Not much of a blog if the guy only writes once a season, eh? Sorry, busy summer with our family, the orchard and the apiary. All good so I guess this better be a good post!
Overwintering Success
Last year I went into winter with 4 hives and 3 nucs. I wrapped 2 of the hives with tar paper and put 2″ thick foam board around each of the rest to see if there was a difference. There wasn’t except the foam board was more expensive, plus a huge pain in the backside to size and strap into place.
More importantly, I placed quilt boxes on every colony. The boxes allowed a 1″ space for sugar blocks and/or patties, then a piece of screen to support a layer of burlap and 3″ of pine shavings. I drilled several 1″ ventilation holes to allow moisture to escape from the shavings and then placed 2″ of foam board to insulate the very top. The quilt boxes went directly on top of the supers without using an inner cover and were topped with the outer cover. These worked great and the colonies had no moisture issues all winter. I also treated every colony with OAV in late November after they were broodless.
Results: I lost 1 nuc that was actually a late combination of 2 weak nucs just before winter. Once again, take your losses in the fall…I could have used those bees to boost other colonies and trashed the weak queen rather than done all of the work to get them through, only to loose them late winter.
The 2017Season
-Breaking the Brood Cycle, Raising Queens, Making Nucs and Harvesting Honey
So this does not become a 50 page post, I’m going to only hit the management highlights that have brought me now to prepping for winter.
My main concern this spring was that my queens in the 4 full overwintered hives were now 2 years old and I did not want them going through a 3rd winter. I also wanted to go into the 2017 winter with 6 full hives and 6 nucs, so I was going to need queens. I also was not very happy using MAQS last year so I decided late May /early June would be a great time to pull queens, break the brood cycle, let the bees raise fresh queens and take some of the extra cells and raise queens for nucs. Without gong into great detail, it all worked. By pulling queens out of the hive and stopping brood production, a number of useful things happen.
1. The bees start emergency cells which results in a new queen in the hive and allows me to place the additional cells in a queen castle to raise additional queens for nucs.
2. The mite breeding cycle is interrupted since the hive goes broodless for about 10 days once all of the existing brood hatches, the queen hardens, mates and finally starts to lay. This has kept my mite counts very low all summer. I did treat 3 hives with 2 doses of OAV but stopped as the mite kill was minimal and further treatment appears unnecessary.
3. With less brood in the hive, nurse bees take on other jobs and the percentage of field bees rises, resulting in increased honey production. In fact, between the 4 overwintered hives, this summer I have harvested 200 lbs of honey and could pull about another 100 lbs if I did not want to use it for surplus overwintering stores.
As we now approach the end of the season, I currently have 6 full hives, 5 with new queens. Only 5 as I never found the overwintered queen in one of the hives all season long, regardless of how hard I looked! Meanwhile the hive is booming, produced about 75 lbs of honey, provided bees for several of the nucs and will provide the honey stores for 2 other nucs heading into winter. I also now have 6 nucs that should be ready to overwinter. It was 7 but this morning I decided to split a nuc that went queenless. There were numerous emergency cells in the hive but as they had yet to hatch, I decided to destroy the cells and split the 3 supers between 2 other nucs to boost their resources. Assuming a queen did hatch, mate and return, there is not enough time left for her to raise the population of bees needed to take the nuc through winter. I decided to take the loss of one nuc while making 2 others much stronger.
Honey Meadow Farm
Just a quick note on how the veggies and fruit did this year. Heavy rains prevented us from getting the garden in until early June and have definitely hampered the veggie garden this year. None-the-less, we’re really enjoying tomato and cuke sandwiches everyday for lunch, salads for dinner and looking forward to our corn. Gayla has lots of broccoli already frozen and canning will start soon. A lot of her effort went into growing the flowers for our son’s and new daughter’s wedding this month on our organic pasture in Sullivan. It was SPECTACULAR!
The blueberries and raspberries had an off year this year but the strawberries were fantastic and our orchard produced salable quantities of fruit for the 1st time! We had hundreds of peaches, plums are almost ready and apples aren’t too far behind! Continuing to follow Micheal Phillips holistic approach has kept us entirely organic and made for great foraging for more pollinators than you can imagine!
Winter Prep
With temps possibly dipping into the 40s within the next week, I just placed mouse guards on all of the colonies. I’m still doing 24-hour mite drop checks on the hives just in case there is a spike. If necessary, I’ll treat with OAV but really do not plan on treating any of the colonies until late November/early December. Each of the full hives will go into winter as 5 mediums. The nucs will be either 3 or 4 mediums. I’m almost out of comb so that will be the only reason a couple may be only 3 high. All of the colonies will be wrapped with tar paper and have a quilt box in place. I’ll feed the nucs, as needed, 2:1 syrup with Honey -B-Healthy and Vitamin-B-Healthy added. I use organic apple cider vinegar to change the pH of the syrup to approximately 4.5 to better match the pH of the bee gut. Hopefully, this helps with nosema, not sure…I plan to have all of my feeders off by the 3rd week in September so the girls can have it all capped before it gets too cold.
I’ll also monitor the 2 apiaries this winter using hive scales plus temperature and humidity sensors to help tell me what is going on inside the hives. I’ll get into this in my next post to let my geek side shine!
Naturally, you are all doing mite checks and making sure the bees that are about to raise the bees that will take you through winter are as healthy as they can be! Gotta keep ’em buzzin’!
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