What Does the Novice Beekeeper Need to Know?

Number 10

Winter Preparations

"And Why"

FIRST! Close down your hives. Reduce the entrance so that a mouse cannot get in. Maybe, you want to modify your entrances to exactly 1"x 3/8". This will keep the European (Japanese) wasps out.

Reducing the entrance to keep wind out is not as important here in the mountains where we don't have the same wind as Kansas. But, the cooling affect of the breeze does impact the work requirements of the cluster. Some hive bottom boards have a summer and winter side. The winter side has an entrance that is not quite as tall as the summer side. I have never seen a commercially built screened bottom board that is reversible. Insert the bottom slide in boards on an IPM bottom.

It is more important to keep the mice out of your hive. They will destroy a large section of drawn comb and build their fuzzy nest. They will eat some honey but come and go as they desire. In warmer areas honey bees have been known to sting the mouse to death and cocoon them in propolis. I have not seen that in any of my hives.

The European wasp's favorite food is honey bees. They will completely clean out a weak hive. This past fall (Oct 2019) was especially good for European wasps. I have never seen so many, so active. Strangely, the wasps were working the leaking bordman feeders and leaving the bees mostly alone. Then by 15 October the wasps seemed to dissipate. I see a 5-6 at a time now (20 Sept 2020) but not like the crowds earlier. Ironically fall 2018 the yellow jackets were ferocious in large numbers and then year 2019 the yellow jackets are practically non-existent. September 2020 the yellow jackets are below average in numbers.

You want to close the bottoms of you screened bottom board hives. Again, this is a wind reduction thing. You really should have closed them up by September. I notice that the bees will avoid the bottom 4 inches of the frame above a screened bottom board. This may just be unique to the cooler mountains. You want the honey bees to use all the space to store honey for the winter. Then next spring you want the queen to brood all the way to the bottom of the lower frame. When it warms up next June you can remove the closures.

A management decision to make in August: Should I requeen any hives? Should I make any splits? It is hard to grow a new queen in September. It is better to purchase a mated queen and install her in August so she has time to lay lots of eggs before October shut down. Do you want to break the brood cycle as a varroa mite control measure? We can have brooding queens 10-11 months a year. I would recommend a management induced break. Do this by not feeding the bees past Thanksgiving. December and January will be brood less. The queen will restart by the end of February.

Mid-November on a warm day you want to thoroughly inspect your hives. Do you have good population that have stored adequate food (pollen and honey)? Is the queen laying eggs adequately for the season or already stopped for the year? Is the queen in the upper or lower hive box? Do you need to reverse you bottom board? Do you need to combine a weak hive with another weak hive or into a strong hive? Do you need to rearrange the frames with honey so the bees can find the food more easily during cold spells? Do you need to reduce the size of the total hive so the bees can manage their heat more efficiently?

And you thought your work was done!

Thoroughly inspect your hives means analyzing every frame, locating the queen, and assessing the health of the worker bees. As you are inspecting look for crinkled wings on the workers. This is a sign of varroa mite problems. Locate the queen so you know she is there and healthy. Is the queen laying eggs? Is the brood pattern correct and how big is it? The brood pattern should be smaller than all summer long. Maybe, only the size of your hand. Are the workers back filling the brood area with honey? This should be occurring on the outer edges of the old brood pattern. If the workers are putting honey among the larvae and capped brood you may be feeding too much syrup too fast. The queen needs to have empty space to lay the eggs. When the feeder gets empty, wait a day or two before refilling it. There are more workers than queens and the workers can outperform the queen filling up all the cells she was going to lay into.

Have the honey bees stored adequate food to last the winter? Are there enough bees to store the honey? The bees don't have as many warm hours to work in the fall so it takes a lot of bees to make not very much honey. You need 90 lbs. of honey stored up to go from Thanksgiving to March. That is a deep hive body full of honey. If you are using 8 frame mediums you need about 3 mediums. For insurance you might use a deep and a medium. You have to account for the space that the bees are living in where there is no honey. The bees won't process nectar into honey at less than 50^o F. There may only be 2-3 hours when the inside of the hive is warm enough to work.

