Bee Chronicles November 2016

20 October 2016 A hard fall for the bees. It has been too dry for nearly two months (end of Aug thru Oct). The bees are eating their winter honey stores. Some hives are still raising brood. Brood consumes more food. There has been adequate pollen in the goldenrod and asters, but no nectar.

If you desire (I recommend it) to keep your queens laying eggs you need to feed 1:1 syrup and pollen patties. This will stimulate egg laying and wax (comb) building.

If all you want is to fill the hives with stored honey 2:1 syrup is better. You are trying to get the sugar carbohydrate into the hive. The more syrup the more carbs. Since it is cooler out the dehydration process is harder. Since it is dryer out the dehydration process is easier. Can you figure out what the bees will do? Feed them and don’t worry. You need a hive body full of honey to get a hive body full of bees through the winter. That is 90 lbs.

By now you should have completed one fall varroa mite treatment. You need to do one more before Thanksgiving. If we have to grow healthier and fatter bees, the main thing we can do is reduce mites. The new rule is if you see one mite in a drop test or sugar/ether roll, then treat. I say go ahead and treat. Most of our treatment chemicals are natural and the varroa “can’t” develop a resistance to them. Have we heard that before?

We are starting to enter the watch and wait part of the year. Inventory your wood work. If you need to make/buy more stuff do it. It will then be on hand so you can put it together in your spare time.

Do we really get to watch and wait? Be checking your bees for brood, presence of a queen. If you loose a queen just combine the “lost queen” hive with a live hive. Repopulate your weaker hives. If you don’t have any weak ones make super hives that will over winter better. Next spring they will be ready to split and add queens as necessary putting you back up to 2 hives for every one you combined. Larger population hives will build up faster in the spring. They will have stored more excess honey. They will have more bees to forage earlier bringing in more food stuffs to stimulate the queen to lay more eggs sooner. These hives will be ready to split earlier.

Be sure and store your drawn comb in a manner that wax moths don’t get into it. Very Airy of para moth crystals and stacked tight and sealed.

I think we should also treat out bees against tracheo mites. We have gotten away from this over the past few years. Menthol crystals are the accepted commercial way. Grease paddies are the accepted old way. The tracheo mite attackes the adult bee at about 4 days old. If the young housekeeper bee has been cleaning the grease paddy up they are “greasy” and the mite can’t smell them to find the 4 day old bee. Menthol aroma desecates the mites inside the trachea. Grease gets them before the they get into your bees. Anything to help have fat healthy bees!