| Winter is coming! We’ve certainly noticed the change in temperatures and we will not be opening any hives until spring. Feeding – By now you have hopefully finished any feeding as it is too cold to feed syrup. Any feeders should be removed, cleaned and stored for next year. Syrup left on hives will be cold and will absorb heat from the brood nest. Be careful not to spill any syrup as you remove the feeders as it will encourage robbing and wasps. Most colonies should not need feeding now and are unlikely to need extra, at least until January. Sometimes you might not manage to get to the ideal 20 kg of stores by October (such as a late swarm or a first year nuc) and you can either leave a small amount of bakers fondant (we use 2.5kg bags or about 1kg in a take away box) over the hole in the crown board or a large amount (maybe 6kg) resting directly on a queen excluder, covered in polythene housed in a thin eke. Don’t use supermarket fondant, it contains more than just sugar. A useful tool to check the weight is a hand held luggage scale. Hook it under the bottom edge of your hives floor and lift the hive slightly off its stand on each side. Add the 2 numbers together to get an approximate total weight. Always ‘heft’ from the same place each time and record the weight. Bees will hopefully now be foraging on ivy on warmer days so the weight is unlikely to drop over the next few weeks. I can’t give you an ideal total weight as all hives and stands are different. Our stands are quite robust wooden stands and we typically have a total weight of about 40kg for a stand, national box, super and roof. In our early years we hefted every 2 weeks and it proved to us that if we’ve done our job properly and left enough stores, then there’s no need to check again until at least January. If you have left a super of honey for your bees, do check that you removed the queen excluder. The super can go above the brood box (brood and a half) or below (nadired). If you still intend to ‘nadir’ and haven’t yet done so, don’t delay as it’s getting cold to be opening boxes. Choose a warmer day as you might need to carefully scrape brace comb from the bottoms of brood frames to fit them above a super and do take extra care not to disturb the brood best or harm the queen (don’t rush, smoke at the entrance and under the brood box and try not to leave them open for any longer than absolutely necessary). You should also not leave the bees with empty space that they do not need. Replace undrawn frames with fat dummy boards or put small colonies in a nuc. Don’t leave any empty space above the brood box such as an eke unless they have no stores and you are filling the entire space with fondant. Other winter preparations: We reduce the entrance on weaker hives to one inch to reduce robbing from wasps and have used ‘wasp out’ entrances in the past. Nucs are particularly vulnerable. They need monitoring and might need just 1 bee space at the entrance. We also sometimes move some of our nucs to different apiaries to stop the attacks. With entrance blocks in and a 7mm high entrance slot, you should not need mouse guards, especially if you don’t have landing boards. We avoid mouse guards as they can strip pollen from bees legs and may damage wings and legs. You might also consider putting a cage over your hives to prevent woodpecker damage. I’ll cover keeping the bees warm in more detail in November. Do cover the holes in crown boards with a piece of perspex or wood and add insulation. We really like the clear crown boards so we can peek at the bees without opening the hive. You need a hole in the crown board to be able to feed fondant over the hole, ideally in a takeaway box. Make sure you use an eke above the crown board to house insulation so the roof sits firmly with no gaps. Before the benefits of insulation were properly understood, beekeepers sometimes propped up the crown board with match sticks to prevent condensation on the crown board. This is no longer recommended, you will just get a lot of propolis as the bees suffer with drafts as much as we do in our homes in winter. We also leave slides in over winter. Again more on this next time. References: “Guide to bees and honey” by Ted Hooper |
Sheffield Beekeepers' Association
