To feed or not to feed...

I'm on a mailing list for a beekeeping club here in Colorado and the hot topic in the last week has been late winter or early spring feeding. There's a bit of a joke that if you ask two beekeepers a question, you'll get three answers, and spring feeding fits that well.

Beekeepers get worried this time of year as they dread that their bees didn't store enough honey to make it through the winter. It's an easy worry to fall into and I have felt it a bit. I know in my head that our two hives were loaded with honey going into the late fall, but in my gut I get a little "oogie" thinking things like "What if they didn't store enough?" and "What if they can't get to all of it?" (this last scenario seems a bit too common: a beekeeper opens the hive in the spring and see a bunch of dead worker bees with their heads buried in cells as they tried to get the last dollop of honey as they starved, yet a full frame of honey hangs nearby). John and I have invested a good bit of time and money into the girls and the last thing we want to do is open up a hive and find them dead. So, it's easy to feel a bit worried.

Three camps of thought appeared on whether a beekeeper should feed their bees this time of year:

• Never do it
• Always do it
• Do it if necessary

Before I go on, let me explain a bit about feeding bees. Feeding can involve something as simple as sprinkling table sugar on the top of the frames the bees cluster on or making sugar patties out of Crisco, sugar, essential oils, and a protien supplement or anything in between. Again, ask two beekeepers, get three answers on what you should feed your bees.

The Nevers usually get to that point by believing two things. First, the cost in time and money seemed to outweigh benefit. If a beekeeper has just a few hives, this may not be such a big deal. But for those that have a dozen or more, mixing up sugar patties or even sugar syrup (table sugar melted into hot water) can be a hassle. Plenty of products can be found to do the same thing, but that means cash outflow. The second reason they stopped feeding their bees, if they started, is to just let the bees be. They know how to take care of themselves and the ones that survive tend to be strong bees and produce more strong bees and just accept the losses as they come.

The Always...well, I'm not entirely sure why they always feed the bees this time of year. Habit and concern, I would imagine, primarily feed their desire to make sure their bees are all fed up. Humans are habitual by nature and beekeepers are no exception. If the beekeeper has always engaged in feeding in the past, why change the habit? The concern factor is easy to peg, too. I was quite relieved yesterday when John texted me that both of the hives were alive and well. Last week when I checked on them, I heard a good healthy buzz coming from the Sicilians, but couldn't hear anything from the First Italians (placing my ear directly against the hive gave me a nice bit aural access to the hive - next time I'm bringing a stethoscope).

Judging by John's and my philosophy about the bees, we probably fall in the third category: Never-leaning Sometimers. It seems that sometimes it will be necessary to give the bees a hand up to help them get to the nectar flow. I don't want to lose a hive just because they can't quite make it to the first bloom--too much money and time have been put into our girls to lose them to a fickle fall or an overly warm winter. But, I don't want them to get dependent on that first kick of sugar, either. To put it in political terms, entitlement programs are necessary, but a nanny state is unwanted in our realm. We'll keep an eye on our girls and do what we can to make sure they stay strong and healthy.

As spring approaches, John and I look heartily forward to interacting with the bees. We plan on splitting both hives and I want to pick up a package or two and collect at least one swarm. In the meantime, it's research and construction season!

What are the bees up to this time of the year?

I get this question quite a bit, so I thought I'd give a quick answer.  Many insects die in the late fall, leaving eggs buried in the ground or encased in some protective covering to perpetuate the species.  Others, like the infamous and devastating pine beetle here in Colorado, continue to live on in the tree it is inhabiting, barely restraining its life cycle.  Bees are somewhat like this in that the hive continues on, but with a lot less travel. 

Bees make honey as an overwintering food.  As the weather turns cooler, the queen nearly halts reproduction as the fall brood will live much longer than their earlier born sisters, who have life spans of about 12 weeks.  The autumn-born workers do little travel outside the hive, the biggest hazard to a bee.  You can tell how close a worker bee is to death by how tattered her wings are.  I ran across a dead bee on the green belt just a few days ago and its wings were a shambles--most likely she died of old age considering how mild the weather has been this December.  However, these late season workers are no slouches.  They continue many of the internal hive duties that their spring and summer-born sisters engage in.

The girls (all the drones have long been kicked out of the hive to conserve honey and bee bread) still tend to the queen and the brood that will be born in late January and early February.  They also meet all the needs of their queen by collecting her feces and depositing outside when its warm--sunny and 45-50 degrees at least.  The queen is the only bee that will defecate in the hive--the workers must go on cleansing flights when the weather is warm enough.  A healthy worker would rather die than defecate in the hive.  This is one of the many reasons a bee hive is the most sanitary of any animal lair in the world.  They deposit the dead outside of the hive on those cleansing days.

To survive the eventually brutal temparatures to hit them, the girls cluster around each other and beat their wings to generate warmth.  Much like penguins, they answer some kind of call that cycles the bees inward to keep everyone warm.  Through this convection of sorts, the area around the bees stays at a balmy 90 degrees or so (oh, lucky them!).  In Vermont, where it gets to 40 below all too frequently, this method keeps bees alive and kicking, ready to take advantage of the first days of spring.

