A Seasonal Guide
The beekeeper’s year
Spring – Expansion and reproduction
Colony growth begins in January / February, when the queen (Q) starts laying many more eggs, preparing the colony for swarming or the spring nectar flow. March is critical, as they have more brood than bees and may run out of stores.
Swarming. The colony may start preparations showing no signs until it is inevitable.
Ornamental ribes
First Inspection
By March, the colony should be sizable. After a long winter of reading bee books, peering inside your hives is finally possible; this glorious time happens when the ornamental Ribes flowers. Choose a sunny day, at least 14 degrees C and little wind. There should be plenty of bees flying. Check for the presence of young larvae; see if there are threats to their health and that they have sufficient stores and space; just that, nothing more. Only inspect for a few minutes, and if they stop flying, it is time you had a cup of tea.
April is the start of the swarming season, although if a colony comes out of winter with plenty of stores, it may swarm in March. So, if a colony is strong enough to swarm, inspect it every week. If there are any signs of varroa treat it. The infestation may be small now, but it will grow astronomically in May when drones emerge.
Spring Nectar Flow
This does not occur where I live
Swarm management
Achieving a large colony is like walking a tightrope. To ensure plenty of bees for the chief foraging season in June/July, they need plenty in May, which requires plenty of bees in March and April. But the more bees, the greater the risk of swarming.
A colony whose build-up nose-dived because it swarmed will produce little honey on its own, but if united with another mediocre colony, it should do well. If your bees are the sort that always swarm, what to do? The answer is to have young Qs and to simulate a swarm early in the year before the significant build-up begins. This may or may not work, but it is worth a try. To get a mated queen by the middle of May, you could try this:
Stimulate the colony. Give a pollen substitute if March is mild and no pollen is going in. Only give syrup in warm weather, above ten degrees.
To trap varroa consider inserting drone combs on the edges of the brood nest in March. If you have no frames of drone comb, put some frames with starter strips above the brood box in March. If the drones emerge before you remove the combs, the manipulation backfires and causes varroa levels to soar.
If you live in Southern England, and you have bees that are swarmy, split the colony in early-April or as soon as they are strong, which in a poly hive means ten frames of brood covered with bees. I guess at least eight frames with a wooden hive (The development of colonies in wooden hives are two to three weeks behind poly hives).
Give the split some drawn comb and 3–4 frames of mostly sealed brood. A couple of days later, feed them. Whilst the home colony is waiting for a new queen, rather than caring for brood, they make some honey from plants like dandelions and Oil Seed Rape (OSR).
Queen rearing
Wally Shaw reckons queens raised early in the year, before the end of June, are more likely to survive the winter. This is because drones produced later in the year have a more significant viral load and transmit Deformed Wing Virus (DWV) when they mate. However, there is evidence that a colony headed by an autumn Q is more likely to survive the winter.
Dearth
Between the spring and summer honey flows, in June, there may be no nectar available, and honeybees (and hence other bees) are at risk of starvation. Don’t wait for the bees to get ratty and keen to rob. At the beginning of June, check they have enough stores. If there is insufficient pollen, the nurse bees cannibalise open brood. A colony can have loads of brood one week, but practically none the next. If you spot a dearth, give them a dribble of sugar syrup in a contact feeder to keep the queen laying. Brood born in mid-May, is needed for the “big push” in July.
Basic Assessment: Aware of the need to add supers and the timing of the operation.
Summer
How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!
By Isaac Watts
Time of Plenty
July is usually the chief foraging month. Add another super when one is almost full of bees. This is called supering. Whether you add another super to the bottom or top of the existing supers makes no difference. If you super too late, the bees will draw comb wherever possible or prepare to swarm. To get comb drawn in a wooden hive, put frames of foundation above the warm brood nest. Just where the bees are happy to store pollen, which is the last thing you want in a nice super. Happily, bees in poly hives draw comb in the top box. Some people cease regular inspections in July.
Processing nectar—For bees to create one frame of honey requires three times as much space to cure it.
There are several sources of nectar in August and September. Ivy produces a pale honey that granulates rapidly and must be extracted hastily. I think a mouthful tastes like mouldy sweetcorn, but it improves with age. Granulated ivy honey is not popular with the bees as they have to lick it out rather than drink it like runny honey. It is commonly believed that ivy honey may not granulate if you feed sugar syrup whilst the ivy is in flower. Heather produces a viscous, premium Ling honey. It is best sold as section/cut honey. Otherwise, it has to be crushed. Himalayan balsam produces delicate nectar. It’s sad that it is such a terrible weed.
Autumn
"Why stand ye idle, blossoms bright,
The livelong summer day?"
"Alas! we labour all the night
For what thou takest away."
by John B. Tabb
In addition to stores, your stock must be healthy and housed in weatherproof, well-secured hives. In a few areas, woodpeckers have learnt to drill into hives.
Figure 1. Autumn tasks and timing depend on whether you take your bees to the heather. Usually, feeding can be left until mid-September. It depends on the size of the colony. Small ones take longer.
Varroa
Varroa is best treated in the early Autumn. It is important to have healthy winter bees. Since these start to be born in mid-August, don’t wait until September.
Honey Harvest
After extracting the honey in August or September, many hives may have one or two super boxes partially filled with stores and sticky frames. The concept is to “bring the stores down” by making the bees react as if the honey is outside their hive. With Beeboxes use the rapid feeder with the walkway blocked apart from a finger-sized hole. Alternatively, uncapped honey frames can be put under the brood box, and the bees will move them up, a process called nadiring. The smell of honey may intoxicate nearby colonies and cause them to start robbing. After a day or so, the stores should be shifted, and the bees will have left you a nice pile of wax cappings.
