Winter Beekeeping and Bee School Updates

Reader Contribution by Tia Douglass
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Happy 2015! Hope you and your bees are doing well. It’s been a crazy winter so far. This past autumn the bees weren’t able to stock their hives as well as I had hoped. I usually depend upon the goldenrod for the girls’ winter stores, but goldenrod season started out too wet resulting in watered down nectar that the bees didn’t want and ended on a dry note so that no nectar was being produced. There were actually only about four good goldenrod nectar collecting days, but during that time every bee, wasp, butterfly and what-have-you pollinators were covering those lovely yellow blossoms!

Went into winter with only three hives. . .which is a great disappointment. . .but I made sure those hives were strong. Two of them were combines. So I’m hoping in the spring I’ll be able to split them. That will take me back up to five, and then I plan to order a couple of nucs to attain my max of seven (after that it ceases to be a hobby and becomes work!).

Haven’t been able to get into the hives to check stores since it’s been such a ridiculously cold  winter (for this area). Usually, my girls get to fly at least a couple of days a week, but between rain and cold, there’s been very little flying going on. So just in case, I put on hivetop feeders with 2:1 syrup in them. At first the girls were sucking it down and I went through about 40 pounds of sugar in the first couple of weeks! Now, however, they’ve stopped taking the syrup, so I’m guessing they’ve filled up the storage sites down below. Nonetheless, I check the feeders every few days to make sure they don’t go dry. Starvation during winter is the biggest danger and heartbreaking to discover if you don’t keep on top of it. So every couple of days (including today) I quickly lift the lid and take a peek. I also put my ear to the box and knock. . .three sharp raps. So far, my girls are responding with a hearty hum. In one hive (the nuc that I had moved into a deep as I reported last time) when I knocked I heard the queen! Now that really makes me want to get into that hive because you don’t usually hear the queen quack unless she’s still in a queen cell or if there are queen cells she’s looking to locate so she can sting them to death before they hatch! I dare not open the hive though, lest I chill the brood. So I’m waiting patiently for an above-sixty-degree day. When I see the girls out flying, that’s when I’ll go in!

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