Winter Feeding | Beekeeping in Richmond, Virginia

Let’s Experiment

Last Spring, there was a lot of consternation about slow build up. Of course, this was only on my part, as the bees went about their business with no worries whatsoever. Basically, both of my hives were building up at about the same pace, but I had spoken to (or emailed) other beekeepers in the area that were seeing more mass (more bees in their hives.)

During one such conversation, back in the Spring of 2010, a beekeeper from Buckingham mentioned that some folks in his neck of the woods would put light syrup on their hives in February to give the hives a jump start. The general theory is that you put a weak sugar-water solution (1 part Sugar to 2 or 3 parts water) on the hives. This makes the bees think that the nectar flow has started and they begin to ‘build up’ (a term that basically means the Queen starts to lay a bunch of eggs). By the time the real nectar flow starts, they will have a TON of bees and really be able to sock away the honey.

Since last Spring, I ran into a wizened beekeeper from yesteryear who put out buckets of syrup water in his apiary to get an early build up. As always, I am fascinated by simple approaches and decided to give it a whirl in one of my outwards.

Bees Eating Syrup from a Dog Waterer — Dog-waterer Turned Bee Feeding Station

I mixed up a batch of weak sugar syrup (10 lbs Sugar, 3 Gallons Water) and poured it into one of my old dog waterers. On Sunday, around 11 am, I placed it in a central area between the hives (it was as much as 40 yards from two of the hives and 30 yards from the other three). By late afternoon (right before I went to watch the Steeler’s get a whooping- booyah!), the bees had found it and were on it pretty thick. During lunch today, I checked in on them around noon and they were really putting the stuff down.

It will be interesting to see how this works. I am pretty sure that I never even considered feeding from outside of the hive (now or in the Summer) as I did not want to feed the feral bees. Now, I am having second thoughts. This was very easy and it did not cause any robbing (like it does, on occasion in late Summer, when the syrup is placed within one hive.) I may not ever feed in the Winter again (we’ll see how it goes with this experiment), but I will most definitely feed outside again (until such time as I figure out a good reason not to.)

Close Shot of Bees Feeding in February — Bee Jamboree at the Feeding Hole

I actually checked one of the hives and it appeared that they were storing it around the brood nest. I am torn about this behavior. I have a gut feeling (no evidence) that honey from real nectar is much better then my sugar syrup (even if I do have Better Bee in it.) This is the roughest time of the year for a bee, so why give her second rate food (assuming there is a difference between nectar and syrup)? But, on the other hand, it gives me a bit of comfort to know that they are socking away some stores exactly where they’ll need it if (quite honestly, I should say when) it gets cold again (at the edges of the cluster.) But, on the other other hand (is that three hands?), are they filling up cells that the queen might want to lay in? Ha! Who knows. The bees know and that’s all that matters.

Finally, I also put pollen patties on each of the hives in this yard (if brood rearing is going to ramp up, they are going to need some pollen! – well, they may need it if they were lazy last Fall and didn’t put enough away!) This brings me to my last observation for today – protein from the bird feeder! I had heard of it, but had never seen it. Folks have said that bees will sometimes scour bird seed, looking for a few bits of protein in the stray pollen. This past Friday, I found one of my bees (well, a bee in my yard anyway) doing just that! She was running in and out of the feeder, filling her legs up with some dust substance (which was pollen, no doubt – probably not the best, but still worth collecting in her mind.)

Bee In Bird Feeder Closeup — Yum! Bird Feed Pollen!

Are Your Bees Doing Ok?

As mentioned previously, my periodic hive checks in 2011 have (so far) indicated a nice honey store left on all hives (except the Westover Hive, which I cannot currently check – they moved up to the attic in early January…) But, I will continue to check on them, every time it gets into the low 40’s. The bees have had a cold Winter, following a fairly dry Autumn in the Richmond, Virginia area. They are at risk.

As an example, David Stover, an active Top Bar Hive beekeeper in ERBA, sent me the following email today. He agreed to let me post it here, for the folks that check in. I think it is a great Alert for us all – get out there and have a peak. Make sure your bees have some honey (and if they don’t, David also offers a quick recipe to get some food into the hive.)

I received a call from a beekeeper that had just discovered his hive had died out on Monday. I went over to help him take a look. Almost zero honey. The bees starved and froze. Lots of pollen, not that it did them much good. So this morning I made up a batch of Fondant. Checked my hive at home which had stored up what I thought was way more than enough to see them through the winter and it was almost empty of honey. A few frames with a little capped honey here and there but certainly not enough to make it through. I smeared fondant into the combs of three frames both sides, and the bees were on it pretty quickly. I did see a few frames partially filled with wet nectar so the bees have been collecting nectar somewhere when it has been warm enough.

