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Intermediate Beekeeping -- Lesson Eight Late Winter Management Intermediate BeekeepingManagement of bees--Late Winter Objectives:
Late Winter Hive Conditions: We would like to begin this lesson with a discussion on what to expect of your bees during the late winter (January-February) in the North. This information will have to be moved back to December-- a period of 4to 5 weeks if applied to an area in the South or to an area along the Pacific California zone. Because a bulk of beekeepers in the U.S. live in a climate zone which includes periods of cold weather (temperatures below freezing) we will use that as a model and those of you who live in colder regions will need to make an adjustment of several weeks later and those of you who live South will have to make adjustments of several or more weeks depending on how far South one is for conditions to be occurring earlier. The daylight hours of January and February are getting longer. December 21 marks the day of the year with the shortest number of daylight hours. January and February will also have some days that allow the beekeeper a chance to visit the hive while the bees are flying. This generally occurs during the mid part of the day when sun shine warms the side of a hive body encouraging the bees to take flight. The following picture The cluster is made up of adult bees that emerged in the fall of the year. The large cluster provides the colony with the ability to maintain a constant temperature of approximately 92 degrees F. within the cluster. Late in January, the queen will begin laying eggs. The larger the cluster and with plentiful honey stores available, the colony will be able to maintain more eggs and thus develop much faster than a colony with a very small cluster. The cluster you are looking at was not created within the last month. It was created before the queen completely shut down egg laying last fall. Honey bees understand economics quite well. Supply and demand. If the supply of honey and pollen are adequate, they will continue to build up. In fact some stains of honey bees will begin the process of development and eat themselves out of stores and thus starve to death. Other stains seem to hold back just a bit longer, thus conserving available resources and then build up rapidly as nectar and pollen become available. Providing bees with (sugar or corn) syrup stimulates them to build up faster. The available food is used to produce more brood and thus prepare them for the nectar flow which will come on early in spring. Our fall inspection is important to help us manage bees so they are able to develop in the late winter as we see in the above pictures. Bees use up honey stores quite rapidly once egg laying begins. This is a critical time in your beekeeping management plan. All hives should be checked for honey stores. Those that are light must be fed. It is not necessary to open each hive and check frames of honey. The weight of the colony can be determined by lifting the hive from the back and tilting it forward. If a hive is feather light, you will have no problems lifting it. After checking several hives, you will develop an idea of what a good hive should feel like when tilting it. A question always comes up during these cold winter days, "Are my bees alive?" How can I tell they are alive? I see no problem to this question at all. One we can open the hive on a warm day and check for the presence of live bees. They might be easily visible like the hive in the picture. On the other hand, they may be down in the lower brood chamber. It is a simple matter of separating the two hive bodies that make up your hive and check to see if the bees are there. We are not asking you to take any frames out of the hive! Usually if you have live bees, you will find that several will come to investigate your messing with them. Other times you will hear the nice friendly roar as they are disturbed. It is when you see nothing and hear nothing that you need to become concerned a little more. Lets examine the typical winter season of a cluster of bees by looking at a chart.
