) frames is an entirely different story. If it is -45 degrees outside the hive, it will nearly be -45 degrees just out side the cluster. So if you pop the top and look at the location and size of the cluster you have done no harm. DO NOT, break the cluster. The inside the cluster will be about 70degrees. There fore, it needs to be above 70 to break it. If you open the hive on a day when the bees are not flying but they are scurrying all over the inside it is border line okay to pull some brood area frames to ascertain their status and possibly place honey and pollen frames in the center. If the ambient (outside) air temperature is around 60 degrees or less make sure there is no breeze.