Bee Chronicles Sept. 2015

As I sit here trying to figure out what my bees are doing, I can’t figure out what I should (or not) be doing.

It is definitely a situation where I should be watching my bees verses doing a lot to (for) them.

As I monitor the blooming schedule of the plants I realize everything is blooming about a month early. That has been the situation all year long. Currently the Joe Pie weed is in full bloom with very large flower clusters. The early goldenrod is passing its peak and the tall goldenrod is coming into full bloom. The ironweed is just starting and I don’t see any fall asters yet. Those are the small blue ones that come in very large plant clusters. Yellow asters (like small black eyed susans) are blooming but not profusely. All these flowers make the bees happy but they can’t collect large amounts of nectar. The goldenrod is a salvation for putting up lots of pollen. Hence, expect your bees to be eating stored honey.

The bee populations are holding pretty strongly. Also, a concern about eating too much stored honey.

You need to be checking the health of your queens. Current history tells us Queens can quit laying or die the first year. She has been working hard all summer, check and make sure she is okay.

If your queen is poor or missing you have to make the judgement call of requeening or combining hives. We are coming up on the end of August. I don’t like requeening later than the middle of September. Here in the mountains the drones start to get evicted from the colonies in September. If you buy a queen in September will she be well mated? I lean toward combining hives late in the summer. If I buy a queen and the colony dies over the winter I just wasted my money. If I combine two hives and create a super hive, the queen has a better chance of surviving with a large cluster. Then next spring I will divide the hive and add a new queen. A queen wintering over with a large cluster usually will start laying eggs earlier and build up faster in the spring.

I am feeding my hives now even though they may be bringing in all they need to eat and create winter stores. I think ( probably fooling myself) that the bees will mix the sugar syrup with the natural nectar and pollen that they are collecting, creating a better quality food stored for the winter. If you wait until later (early fall) to feed syrup you will have some frames filled with nectar honey and some frames filled with syrup honey. This creates two different qualities of food. I don’t want my bees having to eat the low quality food in the hardest part of winter.

Back to blooming time. If the flowers are blooming a month early they will stop blooming a month early, or earlier if the dry spell sets in. Then you will have to feed the bees. Will you recognize and react to the changing conditions in a timely manner? By feeding early you also have more bees in the colony left over from the nectar flow. This will help process more honey faster. By keeping a simulated nectar flow with the goldenrod pollen the queen thinks she needs to keep laying eggs. This will delay here winter slow down resulting in more young bees in the cluster for the winter.

If your populations remain large and adequate winter stores are put up the queen might try to do a late summer/early fall swarm. Be vigilant for queen cells while looking at the health of the queen. I use comb building as the anti swarm tool. While feeding syrup I am creating enough honey to support wax building. The extra work load will discourage swarming. Building brood chamber comb or honey super comb gives you more frames so you can rotate out you old comb.

It also gives you comb you can store for next year’s hives. If you are planning on adding some hives by dividing or purchasing packages, this drawn comb will significantly reduce the work load of you bees next spring.