Bee Chronicles August 2016

11 July 2016: Sourwood nectar flow has ended. Measured at the altitude of Blairsville, GA. city. There will be some flow left with trees that at higher altitudes and in shady environments on north facing slopes.

You next big activity is to remove the honey supers and extract the honey.

The affect of removing the honey supers will be that the hives will have too many bees for the space remaining. This will cause swarming to occur with in 10 days. You need to create more space for the bees by placing empty hive bodies or honey supers on the hives you have just robbed. You can also make spits to reduce the population in a hive. You can make the spits and replace drawn/filled frames with frames of foundation. This will create more work for the bees to do, reducing the swarm stimulus. Placing the full/drawn frames in your spits reduces the work load for the newly created colony helping ensure it will over winter.

Order new queens and do fall requeening. A queen that over winters will be a stronger queen next spring. She will be in the colony earlier next spring than a queen purchased next spring. This will allow her to start laying eggs earlier, building population faster. She will also think she is a 2 year old queen so she will start off laying more eggs than the spring queen.

I recommend extracting you honey while the days are still hot and bottling it as soon as possible. Extraction will be easier and faster that when the honey is cool in October. By bottling early you will again have the advantage of thinner honey. You will also have the advantage of getting the honey into small containers before it sugars. Sometimes the honey will sugar more quickly than other times. Especially if you have black locust honey. Sugared honey is hard to get out of plastic buckets. You can always use a “honey heater” to reliquify small containers of bottled honey. I use a light bulb in a plastic cooler. I can heat 2 cases of containers simultaneously in 24 hr.

As soon as feasible after you have removed the honey supers from the hives, you need to treat for varroa mites. This should be you 2d or 3d treatment of the year. First treatment in the spring, second before nectar flow, now and then again when temperature drops into mid 80’s end of August or September.

You can also start feeding pollen patties and syrup if you want to stimulate you queens to keep laying eggs at maximum production. Use all these extra bees to put up winter food. You need between 90-100 pounds of honey in the hive around Thanksgiving to get you through the winter and into egg laying next spring. Do your spring feeding in the fall. All the young bees will be the ones that make it through the winter and are the ones that will raise next springs bees. You need lots of them and they need to be “fat” (from good pollen) and “healthy” (from few varroa mites). The winter 2015 death rate was 40% of hives nation wide. Don’t bee a statistic!

Bottling your honey needs to be a thoughtful process. How big of a container does your customer want? You are your own customer. What size do you want to give away at Christmas? A gallon of honey weighs 12 lbs. Can your wife handle it to fill the honey pot? Are your relatives nice enough to warrant a quart of honey or do they get 1 lbs. squeeze bottles? Dripless lids or flip tops? Smooth quarts and pints so they can have you fancy label or embossed jars from Walmart? How many containers needed of which size? And you thought this was all easy!