Is the queen laying eggs adequately enough? An old queen may not be laying eggs robustly. Is the pattern dense even though small? Are there enough nurse bees to cover the brood during the cold nights? Do you want to replace the queen with a mated queen? It can be hard to find a queen for sale in the late fall.

Is the queen in the upper or lower hive box? She will move upward (usually in the center of the box) as the cluster moves up during the winter. By having a closed bottom board and a reduced entrance you can keep the queen down as the workers put honey around her. This will allow the bottom box to get filled with honey and then start filling the top box. Remember the bees will eat their way upward throughout the winter.

Reverse your bottom board if it has two different sizes. You want the narrowest opening up during the winter. I can find no reason to have the wide opening up in the summer. It is supposed to increase air circulation. I do not see the scientific evidence of this advantage. Just use the smallest entrance all year. Make sure the screened bottom boards have card board or something closing them off. Winter is only 90 days long and the mites will be at a low point in their life cycle. Some commercial screened bottom boards appear to have two different sides to them. The screen is stapled on the "top" so it is level with the floor of the hive. If you turn it over the screen set down in a 7/8" pit below the floor. It is hard for the bees to clean the pit. It is impossible for the bees to walk through the pit carrying a dead bee to the front door. This accumulation of dead bees will increase diseases inside the hive. You can use a thin "lathe" board to fill the smaller lower opening in the hive or place the too tall normal entrance reducer in front of it.

If you have weak and strong hives you might want to combine a weak hive with another weak hive or a strong hive. The reason to combine hives is the more bees in the colony going into the winter the hotter and healthier the cluster will be. In this case choose your strongest queen to remain in the hive. Kill the other queen. Take one sheet of newspaper, place it on the top of the hive with the queen. Cut 5 one inch slots like the 5 on a dice. Then place the queenless hive on top. The bees will eat the slots larger and within 3 days the bees will all be joined up.

Another trick is to reduce the 10 frame hive to a 5 frame nuc to over winter. This is tricky because of food shortages. A double nuc might work with 5 frames over 5 frames all filled with honey.

Around Thanksgiving rearrange the frames with honey. Some times the bees will not go out to the extreme edges and corners of the colony. As they eat their way up, they leave at least the outer two frames full of honey untouched. You have a nice single hive body system. Place a second hive body on top. Pull frame 1 and 10 and place them in the center of the second story. If you have drawn comb place it in the empty spaces. Maybe the bees will fill it before January. In January when you check the bees, they may have moved up leaving more frames with honey below. Move those frames up. If you have a really strong hive you can rob one or two honey frames from it and place them in the newly created hive. The really strong hive will continue to store honey during the fall because they have lots of worker bees. The first week in January usually is warm enough to go through the hive on a thorough inspection and make adjustments.

If you have double hive bodies, make sure the queen starts the fall in the lower one with most of the frames full of honey. With a closed bottom board, she will stay down longer. Putting a second hive body or a honey super on the hive as a second layer, the bees might start filling it with honey. This extra upward space allows the cluster room to move up over the winter keeping food above the cluster. If the queen is in the upper brood box of a double set up, move the upper box to the bottom and place the bottom one over the one with the queen. You might notice that the bottom box without the queen did not have as much honey in it as the upper box where the queen was living. This is especially true if you have screened bottom boards. By moving the emptier box up and feeding syrup the bees will put more honey in it.

The bees do not need to be protecting a lot of extra space from hive beetles and wax moths. Reduce the size of the total hive to just what the bees will need. Some times you will find bumble bees wintering over in a warm honeybee hive. Honey bees will protect their "pet" hive beetles, moving them to the center of the cluster and feeding them all winter. What a weird set up!