Bee Chronicles Sept 2014

All your honey should be off the hive. Well mine is not. I hope there will be some honey left in the last frames that I left on the hive to get capped off. There is a high probability that it is being consumed as bee food. It really doesn’t matter because the bees would have needed the food anyway.

I only have 5 supers that I left on. They are not full 10 frames of honey and the frames are only 60-80% full. All of my August supers did not get full of honey. But, all the honey that was in the supers got capped off. Why would the bees cap frames that were not completely full? There was a dearth right at the end of sourwood. There was a gap between the sourwood bloom and the following sumac bloom. The weather was fairly dry. There was not enough nectar to finish filling the frames with honey but the humidity was low enough that the honey in the frames got pulled down to 18% so the bees went ahead and capped it off. The dearth stopped more honey from being stored in the supers. The little nectar that was coming in was needed to feed the newly hatching brood, so it got consumed instead of becoming excess for winter food storage.

I think this year was a low average honey crop. Much better than last year when it rained out the nectar collection, but lower than it could have been it the end of season had been a little more humid. We don’t need rain to keep the nectar up in the blossoms but we don’t need too much dryness either. The creek at my house is barely a trickle. It looks like it has not rained since June. In reality we have had plus/minus one inch of rain every week, mixed with an occasional down pour. Lake Nottley is down a little due to lower water levels running into the lake. My bee populations are very high. Only the queen bee knows why the honey production was off, and she’s not telling.

Next I am working on doing fall splits, fall requeening, and feeding to make sure all the colonies are maxed out in stored winter food. It takes approximately 90 lbs of honey to get a colony through the winter. The “Farmers Almanac” says the south east should expect a longer and colder than normal winter. To me that means at least a hivebody and a honey super FULL if honey and bee bread. Even the cluster in an 8 frame hive will need 90 lbs. The clusters are about the same size no matter how big the hive. So 8 frame beekeepers will need 2-3 honey supers.

Here in the south where the temperature keeps jumping up and down during the winter it is extremely hard on honeybees. Inside the hive warms up and the outside temperature get above 60 degrees, the bees go flying around looking for flowers. When they don’t find any they come home tired and hungry. Then they eat more of the winter stores than bees in Minnesota where the temperature stays cold.

The bees don’t take in syrup at under 50 degrees and convert it to honey so they can eat it. Hence you need to do your springtime feeding now. There are lots of bees in the hive so they can convert more syrup to honey and store it. If you also feed pollen patties you can trick the queen into thinking there is a nectar flow and she will keep laying eggs at the maximum rate. I like to see brood in my hives Thanksgiving week end. This allows your colony to go into “winter” with the most food and the most young bees. The youngsters will be the ones that come out of the winter ready to work.

Syrup put up in the fall will be mixed with goldenrod and aster nectar and pollen. This will make a more balance nutritional food source than just sugar syrup alone. I think the mix is best even if you use a product like “honey bee healthy” for added vitamins and minerals. Nothing bees mother nature’s products.

Level the populations between your strong hives and your weak hives. The weak ones need the bees to get up enough food stores. A small cluster might survive the winter, but maybe they didn’t put up enough food so they starve to death in February.

Once all my hives are leveled I do fall requeening instead of spring requeening. I think the new queen ramps up her egg laying before shutting down for the winter. Next spring she will start laying eggs like a 2yr old instead of a new spring queen. You will also have the over wintered queen to start laying eggs earlier than you may be able to buy a spring queen. Especially if we have a long cool spring and queen producers don’t get started in time.

Now if I still have hives with bees bearding on the landing deck I pull those bees off and start nucs. I will mix the bees to create well populated nucs. I can either winter them over as nucs, double nucs, or small 10 frame colonies. Some times a nuc with a 5 honey super over will winter better than 10 frames side by side. The bees rise in the colony throughout the winter instead of going horizontally. Double nucs gives you the vertical heat management of 5 over 5 but the advantage of having 2 queens working the space normally reserved for one. 10 frames horizontally requires lots of bees. If your queen doesn’t produce enough off spring, you will have to combine bees from other hives. You will want the bees to cover 8 frames out of the 10. All of these situations will require 90 lbs of food.

To double a 5 or 10 frame colony vertically, take a screened bottom board and screen the open bottom both on the upper side (as normally done) and the underside, creating a 7/8” space. Place the “double bottom” on top of one brood chamber as the inner cover. Don’t use an inner cover on the bottom chamber. Then place the second brood chamber on the “double bottom” as if it were on the hive stand. Place the inner cover and the telescoping cover on top of the second brood chamber. The bees can come into their respective hive bodies through the normal entrances of the hive bottoms. As weather worsens you might consider closing the lower bottom, and reducing both entrances to protect from wind and mice.

The only other challenge I see is trying to keep the bees healthy. You MUST do varroa mite control. Today there are many acceptable ways to zap the mites. Choose one and do it in accordance with the direction. Apilife Var, may be the easiest. Apiguard is affective. I lean toward Oxolic acid fumigation. It is fairly easy and cheap. Oxolic acid also kills the hive beetles and any adult wax moths that are in the hive.

FEED, FEED, FEED