Bee Chronicles

June 5, 2018

What fickle weather? Everything is blooming on top of everything. This will shorten the honey collection season. AND, when my tulip poplar started to bloom it started to rain. The same thing happened last year except it was a month earlier.

5 April I had wisteria blooming which was supposed to bloom in early March. Well it tried to bloom in March and it got frosted. Except for some.

15 May, I was at the top of my hill (2750 elev.) and the flame azaleas and black locust were in full bloom. Keep in mind black locust has a large white bloom cluster and is supposed to bloom the middle of March. Currently, 15 May, I am seeing Honey Locust tree blooming. It is purple and very pretty. I am not sure but have heard bees are not interested in Honey Locust. The honey referrers to the color of the wood (golden) while black locust is yellow. Black berries in my neighborhood are everything from buds to blooms in the sun. Black berry should be ending when tulip poplar starts. I think all the black raspberries go frosted. 20 May and the Mountain Laurel is starting to bloom. Usually bees don’t go to Mountain Laurel. The honey is poisonous to people but not the honey bees. If there is a better nectar source they will by pass laurel, azalea, and rhododendron. My Japanese Privit is starting to bud. No color yet but starting. This makes a dark strong honey which you would rather have between spring flow (wildflower) and sourwood. The bees can keep that honey. By removing your honey supers you can keep it out of you wildflower honey. My Tulip Poplar started blooming 15 May.

A newly observed phenomenon in my tulip poplars is: Squirrels like to eat tulip poplar buds and flowers. They get two bites and drop them. I do not have to look up to gauge what my trees are doing. I look at the mess on the ground. This year there is extremely much more on the ground. It looks like a really bad hail storm ripped through the area. I can tell it is squirrels as they have a tendency to eat through the stems (stems on the flower on the ground) while a storm rips the bloom off the stem (no stem on the flower). Last year was a good acorn year. There are probably 3x more squirrels being born over last year (going from 2 pups to 6). Momma needs to eat more!

The weather people report that the average daily temperature for April was the lowest in 10 years. I believe them. My last killer frost day was 17 April. It killed out a lot of blooming stuff and set back others. Not to mention the buds that were damaged. A lot of spring weeds were knocked down and had to regrow and set blooms again. You can’t keep a good weed down. Not the same for more woody plants and trees.

I have been finding ½ sized tulip poplar buds that were frost damaged.

The last 3 weeks of April and first 2 of may were low on rain. We go to where we were 4 inches behind. This can hurt in the spring. Now we have had 8 days of consecutive rain with 5 more scheduled. This is not continuous rain but it hurts the amount of nectar in the flowers. The nectar is diluted and or rinsed out of the flowers. It then takes a couple of good days for the nectar to build back up. It also affects the pollen making it soggy and hard to collect. Besides all this bad stuff the bees stay home and can’t collect as much food. This causes the queen to slow down laying eggs.

What can you do besides pray? Feeding syrup and pollen substitute keep the queen active. Even with feeding I noticed slower population build up. Hence, none of my spring splits are ready to collect honey at the end of May. They should be ready 2^nd or 3^rd week of May. My winter over hives are mostly another story. I have 4 good queens that reacted to the food and mediocre populations in a positive manner. The queen was laying in 2 brood chambers. With the syrup they were putting up good honey so I could draw out foundation and fill the previous drawn comb with honey. What Did I Do?.. Add another hive body. These four colonies filled 3 hive bodies each. I didn’t take any chances on making my own queens from these obviously good winter overed queens. I split each hive into 3 single hive body colonies, added mated queens where needed and let them go. That split was end of April. Now they all have one honey super working and the hive bodies that had the old queens are working on their second honey super. I have enough drawn comb honey supers to get me through the nectar flow. I would not be so optimistic if the bees had to draw comb in the honey supers.

If you don’t have enough to do, think about managing your hives. Level your bee populations. You can move frames or boxes from a strong hive to a weak hive. Or, you can just switch the entire stack of boxes. During the day when the foragers are out working, switch the weak hive with the strong hive location. Bees coming into a hive with nectar and pollen are accepted. So by evening your weak hive has thousands of extra worker bees. If the hives are to heavy to move take them apart and move one box at a time. Restack them. There will be lots of honeybees flying around. Don’t worry they will all go home to their proper location boosting your weak hive more. Put lots of hive body space on the week hive so the new bees have a place to live and work.

You can also use this time before nectar flow to draw out frames with new comb. Rotate out your older darker comb. New comb makes a healthier brood chamber. Dark comb can stain your honey darker. You just want you honey to be its normal color. By the time you get this information it will be too late.

OKAY, I want you to always have more projects than time. If you did not get new comb drawn before spring nectar flow, as soon as you think the tulip poplar is done, put foundation in the honey supers. I don’t mess with my hive bodies until after sourwood nectar flow. If you have honey supers partially filled with honey you can take out some drawn comb frames and put in foundation frames. Put the partially filled frames out where the bees can rob them. 100’ from other hives is a good “rule of thumb”. You don’t want the honey smell to start you strong hives to robbing your weak hives. This is a good use for privit honey. The robbed out honey will mostly go into wax building comb verses storing in the honey super. Wax building has a higher priority. Also, brood food honey has a higher priority than honey super. You queen should have more brood now than at the start of spring nectar flow, hence, more requirement for brood food. There is a nectar flow dearth during this in between period. All of this combined will give you nice clean honey frames to start the sourwood flow.

If you need to feed weak hives or nucs use in hive feeders. Field feeders allow bees to mix the syrup with nectar honey which is a “no-no”. Bordman feeders can be robbed by strong colonies which will mix the syrup with their honey. If you don’t have or want in hive feeders, just put an empty brood box on top of your brood chamber. Place a feeder on the top bars of the brood chamber and close it up. Baggie feeders work really well for this. You can place your bordman feeder on top of the top bars, or just place an upside down quart jar of syrup with very small holes in the lid on the top bars.

And just when you thought all was going well, SWARMING has started. Small swarms mostly, but you will loose your good queen just before nectar flow. It takes up to 45 days to go from egg to new queen laying very many eggs. And this is right in the middle of you big forager die off due to hard work. You need those new bees to replace you workers during the nectar flow. THEN, the colony swarms just after tulip poplar or sourwood flow.

The triggers for swarming are hives full of adult bees, full of brood, and full of stored honey. The foragers can’t bring in anymore nectar because there is no place to store it. The queen stops laying eggs because the cells are all full of brood, pollen, or honey. Everyone gets nervous.

Leveling populations helps reduce the bee population stimulus. Moving frames of brood and honey from strong hives to weak hives gives the strong colony more work to do while reducing the work load on the weak hive. You can pull off up to 3 frames of bees with food and mixed brood including eggs and make nucs that will draw their own queens. Good replacement bees for later or grow into new colonies for next year. Some beekeepers say have one nuc for every colony you have. Then you don’t have to worry so much about colonies that die. If you are starting your nucs from you crowded hives these are your best queens.

20 May. Went to church today. Surprising huh! Well any way, next to the ST Francis Catholic church on Hwy 76 east of Blairsville the privit hedge smell could choke a horse. This is bad news. Too early, and signaling the end of Tulip Poplar which has only been going on for 10 days. My privit is not hardly thinking about budding. Your neighborhood will be different. Just reinforces the idea we have to be ready for about anything.