Bee Chronicles Nov 2013

Whew, what a fall?!!

The number one activity between now and Thanksgiving is to feed your bees if necessary. I would think it is necessary. In northeast Georgia the asters and goldenrod was not overly abundant in nectar. Having said that, some local bee keepers are reporting good nectar collection and some fall honey. Fall honey is good for hay fever, for those allergic to ragweed.

Again, an example that beekeeping is not uniform for all people or close locations. You have to know and understand what your bees should be doing and what they are doing.

I was busy at the local fair for the past 10 days so my bees have been neglected. I gave them a cursory once over and fed them before the fair. I fed them as soon as I got home from the fair, but couldn’t look at them. Next came 5 cold (by southern standards) days. Nearly freezing or barely freezing at night. I am hoping for 60 plus degrees and no breeze this coming week. I will check my queens, check the amount of brood, and check the amount of honey. That will require pulling the hives apart.

What do I hope to see? Good things! I saw a frame (from another beekeeper) this past week with 5 queen cells on it. His queen was looking good and laying eggs. What was wrong? He inadvertently pulled the queen out of the hive with a frame he put in a demonstration hive. No problem, except the left behind bees thought the queen died and made queen cells to fix the problem.

Okay, what to do to fix it and what could be worse? The fix is easy, kill the queen cells and put the queen back in the hive. Make sure all queen cells are killed. Don’t try to keep these new queens, more on that next. If these queens are allowed to develop there will be no drones for them to mate with. The drones all disappear around here starting in mid-September. You would probably not notice the virgin queen in the hive until next March when she should be laying eggs. You will either get no eggs or only drone eggs. The worker bees will keep chugging along happily putting up honey as it is their normal late fall job. Normally the queen would slow down on egg laying until she stops in November. Hence, the worker bees may not notice that she is still a virgin. It takes a trained beekeepers eye to tell a virgin queen from a young small mated queen. After she has been laying eggs for a while she will have that mature easy to recognize look. A similar situation could happen in any hive that the queen dies or is superceeded too late in the year. You would then just order a new queen next spring.

Monitor your hive populations for any reason that the population starts shrinking too small to create a good cluster on the coldest days. You are better served by combining a weak hive with another hive than loose the complete hive. When you combine hives, kill the less desirable queen. This is a judgment call, but usually it will be the queen in the weak hive, even if she is the youngest queen. Obviously, she isn’t doing something correctly. Next spring we would like to think this will be a “good” hive which will allow you to buy a new queen and divide it back into two hives for next year.

I like to see brood in my hives Thanksgiving weekend. Maybe it is 2-4 patches the size of my entire hand, but it is still brood. These young bees will be the hard workers next spring. It is not “bad” if there is no brood. But, you want to see lots of worker bees no matter what the brood situation. Your winter cluster should be the size of a basketball or larger. Not a soccer ball. A soccer ball is what you want to see the end of February when the hive is starting to wake up. Anything smaller than this will make for a slow spring population build up. Hives have been known to survive with very small clusters, but don’t bet on it.

I started my spring feeding early in August. I was not satisfied with the volume of stored honey in the hive. Part of this was that the queens were still laying eggs vigorously. In the drier fall there can be a shortage of nectar. So, I started feeding to keep the queen from slowing down to match the weaker nectar flow. You have to be careful not too feed too much syrup too frequently. With lots of worker bees, they can put up honey faster than the queen can lay eggs. The storage bees will put the excess honey in the clean cells where the queen was going to lay an egg. Then the queen stops laying eggs because there is no place for them. Next, the queen might decide to swarm because the hive is full of food. Well, it is really not full, but the center of the living quarters is. To manage around this I withhold syrup for 3 days on the short end or as long as it takes to empty the feeder on the long end. If the bees empty the feeder in 6 hours, I won’t feed for 3 days. They will forage for what they can get to keep the nectar flow coming in. If it takes a week or more to empty the feeder, I will not feed for the week or more to match. I also use field feeder, especially if I am not using hive feeders. This keeps the forager bees happy and working. It does not seem to over fill the honey stores in the hive because it takes longer to bring that syrup into the hive. The bees also will not work the field feeder in bad weather or at night which also slows down incoming syrup.

My syrup is not overly scientific. Some place between 1-1 and 3-1 with Honeybee Healthy added to more closely simulate nectar. Hopefully this will be nutritionally better????? I am trying to get carbohydrates into the hive so the more sugar the better.

I will periodically put a small feed patty in the hive. This food is consumed immediately and not stored. I do not want hive beetles to use it as a brooding area so it has to be consumed with in 5 days. This is just a trick to try and keep the queen laying longer and more profusely. I cannot attest to a level of success.

For the past 5 years I have been a fairly organic beekeeper, trying to achieve results with the least amount of interference into the natural processes in the hive. I used powdered sugar as my mite control treatment. I think it worked on the mite population. HOWEVER, I have suffered nearly 100% die off every winter. This year I have stepped back a little. I treated with Apiguard for mites. Some old beekeeper thought it would be a better idea than maybe loosing my bees. Some middle aged beekeeper used Apiguard and liked it. I realize I need to try other options or get another job to pay for the new bees. I used the Apiguard late August. I experienced some mortality in brood. Mostly the really small stuff. I think my queens slowed or stopped egg laying. I think most of the hives had started to recover by mid September. It will be interesting to see what they all look like this next week (28 Sep).

I don’t treat for foul brood. If I did treat as a prophylactic ( a treatment used before the disease hits) measure I would do it in the spring.

I thought about treating for Nosema ceranea, but have heard too many stories. One, N. ceranea is bad, if your bees get it they are dead and nothing will work. Two, Fumigilan B will help the bees if they get N. ceranea. Three, Fumigilan B will make the N. ceranea more virilant. Four, our bees all test positive for N. ceranea and they are working just fine. Does anyone want to buy a large bottle of Fumigilan B?

Monitor your hives to keep them full of honey. If we have a cold long winter they can not be fed easily or well under emergency conditions. The bees will put up honey as long as it is 50 degrees or above. If it gets too cool they won’t convert syrup to honey. Under emergency conditions, a moist sugar patty works well. Fondant is excellent. Powdered sugar or granulated sugar made into a paste with water will work. You can also use vegetable oil as your moisture. The patty will hold together well but the bee is not getting as much H2O. Vegetable paste patties make good traceo mite treatments. If you open a hive that is starving, dust the bees with powdered sugar while you run and get another food. If you can steal a honey frame from a better hive, scratch the caps and stick it right in the middle of the starving bees.

Seems like late fall is not a time to worry about hive beetles. They seem to have run their life cycle course and are leaving the hives. Treat the ground around your hives to keep the beetle larvae from emerging next spring. Starguard is one treatment. Salt the ground is another. The salt will desiccate the larvae. It also kills the grass so you don’t have to weed eat. It also provides a salt source for the bees who need it to make the enzymes use to make honey.

In your stored frames (both brood and honey) you need to fight wax moths. Now that it is starting to freeze you won’t have the moths until next spring. Before now, you should have either stacked the boxes alternating crossed or used Paramoth to keep them out. Don’t worry the bees will like the new foundation you put in the frames next spring. I call this the forced rotation program.

Mice are cute, even in the hive or stored boxes. Use entrance reducers on the hives and mice bait round your stored equipment. Don’t create extra work for yourself just for the fun of it.

Happy Thanksgiving

Glen