Some beekepers chose to tarp or otherwise cover their bees.  We are choosing not to since Colorado winters are pretty mild and the extra labor and cost seems kinda pointless.  Our experiment is with a solid bottom board compared to a screened bottom board.  This expirment is unintentional: when I bought the hive for the Sicilians, our supplier didn't have any screened bottom boards.  So we'll see how it works and go from there.  Some resources say that you must create additional ventilation if you do a solid board to prevent condensation, however, all these resources come from humid states.  That said, when we transistion to top bar hives, we may have to worry about that since the hive is fully enclosed.

Sheesh...been too long!

The season went well!  Two out of our three hives survived, flourished even.  The Carniolans completely disappeared at the last inspection we did of them.  When I carcked open the hive, all I found was a couple of bees scraping the last drops of honey or bits of bee bread (a pollen-honey mixture that the bees use for protein storage), a couple of earwigs that quickly met their untimely demise, and a few wax moth larvae. 

The last was the most depressing as they wreaked carnage upon some of the frames.  The moth itself is a dark grey moth that looks pretty much like any other moth.  It lays its eggs in bee hives, hoping the bees are too weak to fend off the moth and its larvae.  Once the eggs hatch, the larvae eat their way through the wax leaving a path of destruction not disimilar to what a town looks like after a tornado crashes through it.  The larvae spin a web-like substance that only heightens the effect as it's cast about through the wrecked comb.

A moth infestation (and even one larva can look like an infestation) is a sign of a weak hive...or nonexistent one in the case of the Carns.  The moths are comparitavely large and easy to detect when they attempt to intrude into a hive.  If the bees are in good spirits by being queenright and have a good population, a wax moth has not chance of getting in, much less laying eggs.  The Carns lacked both of the above traits.  The queen we purchased had a penchant for laying two eggs in a cell (often a sign of a drone laying worker), something that dooms both eggs as they won't have enough room to grow.  It's impossible to tell why she did this.  It could have been she never perfected the single egg drop (i.e., she was defective), or it could be that she was so stressed by a lack of workers that she was just shoving her abdomen in a cell and laying willy nilly.  Or it could be something completely different.  Either way, the Carns will be missed but we learned a lot from their time with us. 

Next time we run into that problem--that a queen appears to be out of the picture--we know that we must act more quickly to get the hive requeened.  We discovered over the summer a couple of ways to do this.  One is to manipulate the frames by slicing off the bottom of a comb in a sort of jagged pattern to help induce the workers into creating queen cells (something that can be done in a queenright hive to breed extra queens on purpose).  Another is to buy a queen quickly and get her introduced fast.  Her pheremones, assuming she is accepted, will turn off the drone laying worker's or workers' reproductive organs.  Thus, we could have prevented that kill off that I pereptrated in the early stages of our requeening attempts (see the "How Salvation Hurts" post from June).

What it came down to was a problem with PPB.  This ailment doesn't infect the bees, but the beekeeper, which affects the bees.  PPB is a curable ailment, requiring two things: the desire to be a good steward to the bees and a bit of knowledge.  PPB is a beekeeper's affectionate term for being a lousy bee keeper: it stands for piss poor beekeeping.  One could argue that John and I were just naive and unlearned brand new beekeepers.  However, when it came to the kill-off, it didn't feel like a good idea at all and I should have decided against it.  But at the time it was our only option, or seemed so.  We didn't know that you could try to requeen it as is.  We didn't think about adding them to the second Italian hive to boost their population and, therefore, production.  For me, it all came down to not exhausting the research and knowledge base out there.  That last is one of the simplest cures for PPB.

One last thing about the learning curve.  Another thing that we learned is that going foundationless with deep supers has certain ramifications.  On my last inspection of the hives about three weeks ago, both Italians were obviously doing very well.  As normal, I started with the Sicilians to prevent too much aggression.  Didn't work.  They got pretty "in my face" pretty quickly.  I swear they have African roots some days!  (Look for a post about the recent arrival of Africanized honey bees in Georgia soon.)  I pulled out a few frames of from the top super and they were loaded with honey.  As they were getting mightily ticked off and I had seen enough to know they would do well over the winter, I buttoned them up and wished them well.

The first Italians were so docile initially that I started wondering if they had a a problem.  but as I popped off the inner cover and peaked in, they were as busy as bees should be and looked in good form.  And here's where the learning curve comes in: the first frame I removed was one of our foundationless (the Sicilian frames that I puled out were all foundationed frames that came with their nuc) and the bottom bar had been pretty well attached to the frame below it.  Hence, the bottom bar came half undone, pulling itself halfway out of the frame.  "No problem," I thought.  "I'll just knock off some of the girls and pound the bottom bar back in."  The comb was fully laden with capped honey and weighed a good seven pounds or so.  I tapped and brushed most of the girls off and flipped it over to reattach the bar.  As soon as I had it upside down, the fragile comb collapsed on itself.  The bees start the comb from the top bar and then build it down, attaching it to the sides and bottom once it's fully built out.  Without the bottom bar securing it and the jostling that I did to it to get the frame out, the comb lost its footing and, well, crapped out on me.  So, we got an extra bit of comb honey and the Italians suddenly sounded like the Sicilians.  As soon as the comb collapsed, I heard the hive go into a bit of an uproar.  I felt horrible about it, but realized that if this outside frame was fully loaded, they had more than enough honey to get through the winter.  So I returned the belatedly fixed frame, spaced them and buttoned them up.

So, I can't wait to start our top bar hive project, the subject of the next post!  In that post, I'll tell you how this little incident will be (almost) completely avoided with the different hive design.