Honey bees and beekeeping – Brennah's Backyard

Honey Bees in March

For honey bee colonies that have made it through the winter, the month of March can still be a difficult and risky time. Especially towards the beginning of the month, there isn’t much of anything for them to forage on. Despite that hinderance, the bees are busily expanding their brood rearing operation. The colony’s growing new generation requires more resources than what the relatively small (and all fully grown) winter generation needed. If the colony was successful the previous season, this should be no problem; their stores of honey and pollen would be adequate for the job.

Honey bee foraging on flowers from our winter crops — Honey bee grooming pollen off of her antennae, to be collected in her pollen baskets.

But in the case of my colonies, which were started late last year, and then faced a weirdly early start to winter, they were a bit short on pollen, which is especially important for their developing brood. The warmth of spring also came fairly early this year, and so there was plenty of time before anything was blooming outside for the bees to be out and about, looking for something to feed their brood.

honey bee with pollen on tokyo bekana flowers — Honey bee gathering pollen from Tokyo bekana flowers. Tokyo bekana is a very mild green in the mustard family that we grow during the winter.

Meanwhile in the hoophouse many of the winter crops were starting to bolt (produce their flowers), and the warmer temperatures meant that the louvres were open most of the time… So before long, the bees discovered it and were flying in through the louvres to gather pollen from the bolting winter crops. This would have been just fine, if they were able to find their way back out. Unfortunately, although they were very clever about navigating their way in, when they decide it is time to return to the hive, they tend to try to fly towards the sun, rather than retracing their path. I guess maybe they need to orient themselves for a while before they can pick out their route home? However it works, the result was that with just the louvres open, most of them couldn’t find their way out, and with the sides also opened up, some of them still found themselves stuck in the corners. (Bumble bees don’t have this problem… they seem to be extremely good navigators. They’ll fly into a corner occasionally, but usually after trying unsuccessfully to escape for a minute they just go off and try another way.)

Honey bees foraging on flowers from our winter crops

My response to this was to gather flowers from the bolting plants and arrange them in what I hoped would be a tempting display not too far from the hives (but also not too close, because that can lead to robbing, sometimes) and to catch bees that got in the hoophouse and brush them out of the corners.

Honey bees foraging on flowers from our winter crops

The bees seemed to appreciate having a nearby patch of flowers to forage on, but some of them would still start flying into the hoophouse on the warmest days. One day toward the end of March, I noticed very few bees getting into the hoophouse despite it being a warm sunny day, and there were fewer on the patch by the hives. Finally, something else was flowering for them… but what was it? I didn’t see them on the hazelnut catkins that were just starting to open. Hazelnuts are wind pollinated and offer only pollen, which they would have gone for if something wasn’t offering them a better deal. It turned out to be the silver maples back in the woods.

Silver maple flower (I don’t have pictures of the bees on the flowers because most of the flowers were way up above what I could reach, and I actually had to trek quite a ways just to find a tree with a low hanging branch with flowers I could photograph. The bees, meanwhile, probably don’t find it worth their while to come down there much when most of the flowers are up high.)

So now, as more things join the silver maples (willows are also starting to open their catkins now), the colonies will start to grow, and turn their attention toward their next season, which is the swarming season.

Pollen dusted honey bee hanging from a willow catkin

Midwinter Hive Check

This past Sunday was very warm for this time of year and I decided to check on my bees and see how they were doing. I wanted to see if it looked like they had enough honey left to make it until spring, and make sure that it would be accessible to them. Sometimes, as the cluster of bees makes its way slowly through their winter provisions, they find themselves with empty combs between themselves and the combs filled with honey. They can’t cross the barrier to get to the honey, because the cluster itself moves very slowly (especially when raising brood), and individual bees would quickly become immobilized by the cold.

This is the first time I have done a midwinter hive check, so I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. The sun was shining, but it was windy, and the wind was chilly. I knew the bees wouldn’t like that, but it was only expected to get more windy as the day went on. (Since this needed to be a quick check since it was only marginal weather for beekeeping, all the photos in this post are courtesy of my mom.)

The first hive I opened was the colony that had had the most honey going into winter. The winter cluster looked (from what I could tell having never looked at a winter cluster in person before), pretty good. It seemed like a decent size; there were still plenty of bees left. They didn’t seem very happy about having the chilly wind suddenly blowing on them, though.

