Winter Prep and Nucs for 2013

Well, we are moving well into November and I am definitely behind in my Winter prep. I have probably secured about 50% of the 60-some-odd hives and hope to take care of the rest tomorrow. Like every year, I am putting entrance reducers on (even though I have never tested to see if this really makes a difference), leveling the hives and doing a last honey check. The honey check has been mostly very positive, but I do have a few hives that seem to be a bit lighter than I normally have, going into the Winter. It will be interesting to see how they do. I have about 4 supers of honey collected from the Winter checks (I break hives down to 2 or 3 supers, at most.) If necessary, I’ll use them on any hives that may need it.

One thing that I am doing differently this year is using pop-cycle sticks. In each Winter check, I remove the normal stick under the outer cover (it raises it about a half an inch or more above the inner cover, providing ventilation) and putting a half of a pop-cycle stick under each corner of the inner cover. It’s a bit more work, so I’m not sure why I decided to ‘switch up’ (I’ve not had a problem with survival using the old method). In retrospect, it was probably not a good idea and I may not do it for the remaining hives.

I have definitely learned another lesson in these checks. When you go into August, make sure you have nothing but Medium supers on the hives (if you have any honey supers at all.) I ended up leaving some of my shallow supers on because of how the bees managed their living space. Although all of them were above Queen Excluders, I had to remove the excluders and most will probably end up having brood in them now. One of the benefits of having ‘brood free’ honey supers is that you can store them without much risk at all (wax moths don’t care much for wax without pollen or brood remnants (cocoons.)

Finally, I have opened up my Nuc list (click here). I notified everyone on my waiting list from last Spring (who didn’t get a Nuc) first, so they would have first shot. Right now, I probably have orders for around 13 Deeps and 15 Mediums. I will take orders for 20 Mediums and 35 Deeps before I close down the main list and move to a ‘waiting list’ only plan. Get on now, if you’re interested.

 

VSBA Fall Meeting – Day 1

I barely made it up to the VSBA Fall meeting, but am glad that I did. The two speakers today were Jerry Hayes (from the ‘Classroom’ in ABJ) and Nancy Ostiguy, a specialist in Entomology at Penn State. Jerry spoke about the problems facing both honey bees and mankind, focusing on Monstanto’s drive to feed an ever-growing world population while also looking at ways to reduce problems for our pollinators. Nancy, on the other hand, spoke about the problems facing bees and the different chemicals/treatments that are being used to deal with them.

The interesting thing about Nancy’s talk is that she readily admitted that folks in her profession have been urging Beekeepers to put all manner of chemicals into their hives to ward off the varying problems of the last few decades. Although she did not come right out and say to ‘STOP’, she was stressing the need to be more judicial in the application of treatments. The bottom line is that researchers are starting to see that treatments are not good for the bees, as a whole.

Again, this stresses something that I have believed long before I became a beekeeper. I am not someone who stresses about ‘organics’ or trying to keep bees a ‘natural’ way, for sure. I simply believe that it is best to do what has always worked and let the bees’ genetics work out the rest. It’s certainly not a strategy that today’s commercial beekeeper could take, but I definitely think it is the only strategy for the small-scale beekeepers. In time, I believe the commercial beekeepers will be forced to move in this direction too.