Bee Chronicles January 2015

What is happening in the bee yard this month? Christmas is over. I didn’t see any reindeer tracks on top of the hives. That is good news. Early snows don’t help us much. And good weather doesn’t help us much at all.

If the weather is 50 degrees or better the bees are flying and eating their stored food. After flying around foraging and not finding anything, they come home hungry and eat the stored honey. You still need 90 lbs. of honey in the hive to make it to April. Remember, 90 lbs for the winter. But, when does winter start and when does it end? For sure we know winter will be January and February. Probably, part of March. And, maybe part of April.

Even if the cold weather breaks in mid-March, there has to be food stores to support the brooding of the queen. Watch for the blooming of the red maple and the hembit weed as the start of egg laying. When that happens the bees cluster over the new eggs and larvae. They will raise the brood area temperature to 92 degrees. This takes a lot more food than keeping the winter cluster of bees at 72 degrees. Hence, you can run out of stored food faster than expected and faster than the bees can collect nectar and convert it to honey during the marginally warm days of early spring. Be prepared to do emergency feeding of fondant or sugar patties. Sometimes in very severe starvation you can lightly spritz the bees with sugar syrup. If it is not too cold they will lick the syrup off their neighbor. If it is too cold they will all die because they are wet. Emergency feeding will need to be placed directly in front of the bee. On the top bars generally. Check the hive weight (food stores) frequently from mid-January on until the days are consistently above 50 degrees with lots of blooms. You do not have to break the cluster to check the amount of stored food. First go by weight of the hive. Then when you have to open a light hive start looking from the outside frames in until you are one frame from the cluster. If no food go into the emergency mode.

You can open a hive almost anytime in the winter to see if the bees are alive. The secret is “don’t break the cluster by removing the frames that have clustered bees on them”. If it is -45 degrees out side it is -45 degrees inside the hive but out side the cluster. If you don’t disturb the cluster the bees will hardly notice since they are very lethargic. I am talking about popping the top and inner cover and quickly looking to see if there are any bees. Are they live bees? Can you see the least amount of movement indicating life? You want to do this on the most sunny day you can get, with no wind. You might see a puff of “steam” when you pop the top. This is good. It indicates a higher temperature inside the hive than out. It also indicates moisture in the hive caused by bee respiration. If you see droplets of water on the top bars this is another indication of respiration. Normally on a warmer day the cluster will expand and the bees will use this moisture to mix with the stored honey to thin it down enough to eat.

You cannot trust a hive that has bees coming and going out of the front on warm days during the winter. They could be robber bees working a dead hive. It is okay to steal that honey. It might keep the “robber hives” alive.

On the days that you aren’t sitting by a campfire in the apiary watching your bees, this is wood working time. Get all your extra hive bodies cleaned up and repainted. You will need them when the spring expansion starts. If you have new wood work do you construction and painting. Do hive bodies first and honey supers last, since you will need them later in the year. Don’t work wax foundation on the car port, unheated garage or unheated shop in January or February. It is very fragile when cold and will break. Built the wood frames and wire the frames (if desired). Then when it gets warm just before you need them, you can add the foundation to the frames. The “OR”, add the foundation in the kitchen after it has had time to warm up. Be careful with them if you take them back outside. Once they are place into a hive body or honey super they will be all right.

When you are cleaning up your hive boxes (bodies and supers) winter is a good time to scrape the propolis. It shatters easily off the wood and jumps all over the place. Secret No. 672: Get a large white plastic bag that does not have perfume impregnated into it. Kind of open it up and work in the center. The propolis will pop off. When you are done, gently pick up the bag and all the propolis will be inside of it. When you dump the propolis into you normal processing container, you can tell if all of it has fallen out of the WHITE bag.

In my experience January is about the last month that you can order new or replacement bees. If you wait too long you will go farther and farther down the waiting list. You may not be able to get delivery on your bees until sometime in June. If that happens you won’t get any honey off that hive this year. If you are only growing bees for 2016, no problem. I say take a guess and order some bees. If you don’t need them you neighbor, who didn’t order early will buy them off you.

Around the first week in April is the ideal time to take delivery. Very seldom do I get an ideal delivery time. It is usually earlier or later. Earlier means I still have cold weather concerns to deal with trying to get the new bees settled into the hive. Maybe I have no comb and honey to put them on. Maybe there is not much blooming for nectar. Don’t worry about pollen. They won’t need that until the queen starts laying eggs. The queen won’t start laying eggs until there is comb drawn to lay in. At 8 lbs. of honey to 1 lbs. of wax it takes a package of bees a lot of work to start drawing foundation, collect a little honey and a little pollen so the queen can start laying eggs. Protect the comb and honey from a dead hive. Or, take a frame with honey and comb out of a surviving hive to put the package onto. This will allow the queen to start laying eggs immediately. Let the older hive draw new comb.

The package will start drawing the foundation as soon as they need it. They will bring in more food the first couple of days because there is comb to store it. You should give a bee package syrup just to expedite this situation. There will be a subsequent slow down in food collection as the package starts to grown. As the amount of larvae increases more bees are required to act as nurse bees, taking them away from foraging. The foragers are working their little hearts off gathering food that goes to feeding larvae. Everyone is busy and no one is drawing comb for the next frame’s expansion. Suddenly the queen realizes there is a problem and slows down on egg laying until the wax builders catch up. For a short while you don’t think the package is doing well, but then all of a sudden larvae start hatching and life takes off real fast.

You can see how spring bee keeping can get ahead of you quite rapidly. You must be looking and planning ahead. And, Mother Nature may not be cooperating. Be flexible and be ready.