I could see that they still had honey left, but it looked a little scattered, from what I could tell without really taking things apart. It also wasn’t something I could just rearrange to get the honey next to the bees. I did still have a couple of candy boards left over from last winter, though… I decided to go get those out to give to the bees, just in case.

The candy boards (and smoker). The candy boards are filled with hardened sugar, and have a mesh on the bottom that holds the sugar in place while being large enough for the bees to go through to eat the sugar.

That ended up being easier said than done; one of the candy boards was starting to come apart (I was pretty much improvising when I built them… the other one had turned out all right, though). Once I opened the hive for the second time, the bees really started coming out. Some of them seemed upset, and some of them just seemed confused, and cold. But they were all over the surface I needed to set the candy board on. Setting it down without crushing bees was going to be difficult. After I got it in place (I don’t think I crushed many bees, but it was kind of hard to tell this time) I noticed that there was a bit of a traffic jam at the entrance as all the bees that had flown out when I opened the hive tried to get back inside at once.

A traffic jam at the entrance. The entrance is reduced to a pretty small hole to keep mice out of the hive.

The second hive check went much smoother. At that point I was assuming I would have to put a candy board on for them, but they actually seemed a bit better situated than the others. I already had the candy board out and ready to go, though, so I put it on anyway.

Getting the candy board situated on the hive.

Now it has returned to cold and snowy, and the bees are back out of sight in their hives.

Honey Bees in the Winter

Honey bees flying in late November. — My honey bees flying in late November after an early cold spell.

When it gets too cold for the honey bees to leave their hives it can be much harder to tell how the colony is doing. The hives look pretty lifeless on a cold winter day. There may be some dead bees scattered at the entrance. This is actually a good sign, especially if they are recently dead and as long as there aren’t too many of them. It means there are still live bees inside, and they’re cleaning out the dead. If there’s a warm day and the bees can leave the hive, they’ll clean off the entrance board of their hive and fly the dead bees away from it.

A dead honey bee dropped off into the snow by another member of her colony. — A dead bee dropped off into the snow by another member of her colony.

Another sign to look for when there’s snow on the ground is little flecks of yellow in the snow: bee poop. Bees do not poop inside their hive unless they are sick or it stays very cold for a really long time and they just can’t get out.

Honey bee poop on snow — Bee poop on the snow

The snow also seems to melt a little faster right on the entrance board when the bees are doing well. Other than that, you can’t tell much unless you get a really warm day and are able to take a peek inside, or at least see bees flying around the entrance. But for most of the winter, the bees will be hidden inside their hive, clustered together around the queen, vibrating their flight muscles to generate heat, and eating the honey they stored away during the summer. And then, at some point, usually around mid February here (if not even earlier), the queen will start laying eggs and the bees will have to raise the temperature inside the cluster (to above 90˚F) because the larvae need it extra warm to survive.

Prepping the Honey Bees for Winter

At this time of year, honey bees can be reluctant to build comb. Comb takes a lot of resources to build, and empty comb is not of value to a colony heading into winter. (It is actually a liability.) So bees don’t want to build new comb if they might not be able to fill it with honey before winter, and usually this time of year they are focusing on filling the comb they have with nectar. Wax that the bees do produce is often used to cap cells of ripe honey or even elongate cells intended for honey so that they can pack the space they’re already using with even more.

honey bee making wax — Honey bee making wax. Honey bees secrete wax from glands in their abdomens after eating large amounts of nectar or honey.

At the moment, the little colonies I started this summer are still quite… little. They don’t really have enough comb to fit the amount of honey they require over the winter. I actually have a box of comb that I can give each of them as soon as they each finish filling the box they are in now. (The reason they have to finish filling the box they’re in is due to differences in hive part compatibility.) In the meantime, I have been feeding them ‘bee tea’, which is a sugar syrup made with herbal tea to help them digest the sugar. It is earlier in the year than I would normally feed them, since I only feed sugar if they are likely to starve if I don’t. The goldenrod and asters are still on their way; in the past, I’ve fed them after most of the nectar sources are done for the year and they haven’t collected enough. This year, I’m feeding them to produce the comb to be able to store enough.

honey bees on mint flowers — My view while harvesting mint for the bee tea. There were lots of honey bees foraging on this little patch of mint. The bee in the foreground is an older forager, as her slightly frayed wings and slight bald patch on her back indicate.