Although not perfect, this graft shows some interesting things about a hive of bees during the winter months. If we assume that a colony of bees begins the winter season with a population of approximately 40,000 bees then by mid-February to March the colony population will have dropped to 1/4 of what it was in the fall. In other words, the colony of 40,000 will drop to approximately 10,000 bees or just about three pounds of bees by March. However, by January the hive (colony) should be raising more brood to replace dying bees. Notice that the amount of brood increases rapidly and that the population curve follows it but is delayed somewhat. Remember it takes 21 days from the time an eggs is laid before an adult worker bee emerges from her cell. Also in the above chart, I have tried to show what happens to the supply of honey in the hive. With 90 lbs. of surplus honey, the bees will consume it on a gradual basis until brood is being raised and then the honey stores are exhausted rapidly. In the case of the hive with just 40 lbs. of honey surplus, the honey would be exhausted by sometime in February or March before nectar and pollen sources would be available to the hive and thus result in the death of the hive if it were not supplied with feed. Also notice the gap in the red lines. This is the period of time in the hive cycle that no brood is being raised and represents the coldest and longest night period of the year. In areas of the South, the gap in the red line is much shorter and may disappear altogether. Anytime the honey supply gets below the solid black line (about 10 lbs. of honey) the hive is in danger of starvation. A hive may have honey but the bees may not be able to reach it in very cold weather and this usually happens after brood rearing has started. Bees are reluctant to abandon the brood and move the cluster to the honey stores. Points we want to make:
A beekeeper that leaves an adequate amount of honey for the bees to survive the winter usually will not have to feed bees. On the other hand, once in awhile a year will come along in which the bees do not get a honey crop or even enough honey to store for the winter. In a situation like that the beekeeper must feed colonies to help them survive. There are a number of ways to feed bees. We are going to discuss several methods after we talk about formulations of bee feed. It seems like a simple matter to explain feeding but it gets complicated by the choices a beekeeper needs to make. Will the beekeeper feed table sugar (sucrose), honey, high fructose corn syrup or something else? A word of caution: you need to check out the source of the choice you make regardless of what you think it will do. Several years ago, Canadian beekeepers bought cheap corn syrup that gave their bees dysentery. As a result, beekeepers lost a number of colonies of bees. Lets take a look at what is available:
I have known commercial beekeepers in the South to buy broken candy such as candy canes from candy plants. The canes are rejected candy and are sold by the pallet or box. An entire box the size a grown man could lay down in sells for about $25.00. The candy canes are dumped into 50 gallon drums/barrels -- wrappers and all. The beekeeper then sets these out into the beeyard and allows normal rainfall to fill the drums/barrels, melt and dilute the candy canes for the bees to use. Bees eagerly feed in these open drums. However this type of feed is going to encourage robbing, and will feed all the bees in the neighborhood. It can only be done during a period of time the bees can fly to the drums/barrels. We do not recommend this type of feeding for hobby beekeepers. Now, lets take a look at one more aspect of feeding bees. Should we feed pollen substitutes? If your desire is to stimulate brood rearing, then feeding a pollen substitute makes sense. One product on the market is called "Bee-Pro ®". It can be fed in dry form or as a soft patty. It is not expensive at about $2.00 a pound. In early spring it can be fed in a soft patty. The patty is made by mixing Bee-Pro with corn syrup or sugar syrup to make a patty about the size of a hamburger and of a consistency of dough. Recommendations are to feed about 1/2 pound per colony and replace the patty when the bees have consumed it with another one. This is done before natural pollen become available in the Spring. If bees are flying, Bee-Pro can be fed in a protected box placed in the bee yard so that bees can freely fly in and out to gather the dust like dry form. The Bee-Pro needs to be protected from moisture. One suggestion by Mann Lake is to fed the dry form in a barrel which has been placed on its side. Bee-Pro exposed to moisture will mould. You may get a call someday like the one I received several years ago. A farmer near one of my beeyards called to complain that my bees wouldn't let his pigs eat during the day. It seems they were visiting his feeding trough which held ground grain (pig food). The bees were gathering up the dust like grain and bringing it back to the hives. I had to move the yard to keep the farmer happy. I could have prevented this by using the barrel idea with dry Bee-Pro before the bees found the hog trough. How do we apply bee feed? The following page from the Mann Lake Catalog for 2000 gives one idea to use. A frame feeder is often referred to as a division board feeder. It offers the beekeeper a easy to use container that fits inside the hive taking the place of two frames--the catalog says one frame but that makes things just a bit tight. It also hold a gallon of syrup. Robbing is not encouraged because the feeder is located in the hive and the bees in the hive will be able to access the syrup both in cooler weather and at all times of the day or night.