The colony down-sizes
The colony gradually shrinks and enters the winter with 10–20,000 bees. The workers drag the remaining drones out of the hive, leaving them to die. It’s incredible; one week, there are plenty, and the following week they’ve all gone.
Feeding
If you have harvested honey, some feeding is usually necessary. If a colony is small, and you would rather not unite it with another, start feeding syrup in mid-August. Feed given before September can stimulate the queen to lay.
Sugar has advantages over honey for over-wintering. The theory is that bees only need fuel to keep warm through the winter. They do have fat reserves, but they require plenty of carbs.
Honey contains small amounts of pollen, and pollen contains fibre and minerals (“ash”). If bees eat fibre, they are more likely to need to go for a pooh, euphemistically referred to as cleansing flights. Going for a pooh in the winter is very hazardous. Sugar is cheap and pure carbs, whereas honey is valuable and tastes lovely. So this arrangement works well for everyone. More about feeding:
Most colonies living in wooden hives over-winter in one brood box, one brood and a half (a super), or two brood boxes. I use two mediums. I tried using three, and they were congested in the spring with blobs of stores here and there. Do not put a QE between the boxes. Moderately prolific colonies that need two brood boxes in the summer should have more than six frames of brood at the end of August, dropping to about four (mostly sealed) at the end of September. They need to go into winter with an absolute minimum of eight frames of stores (18 to 24 kg).
Woodpeckers
Check with local beekeepers whether woodpeckers are likely to be a problem. Chicken mesh can be used to protect hives. Leave a 5-6 inch gap between the wire and hive. It makes hefting hives a palaver. Unfortunately, wire gouges holes in polystyrene. The alternative to mesh is to dangle smooth plastic sheets down the sides of the hives. The roof can be protected with a sheet of metal or paving stone.
Winter
O bee, good-by!
Your weapon's gone,
And you anon
Are doomed to die;
But Death to you can bring
No second sting.
Frost on bracken
The Cluster
Basic Assessment: describe how bees spend the winter.
When the exterior temperature drops, the bees start to cluster together for warmth — below 14 °C in poorly insulated hives, colder if insulated.
The Cluster is like a jam doughnut. It forms in the centre of a wooden hive. The Q stays in the jam, and the sugary crust, the mantle of tightly packed bees, acts as an insulating layer. People will try to convince you that this is very effective. Compare them to a 10 tog duvet. Sure, the mantle bees huddle together and reduce convection. As it gets colder, the mantle bees press in closer to the warm core so that the cluster becomes smaller, which results in greater conduction and hence more heat loss. The situation is better in poly hives because the bees cluster against the dry walls.
Bees in wooden hives stay up against a wooden board situated under the roof. The board is called a crown board, and it acts as a heat sump. So long as it stays dry, this dynamic is good at preventing condensation above the cluster. Bees become torpid at 7 °C and die at 4.48 °C. So, bees on the surface of the Cluster are maintained at 8–9 °C whilst the core is kept between 18 and 35 °C depending on whether they are raising brood. Much of the warmth in the cluster is generated by the bees’ basal metabolism, but when necessary, those in the centre of the cluster generate heat by contracting their flight muscles. In one study, 6–80 of these warm (endothermic) bees travelled to the cluster edge every hour, but usually only remained there for a few seconds. Perhaps this process has some role in sensing the temperature of the outer shell.
Despite it being an attractive idea, there is no evidence supporting the notion that the mantle bees rotate like male Emperor penguins. However, the cluster produces much heat when it shifts to another bee space.
Damp
Unfortunately, wooden hives get sodden in the winter. To reduce damp, some beekeepers put cushions above the crown board and replace them when they are saturated. Others put insulation boards (50 mm) under the roof and get good results, so much so that they dispense with air vents at the top of the hive. Others increase ventilation by lifting the crown board using matchsticks so that humid air is vented. Ventilation, some would say definitely, has its place in wooden hives. Stuffy, damp air is bad for children, and the same is true for bees. In inclement climates, hives are covered with insulation wraps or stored in barns.
Over winter, a hive that consumes 16 kg of stores, releases 4 gallons (ca. 18 litres) of water. Nevertheless, a few brave workers collect water when it is as cold as 4 °C. I wonder why.
Research performed by Prof Seeley demonstrated that the insulation of a wooden hive with 20 mm thick walls is effectively no better than metal.
In Poly hives, excess water dribbles harmlessly down the walls and through the screened floor (OMF).
Brood break
At some point during the winter, the queen stops laying completely, and the colony has a “brood break”—no brood at all. This period is the time to treat them for varroa with Oxalic acid.
Isolation starvation
If the weather gets freezing, the cluster gets tight. Bees in poorly insulated hives may be unable to crawl up and over to reach another patch of stores, and the colony starves. Bees with wax foundation often make holes through it, which they presumably use as shortcuts. It is said that “bees do not freeze to death but starve to death” and “die of damp, not cold”. These assume that the colony had a critical mass, large enough to keep warm but not so huge to eat all their stores.
So long as a colony in a poly hive is large enough, the bees do not suffer from isolation starvation. The cluster can nudge their way around, staying against the hive wall.
Bees taking fondant on a crown board
Next: Queen cells.
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