Bee Chronicles March 2015

Another strange year. What is normal? It is February 7^th. I have 6 queens laying eggs. One is a Russian. She is supposed to start late. Four are Carniolians. All queens are laying on the “hot” side of the hive. The one facing the sun. The last queen is a big fat yellow mama. She is laying on 7 frames. She has been laying for a month. The brood pattern has hatched in the center and re-laid. The idea of early laying in a good one here in the mountains, if the weather would just stay constant.

It is now 20 February. The wind is howling, the temperature is around 8 degrees. I am sure the bees are dieing. It will be a week or so before I can even look.

If the bees survive most all the brood will be killed off as the cluster will get so tight there will be new brood left outside the cluster and it will chill. Not a total loss though. Any brood that survives will be a good early addition to the hive which will speed up build-up.

Is there any good news with all this. Of course, I am a beekeeper, “always optimistic”. I have just identified my best queen to draw more queens off of. Survivability is the first measure of a good queen. The dead ones don’t raise good young. The early start up is a good measure. Although a hive that starts early can starve to death early, so the bee keeper has to be as sharp as the stinger on a bee. Another good measure is how much honey the hive puts up. In this instance I started the winter with a double hive body with a shallow honey super. I still have the honey super and 5-6 frames of honey in the double hive body. Maybe another good sign is this hive doesn’t consume a lot of honey in the off season. To me SHE is a winner.

As soon as the snow stops I will be salting the ground around and under my hives to kill the grass and weed, but more importantly to get any hive beetle larvae that may be doing some pupating in the dirt. The salt will desiccate the tender young things before hatching into beetles. I will also weed eat under my electric fence and salt that to keep the grass down. Another good use for the red granulated mineral salt is that as the heavy dews form the bees will lick up the water and take the mineral salt water back to the hive. They use the minerals to make the enzymes that make honey, propolis, and wax.

I am almost done with my wood working. A few hive bodies to paint. A few hundred hive body frames to get glued and foundation in. Both these tasks require 50 plus degrees. You don’t want to work wax foundation when it is very cool. It will break very easily.

I am planning on expanding into a new apiary this spring. Picking the spot was the easy part. I have to have the hives ready for packages in March. I hear through the bee buzz, that although the weather in South Georgia has been pretty nice it is running about 3 weeks behind last year. Then to make everyone’s life easier there is a substantiated rumor that several shipments of Hawaiian queens came in very dead.

I have not checked to see what that will do to my “early” bee orders, but probably not good news.

Keep close eye on your hives that have bees in them. The clusters have been maintained at about 72 degrees all winter. Once pollen and nectar start flowing with the red maple and the hembit weed the queen will start laying eggs. Not only will this increase the requirement for larvae food but the brood area will be kept at 95 degrees which will require a phenomenal food requirement for the nurse bees. A good hive can starve to death very rapidly. Even if you are feeding syrup there can be problems with the short days and cool nights. The bees won’t have enough time to convert an adequate amount of syrup into honey. Just be mindful and alert. At best maybe the queen will slow down here egg laying to keep up with the food production. However, sometimes the queen does not read the incoming nectar flow correctly. The nurse bees will feed any larvae they can until all the food is gone. When the hive runs out of honey the bees will start eating (and feeding) larvae to try to keep some larvae alive. Larvae are about pure protein. By the time the queen figures all this out the hive is in the collapse mode.

When it warms up in March you can switch to 1:1 (sugar:water) syrup. This simulates nectar. Any of the brood builder, pollen substitute patties will work for the pollen substitute. These two activities will level the highs and lows of food coming into the hive created by the fluctuating temperatures outside. I think it is easier on the queen if she can ramp up here egg laying without interruptions from the food flow. Your side benefit is more rapid colony expansion. You are shooting for 30000-40000 bees in a hive before the blackberries bloom. If your hive gets too crowded there will always be a neighbor who needs bees.

This year especially looks like a bad year to get replacement bees. Since November 2014 there has been talk of not enough bees to pollinate the almond crop in California. This will be the second year in a row for poor almond pollination.

I talked to one “good” beekeeper whom had lost nearly 100% this year. He has never suffered losses like that. His bees seem to have died with split clusters. On a warm day the bees move out of the cluster to get honey. The evening temperature drops so fast the bees are too cold to get back to the main cluster and freeze. If this happens 2-3 times the main cluster isn’t large enough to maintain their temperature. Also, the queen could be getting old (2years) and not producing enough pheromone for the outlier bees to recognize where the queen cluster is, so the just cluster in place.

Don’t forget to do a spring varroa mite treatment before there is too much brood in the hive. Early treatments seem to be more affective because there is no brood for the mites to hide in.

Happy Beekeeping