This feeder is just about right for dumping (empting a 5 lbs. sack/bag of sugar) into it and then adding two quarts of hot water. The sugar syrup mixture can be stirred, a stick inserted to act as a float so the bees don't drown, and you are in business. Two other popular feeding options a beekeeper has are: Buckets or a boardman feeder. The boardman feeder sits outside the hive as shown in picture 2. The boardman feeder is usually plastic but older ones are made of wood. They can also be homemade. This feeder has an opening for a quart jar to screw into a lid held above the bottom board so bees can crawl from the hive to get to the feeder. It presents several problems. It has some advantages. Lets start with the problems first. Most likely more starting beekeepers lose a package of bees in early spring using this type of feeder than for any other reason. Bees can not leave the hive during cold weather to get to the syrup that could be life saving if it were located above and close to the bees. I have had a number of customers come back to me with the story "that's what they taught us to do in the beekeeping class I took!" We do not want you to take this class and believe that this feeder is adequate in cold weather. It is not! Since this feeder is outside the hive, it invites other bees to visit and robbing becomes a problem not to mention the number of ants that will come to visit as well. Once wild animals such as raccoons discover the outside feeder, you will have to chase down the jars that they drag off into the bushes. Advantages: You can see the amount of syrup the bees are consuming. You can replace jars without opening the hive. Another type of feeder offered by bee supply dealers is called a
"Miller feeder." Here we see a typical "Miller Feeder" called a Combination Pollen/syrup feeder. This type of feeder is set on top of a hive much in the same manner that a honey super is set on a hive. However, this is a waterproof container that has a slot between the two separate sections that allow bees to move from the center of the hive up into the feeder. It can be used to feed pollen or syrup. It offers the advantage of holding a large amount of syrup and being easy to fill. It does add to the equipment and storage space for bee equipment when not in use. The inner cover and top cover are placed above this feeder just like a honey super and everything again is tight and protected from the weather. The only problem with this type of feeder is the need to check it for leakage before use. They have the habit of developing leaks and one problem is the annual need to check for these leak and repair when needed well before you need them. Combining weak hives There is an old adage in beekeeping lore. "Take your losses in the fall and make your increases in the spring." It goes against some beekeepers idea of trying to save every hive but the adage is true. A great deal of time can be spent feeding weak hives that fail to build up into strong colonies the following spring or die before spring even arrives. By combining weak hives with stronger hives, the beekeeper is able to maintain the good cluster size we have talked about and because a stronger colony was chosen to add the weak colony to, the queen in the stronger colony is a more likely better stock than the weak hive's queen. Maintaining good queens is important. Failing queens are just that -- failing queens. Nothing you can do will improve upon a poor queen. Unless there is a special reason you want to save a particular queen, I would recommend killing a failing queen in the fall and combining her bees with another colony. In the early spring, a beekeeper might change the situation around by installing a new queen in place of a failing queen and give the colony the advantage of new blood and maybe a lot more vigor. How does one go about combining two hives? Fall The best method is the newspaper between two hive bodies. The newspaper will be eaten though by the bees in short order and in the time it takes for this to happen, the queenless bees of the added hive will have had time to adjust. Less fighting between bees will take place using the newspaper method. It is absolutely important to kill the queen in the hive to be combined with another strong hive. I don't like the idea of taking two weak hives and putting them together to form one new hive. This combination may still be a failure by the time spring rolls around. By spring, you will have a very strong colony which can then be split into two colonies. A new queen added to a split is just like buying a nuc. It has all the advantages of a nuc. It will have bees and brood and a new queen. It will take approximately eight weeks to develop into a full productive hive while a package will take approximately twelve weeks to reach the same level of production. Spring Another method of increasing the strength of a colony is as follows: Assume we have three bee hives located in our back yard. The hive to the far right has made it through the winter but has a very small population of bees. One of the other hives is just boiling over with bees and most likely is going to swarm. It is possible to exchange places between the two hives. The weak hive is moved to the exact location the strong hive occupied. The strong hive is moved to the weak hive location. The work force of the strong hive will enter the weak hive and strengthen it. It is commonly believed that bees coming into a strange hive will be attacked and