Bee Chronicles

7 Jan 2020

First week of December 2019 a bear crossed my drive way. Hibernation has not started yet. I like hibernation to be in full swing by Thanksgiving. It is a little cooler than average.

Third week of December 2019 a different bear is trying to get to my bird feeder on the deck. While scaring the bear off I find a possum on the deck railing waiting his turn. Whacked him with a broom. The wildlife is hungry and roaming around.

The Witch Hazel bushes bloomed about the 15^th of November 2019. For the past few years 22 Nov. was good bloom time. The bad news here is it frequently blooms in December but is supposed to bloom in January.

Just before Thanksgiving I had a Forsythia flower bloom. Not the whole bush. Forsythia is Easter time.

The Pussy Willows are in full bud (Christmas time). This is not too strange. If it stays cool it will bloom in January. The pretty smooth "catkins" are the buds. When they look raggedy the pistols and stamens come out and they are in bloom. The bees love pussy willow flowers.

My jonquils are one inch tall. These bloom in March. They are frequently 4" tall under the snow.

Christmas Eve Day (24 Dec 2019) I inspected my bee colonies. Seven are still alive. Six full of bees and frisky (mad). They all have honey (enough for now). I will have to put feed out early in January. This is more as an insurance than absolute emergency. Two colonies have died. Why??? I added two colonies from a beekeeper that went out of business. The dead colonies gratefully provided stored honey in the comb that I can transfer to the live hives.

The not frisky hive is a small cluster of Russians about the size of a baseball. The queen is brooding. The small cluster is not too odd for a Russian colony. They are known to winter over with a smaller cluster. The brooding is rare. They usually start later than the other honeybees.

When I start feeding, I will try something new (to me). I will feed real pollen to the bees. I will carefully sprinkle it on the top bars near the clusters. I want the bees to think this is stored bee bread. They will know the difference but I want the pollen to be in the approximate location as the stored bee bread that the bees would eat in the late winter. You can get pollen from some bee supply dealer or the health food store.

The purpose for feeding real pollen vs. pollen substitute is: The bees have stored fat in their "fat bodies". This came from eating pollen last fall. At the end of winter the bees recall this fat and use it for their body nourishment during the worst of times. The lack of the fat in the fat bodies may be one reason the bees seem to starve to death when they have adequate honey stores in close proximity. The "fat bodies" work like a mammal's liver. With no fat in the "fat bodies" this function is lost. This reduces the honeybee's resistance to pathogens that normally and continuously attack the bee. The fat healthy bee can resist this attack but the bee with no fat is weakened.

The blooming season seems to be off. The cool (cold) weather has started early this year (2019). Normally, there is a warm week the first week of January when I check my bees. Doing a frame by frame inspection, looking at food stores and queens. This year that weather was here for Christmas. Now, has the weather cycle moved forward 2 weeks or will there be another warm spell early in January. Last January 2019 all my queens were brooding in January. Then the end of January got cold and they stopped and were not brooding first week of February. By the End of February 2019, the queens had restarted egg laying.

Now, for those who have not been beekeepers for 30 years, this whole pattern has moved forward 4-6 weeks. It used to be (1970's) that the middle of January to the middle of February was the coldest and snowiest period. Now we have an occasional storm. The cold (below 20^o high for the day) weather seldom lasts a week. I don't believe in that global warming, but something has changed.

Four and Five years ago our bee packages were delivered to Blairsville the first week of April and there was 3 freezing nights following that delivery date. Tough to install packages.

Three years ago, the delivery date was move into the last week of March because it was so warm in South Georgia. It was adequately warm here to install the packages.

Last year the packages came the first week of April and everything was okay. Who knows what to expect this year? I think early April has become a good delivery date for here in the Mountains. The chances of "too cold" are low. If need bee you can store your bees in the garage, basement, or kitchen for 3 days while it warms back up.

If we take delivery of the packages very late in April to guarantee good weather, the colonies will not have enough time to expand adequately for the spring nectar flow.

Nucs expand faster than packages. Not really. The nuc was started as a package and then grown for 4-6 weeks before delivery to you. So, you can grow your own nucs and the colony size will be the same on the same day. However, if you start your colony from a package something can go wrong and the queen dies. If you buy the nuc, the queen will be alive. Hence, it appears to be a better bet to buy the nuc. I usually have some queen problems in the first 90 days of introducing a package into a hive. I just expect I will have to purchase some queen and am ready to do that.