Bees still buzzing!

It looks like I forgot to blog about wintering the bees, but it's pretty straightforward so here's what happened.  It turns out that there's not a lot you can do to help the bees make it through winter.  Insulation sounds like a good idea, but it turns out that the bees require constant airflow through the hives to remove moisture so the hives stay only a few degrees above the outside temperature all winter long.  The worker bees "shiver" by moving their wing muscles without moving their wings to generate heat and keep the little cluster of bees warm enough to make it through the winter, but they only keep their little cluster warm, not the whole hive.  On warmer days, they move around to follow honey stores, but they can't move far when it's really cold so it is important for a beekeeper to check the hives later in the winter (now) to shift around honey stores if the bees eat themselves into a corner and can't get to honey just a few inches away in a cold snap!

Because there's not much that can help the bees through the winter, it's not too difficult to get them ready.  The biggest concern is that they have enough honey to make it through the winter, and I covered that by simply being very conservative about how much honey I took from the hive.  Then you treat any diseases or parasites -- usually Varroa Mites, but since I didn't note any problematic infestation I didn't have to worry about that either.

Finally, in November, I added a sheet of particleboard to help wick moisture out of the hives and covered the hives in black wax-coated cardboard.  The cardboard heats up in the sun and might help to cut the wind a bit.  Here's a picture of the hives after I wrapped them up for the winter.

Late-Winter Inspection


On February 9, on a warm day above 40F, I drove out to the Lair to check the hives.  I gave a light tap to each hive and heard buzzing from the first two, but silence from the last.  It turned out that the third hive, the weakest of the three all last year, had died relatively early in the winter.  Below you can see the remains of a cluster with bees holding onto or with their heads stuck into the comb.  They are surrounded by empty comb so it is possible that they simply ate all the nearby honey and couldn't move far enough during a few cold days to find more food, but because they were still in the bottom two medium boxes out of four, I suspect they were also weak -- perhaps from Varroa.

The other two hives were doing very well and were clustered toward the South side of the top two boxes in both hives.  I took the top two boxes full of honey from the dead hive and added them to the other hive both to prevent the honey from going to waste (they're likely to mold if they stay unattended after it warms up) and to give the bees one more box of solid honey they can move up into in case we see more cold weather.

Below you can see a somewhat blurry picture of the left hive's cluster.  I only lifted up the box for a few seconds to see where they were, and while it's a bit worrysome to have the cluster all the way over on the side, I think it helps a lot that I could add a box of honey above them so they'll have room to move to nearby stores even if it gets very cold.

Another thing a beekeeper can do is move honey around within the boxes -- perhaps moving honey from the left side to a slot right next to the cluster, but the more you disturb the cluster, the more the bees will get stressed and cold so I was satisfied with adding the two boxes on top.

I plan to go back next weekend with some or all of my family to collect the two empty boxes from the dead hive.  They still have some honey (maybe 10-20 pounds) and I want to dry them out in my garage before they get regularly warm enough to mold.  In late March when the weather's good and the queens are laying eggs like mad, I'll split one or both of the living hives and buy a new queen to lead the new hive(s).  The bees will all appreciate the honey left on the hives and they'll have a head start on building up stores for me to steal next Fall!