Wow! Did summer go by fast for you? It did for me. It is time to get your hives prepared for the winter months. There is a dearth of nectar now with only neighborhood gardens to forage and knotweed where it grows by the sides of the road. I have talked with multiple beeks who say the bees are superceeding at alarming rates. I have four in my home apiary of 16 hives. This can be a problem if the drones are being kicked out of the hives early, as reported to me by Tracy Klein regarding her hives. I still have drones here in Woodinville. There are also the 3 weeks it takes for the new queen to emerge and begin laying. That doesn’t add up to enough time to prepare for winter. What can you do? First, identify the large hives. If they have 60 pounds of stored honey with even more resources, you can equalize them by taking frames of resources and capped brood to boost up the smaller hive. First ask yourself why they are small and underperforming. Is it a late swarm or a split? Is disease present? What will happen if you don’t do anything? They will continue to have problems. Like not enough foragers to bring in resources. Not enough nurses to feed the brood or more importantly feed the queen. Before you strengthen the weaker hive, make sure that what you can do for them is enough. Hint: there must be at least 4 frames of brood. The answer if there is not enough available to pump them up, is to combine. If they are diseased, do not combine them, but accept their demise. It is best to combine 2 weak hives, than to combine with a strong hive. Just to make sure you are not doing anything to damage the big hive.
The best thing is to combine the hives with a newspaper combination. If that is what you choose, take a full page of the newspaper and place it on top of the hive that has the established queen. I lightly spray the newspaper with syrup and poke a few holes with my hive tool in between the frames. Then place the weak queen colony on top and close it up for 3-4 days. Next, take off the boxes above the newspaper and peel away the newspaper. By now the two have swapped pheromones. The weak hive queen will smell the rising pheromone from the established queen and go down to fight her. The bees in the bottom box will surround the queen and suffocate her. This is called balling the queen. Now you have one hive going into winter with a better chance of survival with the additional population. You should remove any unused boxes and frames, moving all resources down from the top boxes. Best of luck.
It is time to feed feed feed. Give them pollen patties, changing to winter patties next month. It has less protein, so the queen is not going to go crazy laying. She will take a short break where you may not see any eggs. She is getting ready to lay winter bees with fat bodies. These bees, unlike summer bees who last only 3-6 weeks are hardy bees lasting 4-6 months. So, before the queen lays them you need to get rid of the mites. Make sure you have treatments that are within the temperature range. Some require that you have removed all honey first. And make sure you have enough time to do two treatments. If you don’t treat the hives, your colony is sure to succumb over the winter. Do not skip this important step of honeybee healthcare.
One last thing to know about is Ivy honey. It is plentiful in the fall and the bees bring it in like crazy. Unfortunately, it crystallizes immediately. It is impossible for the bees to go out in the winter for water, so remove it and freeze it to give it back in the spring when they can get the water needed to reconstitute it. By the way, it smells like cat piss, so don’t try to extract it!!
As you are inspecting your colonies, it is time to start moving them down into cramped quarters. They will be dying in droves and empty frames are wasting bees’ energy trying to heat the unoccupied spaces. Make sure that each box has frames of nectar or honey. The bees will start in the bottom and move up as they eat all the resources in the lowest box. They will not move over to the frames that are not right next to the cluster to eat. So, during your checkups move food next to the cluster as it is shrinking during the winter months. If the bottom box is empty of brood, then take it off and take any food frames to replace empty frames in the above boxes.
Until next time, start tucking the bees in for the winter!
Kathy Cox
Master Beekeeper U of Montana
Website: FACEBOOK.com/seattlehoneybees
Email: KCox@pugetsoundbees.org