Bee Chronicles

Nov. 2015

The most important activity in the bee yard this time of the year is “watching your bees”. It is interesting how we might think they can just get along. There has been abundant goldenrod and fall aster flowers. The bees look like they are working, flying back and forth. I see them going in and out of the hives.

But really, what are they doing? Eating all the honey you left them with after the sourwood ended. They hives generally have had good brood clusters for the last two months. That takes a lot of food to support. If the bees have not been foraging for enough nectar and pollen they may have eaten a lot of the stored honey from summer. You just need to check and make sure.

Some of the hive that have had bees coming and going out of might be dead. The hives will get robbed out and you won’t notice they are dead until all the honey is gone and the robbing stops.

Varroa mites might be a problem. Have you done might counts using the sticky board or bee rolling techniques. You do need to check, even in a strong population. Now is the time when might damage to larvae will increase. As the population deceases in the hive the number of mites per new larvae will increase as the adult mites concentrate in a smaller breeding area. This will cause crinkle wing damage which you can see quite easily.

If you have a queenless colony you may be better served by combining the hive with a medium or week hive to create a stronger hive for the winter. If that hive survives the winter, it will be strong enough to split next spring. If you were to buy a queen and colony dies in the winter you just lost $25.

Now that it is getting cooler, it is a good time to collect propolis from the hive. I unload all the frames into a clean hive body, close the hive up, and take the old box to the shop to scrape it. Under the inner cover is a good place to get a little clean propolis. I will work through all my honey supers, scraping the boxes and the ends of the frames for more propolis. This is just another way to get a few more dollar out of your hive. I see prepared propolis for nearly $20 an ounce in the health food store.

Why have I been feeding sugar syrup to my bees since August? I think that syrup can not be as good as nectar honey. If I wait until now to start feeding my bee syrup, because there were flowers the bees could work, I create concentrations of good honey and syrup honey in the hive. By feeding while the bees have blooms to work they mix the two types of stored honey creating a better balanced diet through out the winter. This technique also maximizes the high bee population early in the fall so more honey gets stored. Having the feed available during the last nectar flow evens out the honey production if any bad weather might interrupt foraging. Lastly, as the days get shorter and cooler, the bees have fewer hours each day they can make honey. I think bees don’t convert nectar to honey at under 50^o . This causes them to start honey making later in the morning and stop earlier in the evening. Even though the day is good for us the bees can’t work as long.