Bee Chronicles

February 2017

Well all the bee buddies are cuddling up! Winter came, winter went. Now winter returns. This is hard on the bees. They don’t know what to do.

They do know to fly around and expend energy. Then go home and eat. I like to feed syrup this time of the year. Every good day allows the bees to put up a little honey. Even if there is a little honey still left in the hive a little unripened honey near the center of the cluster will be better cold day food than ripe stored honey out toward the edge. The bees have to collect condensation water to thin the honey before eating it. The unripened honey has a higher moisture content so it is more readily eaten.

17 January 2017 I inspected all my hives. 20 survivors so far. 7 laying eggs already. Some hives have stored pollen. Foragers are bringing in a small amount of very light colored tan pollen. I am guessing this is American Holly. It blooms early. Not verified yet but I am looking for the source.

This weather pattern is very similar to spring 2016. Last year I had hives laying eggs the first week of January. End of January it got cold and rainy, then it warmed up in February. Then a heavy freeze and a couple of weeks of winter. Flowers were blooming and got frosted out. When March came it warmed up above average. I got the bee packages on 27 March and the 3 weeks prior were very warm. It started raining again and rained until June. The bee packages had a hard time expanding and were not robust for sourwood. 3 weeks of sourwood in July and then the drought hit.

I hope we don’t follow last year but it looks close so far.

I am pushing the queens to expand on the warm days. This will have 2 draw backs. First the brood area will get larger than the size of the cluster on the cold days and nights. You will see some brood larvae die off with the carcasses thrown out the front. The net gain will be that the colony expands. The second is that the energy requirements to raise brood will put a heavy drain on the food stores. If you don’t feed syrup there is a chance the colony will starve to death even though there are foragers, a little wild nectar, and pollen on top of the stored honey. Brood really impacts the food source. I think it takes 7 cells of honey to raise one larva. On top of that the nurse bees have to keep the brood area at 92 degrees instead of 72 degrees.

I have switch to 1:1 sugar syrup and pollen patties. 1:1 syrup more nearly simulates nectar and the pollen patties help trick the queen into thinking spring has sprung. You don’t have to force your queens. It is just a technique I use. I want to make splits as early as I can.

Get ready to do varroa mite treatment as soon as the weather matches you needs. I don’t like to treat too early as all treatments irritate the queen. I want her to get a good start and then I will disturb the hive with the treatment.

I have seen lots of hive beetles in all my hives. Not crisis level but noticeably a bunch. That is a sign of a pretty good hive. The hive survived and fed those pesky buggers all winter long. Oxolic Acid fumigation is a good way to kill them off enmass. Beetle traps are slow and inefficient.