Bee Chronicles July 2016

It is now June 20, 2016. The sourwood has started blooming at my house which indicates it is probably blooming everywhere. Being on the shady north slope, I am almost always the last to start blooming. Two weeks ago I saw a tree in Blairsville just starting to bloom. It was south facing next to the Cannery at the Farmers Market hanging over a paved parking lot. Lots of heat and sun.

Over the past 3 weeks you should have been balancing the bee populations between your different hives getting ready for sourwood nectar flow. This is necessary to maximize the work of your bees. If you have too many foragers in your hive they have to stand in line to unload their nectar to the storage bees. This creates anxiety. Bees don’t need stress. If you spread the bees out then all the hives can work more efficiently getting you more honey.

During sourwood you are more concerned with getting the most honey when you can. The sourwood blossom is delicate. Too much wind will blow the nectar out of the inverted bell blossoms. Rain can knock out nectar and shred the blossoms. Don’t even discuss what hail can do. Dry periods as we are in now can dry the nectar out of the blossoms. I think we are currently okay in moisture respects because it is not dry at tree root level. The top 18” of soil are very dry. If we don’t get several inches of gentle rain we will have a small nectar flow. There is no way to forecast how long the blossoms will last so you need to get all the honey you can whenever the bees can collect the nectar.

You have the option of segregating your spring honey from your sourwood honey or just mix it all up. Spring honey always tastes different form sourwood. Spring is a more mellow flavor. Sourwood is a little more acidic honey so there is a little after taste zing on the back of your tounge. You can not get away from the zing. If you mix your two honeys you will still be able to have a little of the sourwood zing in the mix. That does not make your honey “bad”.

The problem starting to develop right now is the “Staghorn sumac”, Shumate, or ivy. Which ever you prefer. It bloom right at the end of sourwood. Sourwood is a light honey, sumac is a dark honey. The sumac is starting to bloom NOW! No way to tell if it buds for a long period of time or not. I think it will progress fast due to the above average temperatures. Hence, it will get mixed with the sourwood making it a dark flavored honey with a little carmel flavor. Not prefect, just different.

Some people have had swarming situations since the end of tulip poplar bloom. This is normal. When the nectar flow ends the hives are pretty full of honey, there is lots of brood and bees, and the queen thinks it is a good time to divide the colony. If you were not prepared to manage for these problems you may have lost some bees. This can impact the robustness of the colony during sourwood season resulting in less sourwood honey being collected. It can also delay the build up of any smaller hives that decide to swarm resulting in not enough bees to collect enough nectar for the coming winter.

When the sourwood nectar flow stops your hives will be at the peak for the year. This will be swarm time for all hives, both those that have already swarmed and those that have not yet. I fight the swarming urge with two actions. One is to do a fall split on my strongest hives. You can either split 50/50 and let the one new hive grow a queen or put a queen in it. You can pull bees off a hive and use those bees to build up weaker hives. The second thing I do is make the bees draw new comb. Both in hive bodies and honey supers. This comb is used to rotate out dark/old comb. You need to feed sugar syrup to draw the comb.

I start feed sugar syrup as soon as my sourwood supers are off the hive. I want the bees to mix the less than best sugar syrup honey with “real” flower honey and pollen to even out the quality of their winter food. I don’t want frames of less than the best and the best causing nutritional peaks and valleys.

One of my guiding mottoes is: “Do your spring feeding in the fall”. After sourwood you have all these extra bees when you pull the honey supers. You have good weather. Put these bees to work doing something useful, Storing Honey!

I also do fall splits and requeening. This allows the colonies to grow larger before fall. The queens get settled in and start laying lots of brood. The larger number of young bees with lots of food will return big benefits next February.

To Help the colony survive the winter you MUST treat for mites. Pick your method and do it correctly. You should treat right after all you honey has been removed from the hive (end of July) and again before October. Clean those mites out before all you bees are born wounded going into winter. If your protocol calls for three successive weakly treatments, do that regime twice before October. You want lot of healthy bees born before your queen stops laying eggs in November.

Once you have “slung” out your honey, clean the comb by placing the “wet” honey supers back on the hive. Traditionally, we just stack the supers out in the yard and let the bees clean them up. Now, it is considered a better practice to place the supers back on the hive to keep other peoples bees, and hornets out of the supers. Hornets will hang around field feeders and eat your honey bees which are concentrating on the honey. Also, there is no reason to share you honey with the neighbor. When the supers are clean and dry (2-3 days) you can take them off and store them where ever you like. They will not attract rodents and ants. I like to cross stack them so they get air and light to discourage wax moths.

If you don’t have an extractor’, start buttering up a friend who does.

Good Bee Keeping Luck

Glen