Herbs for the bee tea: yarrow, sage, mint, lemon balm, chamomile, stinging nettle. I also had hyssop, but I realized that it’s buried under the sage in the photo. The chamomile and stinging nettle are the dried herbs on the edge of the photo.

The recipe for the bee tea comes from the website of Spikenard Farm Honeybee Sanctuary.

https://spikenardfarm.org

https://spikenardfarm.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Healing-Tea-for-Honeybees-2_15_15.pdf

Sights from the Bee Hives

I recently got a couple new colonies of honey bees. These were nucleus colonies, which are just tiny honey bee colonies in small (and more portable) boxes. They rapidly outgrow such small boxes, so moving them into new boxes (and looking them over and taking photos while I was at it) was my first task. Here’s a bit of what I encountered.

honey bee eggs and just hatched larvae — Honey bee eggs (mostly on the left) and just hatched larvae. The liquid around the larvae is their food; probably royal jelly. (All larvae are fed royal jelly until they are three days old, after three days, only queens are fed royal jelly.)

The black background to these photos is foundation, a template that the bees construct their comb on inside the hive. Foundation is a sheet of wax, or plastic (or wax coated plastic) printed with a hexagon pattern that the bees draw out into comb. In this case it is black plastic, which is often helpful for beginners to be able to see the bee eggs and young larvae, which is useful in assessing the health of the colony. (You actually literally have to train your eyes to see them; I had good eyesight and knew what I was looking for when I started, but I simply wasn’t able to see them through my veil so I would take it off temporarily. Now I can see them just fine through my veil.)

honey bee eggs and young larvae, with two eggs in one cell — Honey bee eggs and just hatched larvae. One cell contains two eggs. Very young queens sometimes do this when they are still learning how to lay eggs properly.

honey bees on comb — Close up of a few bees on the comb. The light in this picture highlights their fur (they even have fur on their eyes). Young bees are especially fuzzy.

honey bees with eggs and just hatched larvae — Honey bees with eggs (mostly on the left again) and just hatched larvae.

worker honey bees with queen — Worker honey bees surrounding their queen. This queen is marked with a white dot on her back (this is also something that can be helpful for beginners to be able to spot the queen among the thousands of worker bees, but it can also be helpful for people who have a lot of hives, or are breeding queens and need to keep track of them more carefully).

Winter Flights

Today was a warm day; in the upper fifties, and the bees were flying. They seem to appreciate a chance to come out during the winter (even if it isn’t technically winter yet, it is for them now). They usually start coming out of their hives at around fifty degrees, but the wind, sun, clouds, and their own level of need all have an effect, so there is no exact temperature that draws them out. If it is a sunny, calm day and they’ve been cooped up for a long time, they may well come out if it is only just above freezing.

Honey bees gathered at a crack between hive boxes in February 2016.

A few days like this, scattered throughout the winter, are definitely beneficial for the bees. Bees are cleanly creatures, and they don’t poop inside their hives. Warm days allow them to leave and make ‘cleansing flights’ which is the term for the flights they make in winter solely to relieve themselves. Warmer days also allow them to clean out any bees that have died while they are in their winter cluster. There are always some bees dying in a normal honey bee colony, but in winter, they almost always die inside the hive, and then have to be removed.

Honey bees at the entrance to their hive in January 2016. The mesh at the entrance is sized so that bees can come and go freely, but mice cannot.

Too many warm days, though, can be a bit of a problem. The bees seem to want to take advantage of any days that are warm enough for flying, but if there aren’t any nectar or pollen sources, there isn’t much for them to do and flying every day can actually shorten their lifespans. The winter bees have to live longer than the summer bees since the colony takes a break, for a month or two, from raising new bees to replace them. Part of the reason the winter bees are able to live longer is that they fly less. Their wings, which wear out eventually, are one of the limits of their lifespans. Another problem is that if the weather is not cold, but still chilly, every bee that ventures out runs a risk of getting chilled and not being able to return. Chilled bees become sluggish, and eventually unable to move. They can be revived easily enough, simply by warming them up, but they usually wind up stuck somewhere where they can’t get warmed up. Sometimes I find a chilled bee somewhere, and breathe on her a bit to warm her up. (They don’t seem to like this; they usually slide their stingers out, but they can’t really do anything since they can’t move.) That usually warms her up just enough to start flexing her flight muscles and eventually revive herself.

