Bee Chronicles May 2014
I have been tracking the blooms for the past two months. What a wonderful past time. I used to work for a concrete company and it was my job to let everyone know when the concrete had dried.
In January I was predicting a long and cool spring. So far I am not quite on target, but! 16 April the high for the day was 57 degrees. It should have been 73 to hit the average. Rain is about 3 inches behind normal. That is good news from last year. I don’t believe in global warming but generally cut my hay a month earlier. I think it was 9 April 2009 when we had the killer frost that killed all the blooms and took all the leaves off the trees. The tulip poplar was in full bloom. Normal for here in the mountains is to be ready to cut hay around the first of May. Most of the past 20 years it has been ready anywhere from 1 April to mid May, weather depending. This year first of May looks good. So we are nearly at normal but with cooler temperatures from average.
The stage is set. What does this mean to the beekeeper? What problems can we expect?
From the dirt up, what I have seen blooming is:
Flowering quince 1 April (still in bloom)
Pagoda plant, similar to hembit but a little taller 20 Mar. till today (still budding and blooming)
Red buds are just starting to fade 15 Mar. start ( it has been a long season)
Spice bush (profuse yellow clusters) 20 Mar. (supposed to bloom before red bud) (ended 10 Apr.)
Dandelions (first blooms gone to seed) 20 Mar. more blooms coming
Yellow violets 3rd week of Mar. (still there)
Purple violets 10 April (more coming)
White violets 20 April
Field pansies Just starting (20 April)
Dog woods 5 April (in full bloom, long and slow)
Blueberries 10 April (for those getting southern sun) 20 April (shadey)
Carolina Silverbells 15 April (tree with large bells)
Mostly I skip what is in the cultivated flower beds because your garden won’t produce enough pollen and nectar for several bee hives. You need the native blooms around your neighborhood.
With all this natural food you can stop feeding your bees unless you have specific reason. If you are trying to force population growth or draw wax you might feed just to shorten the turn around time for each trip the foragers must make. Use an in hive feeder if you have neighbors whose bees you don’t want to feed. If you are the only bee keeper in 2 miles you might field feed so your foragers stay in the practice of searching away from the hive.
This cool weather is excellent for the flowers. They will hold the nectar longer in the blossom. You are gauging two things. Cool days will not evaporate the nectar out of the blossoms. Couple that with sporadic drizzly rain (no wind or heavy rain), and there will be more moisture to make the nectar. Decent sunlight and temperature will raise the sugar content in the nectar.
Now what is wrong with the coolness. I mean, “cool” is “cool”! When the nights fall back below 40 degrees, the bees will cluster up. A loose cluster at 40. A tighter cluster at 25 degrees. Well, last week we hit 28, two nights in a row, with a cool day in between.
The queens have been laying eggs at the maximum number. Each hive is different, but the controlling factors are: Are there enough nurse bees to tend to the brood. Are there enough foragers to bring in enough food for the brood. Are there enough flowers to produce enough pollen and nectar. The queen is monitoring what comes into the hive and how much stores are still in the hive from winter and spring feeding.
On the longer cool snaps the brood outside the cluster can be chilled to death. If enough food in not coming into the hive to replentish and add to the stores the expanded brood area may starve, both larvae and newly hatched bees.
I have seen this situation for the first time. It explains why some hive up and die when it looks like a good spring. There were lots of bees in the hive. They are calm and working normally. Next week there are lots of dead bees in the bottom of the hive and some extracted dead larvae. Upon closer examination, there were no eggs. It was hard to find the small queen. I could not figure out which disease I had. Jennifer Berry UGA to the rescue. Further examination indicated there was virtually no stored honey but the bees were foraging and making honey. ¾ quarters of the brood was dead in the cells. Sunken caps, open cells with dead larvae, bees trying to clean it out. Only one half hatched bee with her tongue sticking out. No foul smell. We cleaned the hive and let it sit 2 days. More of the same.
The idea is out there that if there is not enough honey in the hive the queen will stop laying eggs. That could be anything less than 10-20 lbs. The brood was hatching so fast before the short cool spell that the bees had consumed all the stores. The cool weather was slowing down foraging on two fronts. The bees were leaving the hive later in the morning and coolness had retarded the nectar production in the flowers. Lots of worker bees. As the new bees hatched there was not enough food to feed them with in the first several hours so they immediately starved to death. The dead bees were the newly hatched ones. Some were still moving around similar to starving workers (very lethargic). On top of all this there was the chilled and killed brood. Seems the younger capped pupae and open larvae couldn’t take the cold. The older pupae could and continued to hatch.
We added two frames of honey and a honey super full of bees from another hive. The saga continues as we have to open the hive in 2 more days and see if the die off has stopped and the new bees are making themselves at home. If we have saved the hive we will add another honey super of bees from another strong hive. This would be a normal population balancing situation versus an emergency. We want the hive to be ready for honey collection in 3-4 weeks (1st of June).
Another exercise I worked with was a robust looking queen in a colony with the adequate number of bees and she was not laying. She was not a virgin queen. I put a swarm lure into the hive because it was the only pheromone thing I had to see if it would stimulate the queen to lay eggs. I was thinking the hive was acting like a newly established colony after a swarm situation where the queen had stopped laying. It worked she woke up and went to work immediately. You can keep these lures in the freezer for several years.
With stable weather (lack of violent wind and rain) the blossoms can hang on the plant for longer periods of time. You need to learn how to read the bees working the flowers. Are they loitering and sucking up nectar? Are they picking up pollen? Are they just visiting for a second and moving on? The flower will stop producing nectar once it is pollinated adequately. It may look just fine for you girl friend. The pollen is only produced once in the flower bud before it opens. There may be residual pollen and no nectar. If for some reason all the flowers in the neighborhood are waning your bees won’t get enough food. This can happen if you have a monoculture of plants (think orchard). You want a variety of weeds, etc.
My future work (next month) is to start managing against swarming and balancing populations. First I will be checking for queen cells. If I find some in my best hives I will start small nucs with those frames and some nurse bees. If I don’t want the queens I will kill the cells. Then I will make sure the bees have space and work inside the hive. I can draw comb in brood frames or honey supers. So far it looks like a super year for honey. Anyone want to buy a bridge in Savannah? You can use this time to draw comb in “cut comb supers”. Then they will be ready for your regular nectar flow without wasting that honey making wax. If the bees put a little honey in the cut comb frames just set the super out away from the apiary and the bees will clean the comb before you store it for later.
Planning a little farther ahead, I will not split my hives until after the sourwood nectar flow in July/Aug. 60,000 bees will collect more honey in a single colony than two 30,000 hives set side by side. After the main nectar flow I can split all my double hive bodies and add a queen. My guess will be that I will have two 40,000 bee colonies. With 3 months to go before “fall” the splits should be very strong going into winter.
Happy beekeeping