It is often said that the bee year starts in August with winter preparations. For us this means removing supers and treating for varroa and keeping an eye on stores. Our bees have had a great year, but the flow is over in some areas and if you have taken honey off, you may need to feed them. You should also make sure you feed nucs and newer colonies. Here’s what we are doing in August.
Summer crop – Apart from colonies on the heather, we extract in early August. Don’t forget that colonies need 20kg of stores over winter, so decide if you are going to leave them enough honey or feed them. If they have nosema, which is very prevalent locally, I’m not sure there is much benefit to returning full supers that have been infected and you may choose to feed thymolated syrup instead. More about this next month.
After extracting, we store our supers ‘dry’. This means we return extracted supers above the crown board (with an empty eke or super between the crown board and super to create space) for the bees to clean. After 24 hours we use clearer boards to empty the supers once more, then stack to store. Wax moths can destroy drawn comb, especially if frames have had some pollen in them. We have too many to freeze and are sterilising with acetic acid to destroy nosema spores and wax moth larvae this year. If you want to go down this route remember to read the instructions carefully and use the correct PPE as it’s highly corrosive and harmful to health.
When we don’t use acetic acid, we tend to stack them in groups of 4 or 5 and check every few weeks to remove wax moth larvae. We stack on top of a travel screen to allow air movement to reduce mould and top the stack with a roof or plastic tray. A ratchet strap reduces gaps where wax moths may lay eggs and keeps everything secure.
Varroa treatments: – Winter bees start out as eggs in September. This means you need to deal with varroa before this. Thymol based treatments, such as Apiguard and Apilife Var are not effective in cooler temperatures and you need to finish the 4 week treatment window before it gets cooler than 15 °C maximum daily temperature, so start in early August.
Apivar is not temperature dependent and can also be used. The only treatment approved for use with supers on is MAQS. but it is currently unavailable. Another option is to remove supers for a week and use formic pro which has the same formula as MAQS and takes just 1 week to be effective.
Always read and follow instructions carefully and keep proper records.
You can really help reduce winter losses by treating for varroa (and also by feeding in September which I’ll cover next time). Failure to treat for varroa leaves bees with weakened immunity and susceptible to disease including Nosema. Both these issues will shorten life span and lead to winter losses. Sam Ramsey summarises his work on Varroa in a very entertaining Youtube video which is well worth watching.
As we don’t have MAQS to treat our colonies that are going to the heather, we are using swarms or splits that we have treated with oxalic before they had brood or supers on. We have checked for disease and combined colonies to make them very strong and requeened with this years queens.
I hope you are having a lovely summer and enjoying your bees. Please message with any questions or feedback, no matter how small.
References
Managing Varroa – National Bee Unit