The beekeeping season is over again – amazing how quickly it goes! It wasn’t that long ago when we were looking into hives after winter to see how the bees had fared. Now we are preparing them for winter again. There are reports of good honey crops this year which is good to hear.
On the topic of winter preparation, varroa treatment should be well under way if you intend to treat before winter, especially if using Apiguard which is temperature dependent. Around the beginning of September I normally start my winter feeding but carry out a quick inspection of each colony to see if it looks viable. If there are several frames of brood, some of them containing slabs of sealed brood, I consider the colony in good shape. If it looks dubious the best thing to do is unite it elsewhere. If there are a couple of colonies that are like this I unite them leaving the queens in each box. Let the bees decide which one they prefer. This only applies to colonies where there are no obvious signs of disease. It may also be necessary to unite colonies if increase has been made earlier in the year due to artificial swarming. Ideally the old queen should be killed and her brood united onto a hive with a current year’s queen. Younger queens generally survive the winter better.
The aim when feeding is to feed individual colonies as quickly as possible, providing around 20 to 22 kilos of stores for a National hive on a single brood box. If using brood and a half or a larger brood box then more stores can be provided. But remember to remove the queen excluder if using brood and a half. If there are frames with just foundation after the artificial swarm process, bees are reluctant to draw comb late in the season if the frame(s) are by the wall. Move the frames with foundation to either side of the nest and the bees may draw them but there is no guarantee that they will. Rather than leaving foundation in the hive remove these frames and add empty drawn frames if available.
An important point to bear in mind when feeding is not to overfeed as this will restrict comb space for the queen to lay. The winter bees are raised during the autumn months and if brood frames are full of stores there will not be enough space for the queen to lay to produce the bees that will be needed. It appears that some of last winter’s losses were due to stores taking up too much space in the brood box thus restricting brood production.
My aim is to finish feeding around the end of September as the ivy starts flowering later in the month. Bees don’t seem to overwinter too well if they have a lot of ivy honey in the brood frames. So feeding syrup before the ivy flowers prevents bees storing this honey in the brood box. After feeding I leave one super on the hive for bees to store any ivy they manage to locate which is then removed before winter.
Mouse guards should be added when the first frost is imminent. Placing them too soon can remove incoming pollen from foragers which reduces pollen availability for brood rearing. It is also a good time to add netting to keep out woodpeckers. Doing this job in midwinter in bad weather is no fun.
Regards Wally