rejected. False! These bees will return to a hive that will accept them with their nectar and pollen. These bees returning to the location which they know as home will enter the new hive and accept the new queen. Her own bees will protect her during the time the new bees are adjusting to the loss of the pheromone odor from their own queen. This happens very rapidly. Sometimes during a season, the beekeeper will come across a hive that has lost its queen. The hive of bees have failed to produce a new emergency queen and the beekeeper has no extra queens to install in the hive. It is possible to place this queenless hive above a queen excluder on another queen right hive. The beekeeper could use a sheet of newsprint to lay on the excluder before adding the queenless hive. The bees in the queenless portion will not become laying workers because there is a free exchange of bees moving up and down within the hive. Pheromones that discourage ovary development will inhibit worker bees in the queenless part from becoming drone layers. In the meantime, a new queen can be ordered. Once the new queen arrives, the hive containing the old brood chamber can be restarted. This is done by moving the lower hive with the queen below the queen excluder to a new location and the hive to receive the new queen is set up on the site to receive all the active field bees. The beekeeper should also remove two frames of brood -- shake the bees off so the queen is not accidentally moved with the frames of brood -- and place these frames of brood in the new stand of bees. The new queen can then be introduced and the colony that was hopeless is now in a position to grow and develop into a good colony of bees. It may be noted that it is possible to take a colony with no queen and just set that hive upon another hive. This is going to disrupt both colonies for a short time. However, it is done all the time by commercial beekeepers and they don't seem to worry about the fighting that may take place within the hive. In some instances these beekeepers do not even take the time to find the queens because they assume the better of the two queens will survive. But my experience indicates that the queen in the stronger group of bees is the one to survive -- not the youngest. Bees are very loyal to their queen and another queen in the hive doesn't have a chance of getting to the protected queen. In fact, the two queens may exist in the colony for some time before one of these queens disappears. But by observation, I have noticed that the strange queen is surrounded and harassed by the stronger group of bees and is balled! Balled is a term used to describe an event in which a queen is attacked and the number of bees trying to get at her form a ball around her. This ball of bees around her grows to approximately the size of a quarter. If you introduce a new queen directly into a hive without an introduction cage, you will most likely observe this behavior. The reason we leave a queen in an introduction cage is to give the bees a chance to become accustomed to the new queen and to protect the new queen from aggressive bees that might harm her. I believe a queen should be held in a cage for at least 36 hours after being introduced to a new crew of bees. I don't believe in putting a hole in the candy to speed up the introduction process. If the bees do not release a queen in several days and show no aggression to her, then the beekeeper can release her directly onto a frame of comb and observe how the bees react to her. If they are aggressive, you should be checking out why! There may still be another queen in the hive. The other queen could even be a virgin queen. The bees will prefer their own virgin queen to your new mated queen every time.
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of a hive opened on a
warm January day shows a good cluster of bees.
Note that the bees are still clustered but some of the bees are wandering around
away from the cluster. It is not wise to remove a frame of bees while they
are clustered in this fashion unless the temperatures are above 55 degrees
F. It was just 45 degrees on the day this picture was
taken. When removing a frame of bees from a hive like this, it is
wise to work from the frames on the outside where there are no bees and work
toward the cluster by removing a frame by sliding it away from the cluster so as
not to roll and crush bees.
One gallon buckets are available from bee supply companies and include a lid
usually with a fine screen for the bees to feed through. In addition,
these commercially made buckets have a capped opening to pour the syrup into the
bucket. This gives us the advantage of not having to remove the lid in
order to refill the bucket. Buckets also come in larger sizes. You
can easily make a bucket like feeder from used pails found around the
house. The lid can be punched full of small holes so the bees can get at
the syrup in the container. It is important for any bucket to be
filled to the brim. Any large air space in the bucket will l allow the
syrup to drain from the container. In picture 1 above, the bucket is
placed upside down over the inner cover hole and an extra empty super is placed
on the inner cover to protect the bucket from the weather. The top cover
is then placed on the hive and everything is sealed in for protection from the
elements. This type of feeder works well. It is placed above the
bees so they can get to it during cold weather and the bucket hold enough syrup
for several days.