Bee Chronicles

March 2018

Another shocking month is starting! Can you believe this spring weather? Do You realize it is still winter?

I am writing this February 24^th. I was out of town on the 21st and 22^rd. Upon returning the johnquills, and red maples had bloomed. So I started looking around. The Henbit is blooming. The flowering quince is showing color. The forsythia is blooming. This is not supposed to bee!

Spring seems to be coming a little early and fast. Both of these are bad news.

Henbit and Maple are the signals for the queen to start laying eggs. Mine had started by 12 Feb. 10 of my 11 queens were laying eggs on multiple frame faces. That was good. I feed syrup and pollen patties to keep the hive happy. I popped a lid to look at one hive yesterday (23 Feb) and the area the bees were covering was 2 times what they were covering on 6 February. They had eaten all of the pollen patty. Syrup was down ¼. That would be acceptable.

It is good to force you population expansion early in the year, but you have to be aware of the early swarming that will occur before April. You need as many bees as possible to gather lots of honey and have extra bees to even out the populations of the weaker hives.

BUT, if the brood area grows too big and there is a frost the cluster during the cold weather will be smaller than the brood area resulting in brood die off. Okay, we can live with that, but it is wasted energy out put from the queen.

We will still have cold days and nights until mid April. A lot of the early flower bloom can get killed reducing the honey crop.

If spring comes on too fast the flowers will bloom all at once. I call blooming on top of each other. There is supposed to be a progression of blooming. Maple/henbit, sweet bush, red bud, quince, dandelions (seen any yet?), white clover, black raspberry, black berry, tulip poplar tree. If it all comes early and not spread out the bees will have nothing to eat in April causing a dearth. The dearth can last until sourwood. You will need to be prepared to feed syrup and pollen.

Our cold winter came in December 2017. Nice snow, cold weather, plants in deep dormancy. This warm weather and rain tells the plants spring is here, let’s go.

Spring is not here. March 13, 1993 was the “Great Blizzard” (3 feet of snow with power outages for 2 weeks). April 9, 2009 was the “Great Frost” ( lasted 3 nights, all the leaves were frosted off the trees and the tulip poplars were in full bloom We collected really good rhododendron honey that year, “Mother in law honey”). Who knows what to be prepared for?

I say just raise your bees and have fun. Stay flexible but be prepared.