Bee Chronicle Aug 2014

It is now July 22, 2014. Sour wood is over here at our elevation. Your hives are packed with honey. The queen is laying eggs at max capacity. Look out for swarming. Now is a good time to start nucs for next year’s bees. The nuc queen will have 3 months to lay eggs and you can swap bees from the really strong hive to build up the nuc. Don’t waste the bees by just letting them die out or swarm. Go into the winter with more hives than you really want. Next spring you can sell your extras or maybe the “die off” will leave you with just what you want.

I am declaring this past honey season (spring and sourwood) a success. I would say a high average year, not above average. What made it “good” was the lack of prolonged weather extremes. Sure there was the sparse hail and occasional torrential thunderstorm, but. I don’t think there was much blossom damage so the flowers recovered within days by putting nectar back in the blossoms. The “summer, arctic vortex” kept the dry hot July weather at bay. That allowed the sourwood flowers to bloom leisurely, creating the perfect sourwood season.

Coinciding with the long bloom season, some of the slow starting colonies got big enough to collect a super or two of sourwood.

Most of the hives have full brood chambers, both brood and honey stores. This will set them up good for the winter. Be careful! This sounds wonderful, BUT! It is still a long time until winter and a good sized hive with brood hatching at a good rate will eat all the honey before goldenrod starts to bloom in September. You are now walking a balancing wire. Keep the hive full of food, but don’t over feed which will stimulate fall swarming. You have to keep space in the brood chamber for the queen to lay eggs or she will swarm.

This is a good time to draw some new comb for next year. The hard wax building work requires lots of bees and will keep the queen from swarming. You need to rotate your brood comb on a 3-5 year cycle. As it turns brown it will have lots of ambient air pollution and insecticides imbedded in it. Pull one or two dark brown frames. Remove the wax. Insert foundation, or not. Let the bees draw 2 new frames per hive body box.

As fall progresses you might want to feed the bees. Feed the sugar syrup at the same time there are flowers still blooming. The bees will mix the syrup and the nectar in the same cells storing a more nutritious winter food. To keep space in the brood chamber, feed for 3-4 days then not for 3-4 days. I use Bordman feeders. If it takes 3 days to empty the feeder I wait 3 days before I refill it. Larger feeders don’t have to be filled completely full, just enough for a few days at a time.

Have your next spring’s feeding done by Thanksgiving. Feed for spring in the fall. Get the honey stored during warm fall weather when lots of bees are still in the hive. Next spring when you decide to do emergency feeding there will be fewer bees in the colony and the temperature will be too cool to make and store honey. The hive will collapse in February. It will take about 90 lbs. of honey to winter a good colony. You have to keep the hive full of honey because you never know when the cold snap will hit and how long it will be. You will need any type of combination of brood chamber, and honey supers to get enough stored food into the hive. One hive body will not do it. Two full hive bodies will. You might squeak by with a hive body and medium super. Just remember to have them full before the outside temperature drops below 50 degrees for the daily high in December.

What makes this hard here in the south is the bees can still be brooding in January. And then they will start building up in February. But in February it may be too cold to convert syrup to honey for food. Even in south Georgia you can get caught short of stored food. Surely, in the mountains you will get caught short. The yoyo affect of the daily temperature swings is especially hard on our southern bees. In Minnesota the bees can cluster and stay that way for 4 months. Here in the south if you see bees flying in the winter they are consuming food. Then they cluster for 5 days over a spot where no honey is stored. You see the results when a hive has starved to death with honey 2” away.