I checked four other hives and all but one were in the same condition. The one hive that was fairly small had a good amount of capped honey. Just as a precaution I added some fondant to that hive anyway. The smaller hives I went through completely and did not see any signs of brood and not much pollen. All hives now have some fondant to help out.

So if you haven’t checked your hives you might want to take a look this weekend. Sunday is supposed to be in the 50’s and sunny.

Fondant Recipe:

1 part water
4 parts sugar
1/4 teaspoon white vinegar
I also added 1/4 teaspoon Honey-B-Healthy (just because I had some)

Put into big sauce pan. Bring to a boil while stirring the whole time to prevent the sugar from burning. Leave it to a gently boil for 5 more minutes or until it reaches 234 F. test with a candy thermometer if you have one. Take it off the heat and let it sit until it cools to 200 F. With an electric hand held soup mixer or whatever mixer you have beat the mixture until it turns sort of white and has lots of air bubbles in it (took about 5 minutes). Pour into a shall container and let it sit undisturbed until cool.

In Langs you can put it on top of the frames over the brood/cluster in a shall dish or on wax paper. (put some sticks in it so the bees don’t get stuck)

In a TBH I either smear it into empty comb or put it in a shallow narrow plastic dish, cut to fit, and slide it on the floor of the hive as far in as I can get it.

Thank the Lord for Good Weather

Last Summer, I set up one of my experimental apiaries down at Westover Plantation. I now actually have 7 daggone apiaries, if you include my home yard. Nobody needs this many apiaries, unless you’re trying to make money I suppose. In an ideal world, I would have all of my hives in one location, so that I could inspect/compare all of them with one trip. But, there are (at least) a couple of reasons to expand out beyond that initial apiary.

To begin with, if you want to try raising Nuc’s (especially those started after June 1), it is very hard to do so in a yard with established hives. The minute it gets dry (which seems to be in June these days, in my neck of the woods), the strong hives pretty much ravage the small Nuc’s. It’s really depressing to see, so I now allocate my home yard as my Nuc yard.

The second reason to try other locations is forage. During my first year, when both of my hives were in my backyard here in Varina, Virginia, my cousin started a couple of hives down in Charles City, Virginia, on land adjacent to my family’s farm. His hives really put away more honey then my two did. At first, I worried that I had a bunch of lazy bees, but I decided it was more likely that his bees simply had better forage. Even though my cousin’s land was only about 30 miles away, it was receiving substantially more rain then Varina. This was likely to be the problem.

So, I decided to prop up several apiaries, with one, two or three hives, in both Henrico and Charles City, to test it out. My goal is to watch how these apiaries perform and eventually reduce my outyards down to 3 at the most. But, that’s what I’m saying now and I seem to change my mind more often then my wife when it comes to bees!

At any rate, all of this leads up to the main activity of this weekend. My bees down at Westover Plantation were backed up against a small patch of trees that held an old elm tree last year. After I put my bees there, the elm tree fell over (my bees collect honey AND clear land, apparently.) Without this elm tree, the little patch of trees has little value and the farmers wanted to clear it to expand their nearby field. To get it ready for planting, they would probably need to get this done by early March. That meant I needed to move my bees in the Winter!

I have moved bees before several times, but never in Winter. The one problem with monkeying with your bees in the Winter is that you can accidentally kill or damage the Queen. Since it is the Winter, your bees stand next to no chance of getting a new queen going (they might not even have eggs the right age.) But, I had to move these bees and could not wait until Spring. I decided to wait for a warm day and the good Lord gave me one (two) this weekend. I moved them both and even dropped a pollen patty on them to give them a little jump start (they both have a ton of honey, as my back will verify, but I really have no idea how much pollen has been stored.) As a bonus, the owners of Westover Plantation gave me a lot of their bee gear (they had tinkered with bees years ago), which amounted to 3 or 4 full hives with honey supers and frames! All in all, this trip was a big success.

Unfortunately, bad news awaited me back home in one of the double nucs. No activity was emerging from one side, so I cracked her open and found one side to be dead. I immediately did a postmortem and discovered that they had died of starvation. I could even see little crystals of sugar in some of the comb. Apparently, they tried to use the sugar that I put down for them, but probably needed moisture to break it down. The bottom line is that they did not store enough honey in their frames to make it. There are steps that I could have taken (probably, not for certain though) that would have helped them to survive, but that’s the point. I took on this challenge to learn and this experience will be used to form my final conclusions come late March or so. One thing about this Nuc is that it was the only one to hold a non-local queen (it was one of the pair that I purchased last Summer – one for the Apache hive and this one.) This may or may not have had a part in it (maybe the queen rearer medicates and feeds his bees year round, so they simply could not handle it in my yards), but I am actually not that upset about losing this queen. It does not have the value (to me) of my local queens.

