Bee Chronicle Sept 2013

What is September all about in the mountains. Why getting your skis ready for that Colorado Thanksgiving Holiday, of course.

The big move is to get the bees ready for winter. You think it is too early and too hot for that! The bee colony is at or near its peak population for the year. The bees are not particularly busy because the flower population is somewhat low. In a normal year, July and August are hot and dry periods. Not this year though. September is a little bit dry and October is the driest month of the year. The end of October is typically marked by afternoon thunder storms. October and November are the end of hurricane season, so there might be a spin off storm from that.

However, the flowers that bloom beautifully in the fall may be short on nectar. To get the hives full of honey for winter food you may need to feed early and long. I start as soon as the sourwood honey is taken off the hives.

Bees don’t take up syrup and process it into honey for winter stores when it is “too cool”. Only the queen bee knows what “too cool” is. What us bee keepers do know is that spring feeding to a hive needing food because it ran out is “not too cool”. Fall feeding is the time to do your spring feeding. Get the honey into the hive. Get the hive full early in the fall. Cut back on feeding but keep checking the hive until after the Thanksgiving dinner. Keep checking the hive to make sure that it is full of stored food starting in December. In the fall and spring (and winter), if it is warm enough for the bees to fly they are coming home and eating food. You don’t want the hive half empty when the bees go into cluster the end of January and February. At that time you want the center of the hive body still full of food.

Pollen is not such a concern in a normal fall. The golden rod will provide lots of pollen. You have to be concerned with too much pollen coming into the hive and making pollen bound frames. Feeding syrup will balance this out.

I like feeding sugar syrup when there is still pollen and nectar in the fields because the bees will mix the nectar and the syrup storing it together. This makes a healthier bee food than straight sugar syrup honey.

The next big challenge is to make your bees as healthy as possible. Get serious and hit the varroa mites hard. I traditionally hit the mites softly. I traditionally loose lots of bee colonies. I am changing my technique. Use a mild organically approved mite treatment. Follow instructions but get those mites out of the hive. There is not much observable mite damage in a healthy colony in the early fall. However, as the population of adult bees diminishes, more sexually mature mites will go into fewer larval cells to lay eggs. The queen is slowing down on egg laying so there are fewer opportunities for the mites to go into. The young bees born after being heavily mite infested in the larval stage will be injured and deformed. These are the bees you need to be super healthy to over winter and start the colony expansion next spring.

If you are good at reducing mites and creating healthy bees most of your other problems might take care of their self. The other problems are hive beetles, trachea mites, nosema, and other viruses. Large healthy populations seem to be able to withstand low levels of pathogen infestations.

If you have mediocre colonies go ahead and combine them now to create one strong colony. Pick the best of the two “weak“ queens for the new colony and kill the other. This will give that queen longer to lay more brood with a larger population to tend to them. Usually you will loose both of the weak colonies if you try to save both. Don’t waste the food and time just to loose them in the spring.

Now is your last chance to do fall requeening. You can always add a queen to a colony. But, you need a well mated queen. Whether you grow her or buy her the drone population starts dropping off in September. Get a well mated queen and give her time to start laying eggs to create those wintering over bees. Next spring she will start laying eggs at the two year old queen rate because her hormones were built up and then shut down like a two year old. It also allows you to avoid any problems that might arise when you buy queen too early next spring and they are not mated well.

Put your wood work up for winter storage. Pay close attention to how and where you stack you honey supers and hive bodies. You want to keep wax moths out of the comb and mice out of the boxes.

Do you have entrance reducers for your hives. It is never too early to put them on. There is a lot of mouse activity as they store seeds for winter. I am seeing probably the last batch of baby mice. They all will be looking for a warm place to winter. Lots of mouse poison around the honey house won’t hurt. Put it outside the honey house. A good anti pet trick is to place the bait in section of PVC, maybe 2 inches diameter and 6” long. Place it near the foundation where the mice run looking for an entrance to the building. This works around your house also. Larger diameter PVC for rats.