I learned about most of this after noticing that my bees seemed to have more trouble with warm winters than cold ones. I knew they had issues with moisture during those winters, but I began to suspect that the warmth itself might have been a factor. This was what I found out when I researched it, but I still wonder if there may be something more to it. The bees that did survive one of those warm winters seemed to have a lot of mites (and the viral diseases associated with them) that following spring. Normally in spring, most of the mites have died off over winter, resetting things for the bees. Then, their numbers gradually increase over the year until winter once again resets their numbers. (Assuming, of course, that they don’t increase too fast, and kill the colony.) So, are warm winters not enough to reset the mite levels for the bees? I don’t have enough winters or colonies worth of experience to say for sure, only enough to notice a pattern that makes me suspicious. In any case, it is enough to make me take the precautions I would take if I knew that to be true.

My very active warré colony in February of 2016 – one of the warm winters

So far this winter, there have been some warm days, but it doesn’t seem to be an overabundance of them. It’s still early, though.

Tea for the Bees

The final fall flowers are still in bloom, but the time for the honey bees to be able to collect large enough amounts of nectar to make a significant amount of honey has passed. At this time of year a prosperous honey bee colony should have at least fifty pounds of honey stored away for them to eat over the winter. If not, they may run out of food before spring. For me, most years, making sure my bees have put away enough honey to last them the winter is a relatively minor concern, at least compared to trying to make sure the bees are healthy and will stay dry come winter.

Honey bees bringing pollen back to their colony

This year, though, as I was checking the hives at some point, I noticed that they were too light, which told me that they didn’t have even close to the right amount of honey. At the time there was still one more ‘honey flow’, which is a source of nectar from which they can make a significant amount of honey, but I knew that it wouldn’t be enough. One colony hadn’t even made enough comb to hold that much honey, and comb building takes even more nectar than honey does. That colony had done quite a good job, considering the unlucky start it had. When I was installing the bees, a lot of the bees got confused and most of them wound up in one hive, while the other hive had a very small number of bees. When ‘packages’ of bees are sent through the mail, they aren’t necessarily related to each other or to their queen. Installing the package involves taking the queen in her cage and putting her in the hive and then pouring the rest of the bees in around her. (She is in a cage to protect her from the rest of the bees, who may not have accepted her yet.) A number of bees may take flight when they are being poured, and because they don’t have any strong loyalty to the scent of their fellows yet, they will land at whatever hive they find first and join it. Since I was installing two at once, that gave them two possibilities and a lot of them were in the air. When a bee finds a hive after being lost and confused for a bit, she will often start fanning her scent at the entrance, to help other lost bees find their way. As more find one than the other and start fanning, the remaining bees in the air are more likely to also find that hive before the other. My early attempts to even out this disparity only switched their fates, and the hive that originally had so many now had as few as the other had had before.

This slow start left them with no way to both store away enough honey to feed them over winter and raise enough bees to generate enough body heat to keep them warm. They opted to raise a lot of bees first, which, if they had had enough time, would have given them a large enough workforce to gather plenty of nectar. They were still building comb long after most colonies stop for the year (since they usually don’t want to be stuck with a half finished project when winter arrives).

I was glad that they were able to raise enough bees, since if they hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to help them. And I was impressed with how healthy the bees they were raising looked, especially compared with the other colony. I decided I needed to start feeding them. Honey is the ideal thing for bees to eat, but I didn’t have enough honey left over to feed them all honey. The next best thing is usually to feed bees sugar syrup. Sugar does not have all the nutrition of honey though, so it isn’t ideal. I have a recipe for a bee tea, which is sugar syrup made with an herbal tea instead of water. I decided to feed them the tea since the herbs make the sugar easier to digest and provide a bit more variety of nutrients for the bees. I made it from herbs growing here, some of them wild, some of them planted on purpose. I can’t remember now where I got the recipe, but it originally comes from Spikenard Farm Honeybee Sanctuary. https://spikenardfarm.org

https://spikenardfarm.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Healing-Tea-for-Honeybees-2_15_15.pdf