Bee Chronicle, Aug 2013

One more week to go in July. The Sourwood season has been strange. Oh, yeh! No one noticed!

I think we are headed for one of the longest sourwood seasons. “How can you say that?” Well, it is my letter for one. And secondly, no one has ever accused me of being right.

I started seeing sourwood bloom along road ways the first week of July. This is usually an early start for the Norhteast corner of Georgia. Maybe 2 weeks early. It is now the last week of July and I see trees in my immediate neighborhood that are just starting to open. Not necessarily too late. These blooms should last 3-4 weeks. There is no way to predict the amount of nectar in the blooms. We could have severe weather or extreme drought. How did this happen? Must be that global warming!

I have seen 3 weeks of sourwood nectar and I have seen 7 weeks. I have seen it start the end of June or the end of July. I have see excellent nectar flow with damp cool days and I have seen no nectar flow with the severe droughts. I have seen the last rain of June be the last rain until October. Go figure!

In the Clarksville GA area I here reports of no sourwood honey collection. Their blooming season coincided with the wonderful rainy season. Should we call this spring the monsoons? The bees could not get out and work the blossoms. If there was a break in the weather, there was no nectar because it had been knocked out of the blossoms by the pelting rain. Then the bad weather would set back in before the nectar could rise up in the flower again.

40 miles away in Blairsville GA the rain broke 3 weeks into the peak nectar flow and the bees went to work. My good hives all have 2 shallow honey supers full of sourwood honey. Sounds good…but! They won’t cap it. It is so humid out they cannot get the honey to evaporate down to 18% moisture. This will happen I just have to be patient. I still have sourwood blossoms just starting. So I have added a third super to all hives.

The rain and cool weather kept me from getting a full spring nectar flow. I got maybe 30%. Some hives maybe 50%. The difference is due to the populations in the hives. The cool weather retarded the queen’s egg laying (combined with a late start).

Now many of the slow hives are brim full of bees so they are working sourwood with normal large populations.

I am blessed in that I have a second sourwood location at 3,500 ft elevation. TOP SECRET! I have moved half my hives up there in anticipation of getting an extra long sourwood collection period. By leaving ½ my hives at home (elev. 2250-2750) those bees can keep working the local sourwood until it is finished. I hope the reduced number of hives will allow the remaining bees to put more honey in their own hives instead of spreading out among many hives. I don’t have absolute faith that the nectar flow will remain strong (here at home) even though there are young blooms. When the activity of the hive indicates the flow has ended here at the home place I hope there is still nectar flow higher in the mountains and I can move the remaining hives up to continue collecting sourwood.

This is way too much planning for a beekeeper! What exciting times!!

If you are in an area where the main nectar flow has ceased you need to pull your honey supers and extract the honey. If the bees can not collect honey, due to weather or drought, they will eat the already collected and stored honey. The bees think that is what stored honey is for. Foolish girls! This has already happened to some beekeepers.

A TRICK OF THE TRADE

If you can’t get your honey capped, it is good to learn what a full super frame looks like vs. one that is still being worked. There should not be a lot of bees just hanging out on a filled open frame unless they are making capping wax.

A full frame has the cells filled to a uniform depth with honey. The entire frame is uniformly filled (corner to corner). Sometimes you can see some of the cell wall near the upper center of the frame are thicker. This is where the bees have started pulling the caps but stopped because they could not get the honey dehydrated. Add more supers so the bees will continue collecting nectar as available.

The bees will cap the honey when they can. They will use stored honey to make the wax, so you will notice a small decrease in the amount of stored honey. The bees will normally use partially dehydrated honey (green honey) to make the wax. That is why you want to encourage them to continue to forage instead of using up lots of ripe honey for the wax.

Bottom supering the empty super may help discourage the bees from robbing their own honey.

Bees will rob a capped frame from the bottom up. Opposite from filling the frame from the top down.

If you check your super and you see a generally straight line across the entire frame with the bottom open and the top capped the bees are opening the ripe honey and eating it. This honey is okay to extract before you loose the entire frame.

When bees fill a frame they usually start at the top center. When the center honey is ripe they start to cap it while they are still filling the bottom and ends of the frame. This creates a generally “V” shaped pattern to the capped honey vs. the more or less straight line across a frame being opened.

Any time you extracting open honey it is good to let it sit in a room with a dehumidifier. Your AC will only draw the moisture down to 40%. You want to get the room down to 18% for 3 days, then your honey is probably okay. You can double check with a “hygrometer”.

Keep your queens laying. Now is the time to keep your queens laying eggs at their optimum rate. Now until Thanksgiving will create the youngest, strongest worker bees to winter over and start next spring with a rush. The reduction in nectar flow associated with the early fall dry spell will slow the queen down. When the fall rains come in October there won’t be any nectar or pollen to restimulate her. The hive population will dwindle giving you a weaker colony to overwinter. Keep pushing her with sugar syrup. The bees will mix the cane sugar syrup with the nectar they collect along with the pollen creating a more vitamin/mineral balance food. Starting syrup after all the blooms are gone will create a deficient stored food.

Along this line of keeping the largest young population going into winter, the technique of fall requeening warrants looking at. It is difficult for the hobbiest to know whether to requeen in the spring and order early or carry the 9 month old queen the second summer. The way queens die unpredictably today you need to be prepared to requeen every year. But if you don’t order your queens in January, you may not be able to get one until June. Well, you just missed the spring honey flow.

If you requeen in the fall the young queen can ramp up her egg laying and get her hormones flowing. Come next spring she will start laying eggs at the 2 year old rate instead of the new queen rate. This gives you a faster build up. Yes, there is always the chance she and the colony will not winter over. That becomes a test of your beekeeping skills.

The botany lesson for today is: Yellow pollen (corn), Orange pollen (butterfly weed), Milk weed, red and white clover. These are all good pollens for late summer brooding. If your neighbor hood (countryside) is short on abundant pollen and nectar sources during these in between periods, plant some. As you walk the dog along the county road, sprinkle mixed clover seeds. Be sure they are coated with inoculants or they won’t grow. The county will keep the grass short enhancing the clover blossoms. Orange butterfly weed is a native milk weed family. It propagates by seed very easily. It has a deep tap root making hard to transplant from the wild. You can buy the plants in many nursery catalogues. Common milk weed will be covered by bees when in bloom. Pick the seed pods in the fall and spread them around the neighbor hood. Common milk weed will spread itself by root runners. Make use of all the neglected weed patches within 2 miles of your bees by improving the quality of the weeds.

As soon as you are done collecting honey, treat for varroa mites and Nosema. These are our two biggest problems today. Don’t kid yourself. Hit ‘em early and hit ‘em often. Survive the winter.