For now, my primary plan is to look forward to February. According to the forecast, we have a few days ahead of us that might once again reach nice temperatures in the day. I might use these to get a little more active with my remaining Nuc’s. I will probably also begin a little light feeding (1:1 or .5:1 Sugar:Water mixes) at one or two apiaries, just to see what happens. Well, more on that later.

Encouraging Activity During a Warm Spell

After speaking with David Stover and making a forum post at Beesource.com, my feelings about the activities in front of my hives have swung the full gamut. There is no fighting at all and both of them are actually bringing in pollen at this point. I even noticed one gal doing a crazy dance on the landing board before zipping off to the South and East. This is clearly just part of the normal progression of things and is a great sign. The hives are alive and seemingly doing well!

Yesterday, I only watched them from the outside and noticed tons of activity again. Of note, the weak hive was eating up the syrup like mad. I am glad that they were at it, as several are floating in the reservoir where they eat and I would like them to eat up this syrup so that I can clean out that mess (although most times they clean them out – but it seems to happen less frequently in the winter.)

First January Hive Check

It’s been a tough few weeks with miserable temperatures and a couple of spots of snow. It’s really been an unusual Winter…at least when compared to the last few years. Regardless, I was able to check my hives today and all is good, despite my constant hand wringing.

To begin with, we had a couple of bee meetings this week. The first was ERBA’s monthly meeting, which really did not have much on bees that hit home for me. But, the Richmond Beekeeper’s Association had a discussion from 1st year beekeepers and their adventures. The main thing that I picked up from the folks that spoke here was that a purchased package of bees must usually outperform a nuke of bees in the first year. I think Tom Fifer mentioned something about this back in the Fall of 2008, but I do not think I really understood the difference until I saw what these other fellow’s hives did.

To begin with, they picked up their bees in late March, whereas I picked my nuk’s up in the middle of May. I really think this must have been the biggest difference, as one fellow was actually making splits with his bees in August! But, one of the fellows lost his whole hive! He went out to check them recently and found them in a tight cluster, all dead. Kenny (who is also a member of the Richmond Beekeeping Association) said that they starved to death. He also said the problem was the Queen. This circles back around to my initial strategy of getting local bees. Hopefully, they will prove hardier (over the long haul) then these other bees. I forgot to ask the newbs if they treated their bees, as I do not treat mine with anything except for powdered sugar and a heavy dose of my own ineptness. One of these days, I will purchase a package or two just to experience that kind of thing.

But, on to the good news. When I went out to check the hives, I initially glanced at the strong Hive (they face East and I come from the West, whereas the weaker hive faces South, so it is harder to see the landing board until I am up on it.) Not much was going on here, but when I got to the weak hive, I found all sorts of bees flying about and several on the landing board. I am assuming that these are some orientation flights, but regardless of the reason, it was great to see them moving about!

When I took the top off of Hive 2, I found them busily sipping up the syrup that was still in the feeder. Several were floating in the liquid. At some point, I need to figure out how to get them out of the syrup. I carefully removed the feeder to get a look inside. I was happy to see that the cluster had not already moved up into the top deep. I had been worried that their lack of stores would mean that they would be nearly out and already eating at the last of their stores. Instead, they had yet to touch any of their capped honey in the top deep (which is only about 5 frames worth, but is better then nothing!)

I placed several pieces of pollen substitute on the top of the upper deep and left it at that. All in all, I am very impressed with Hive 2.

Hive 1, what appeared to be the stronger hive last Fall, had much less activity. A few bees were hanging around on the south side of the hive, but only one or two flying about. This may be due to the orientation of the hive. It faces East, whereas Hive 2 faces South. At any rate, I opened these gals up and found a few hanging on top of the upper Deep. From what I could tell, these bees were also primarily in the lower Deep. But, I really needed a flashlight to look down in there and be sure. I hope to check on both hives with a flashlight tomorrow.

This hive has received no food since Fall, so I decided to put a single layer of paper down over a portion of the top and dump some sugar on it. I gave it a misting with the water bottle and immediately received a couple of dive bombers attacking me at every spot. Now that I have this food on (I also gave them some pollen substitute), I am much more comfortable about everything.

All in all, this was a resounding success. I look forward to a brief look tomorrow (with my flashlight!) and will report back then.