In September it is easy to be lulled into thinking ‘our work is done’. This is a vulnerable time for bees. There is little forage and you will see drones being refused entry to hives and dying as a result. Mating successes are therefore much reduced. 

Do consider joining study groups. You don’t have to take the exams, but the more you learn the easier it is to look after your bees. 

A quick recap from last month, it’s s too late now to start treating for varroa with Thymol based treatments such as Apiguard and Apilife Var, as temperatures will be too low by the end of the 4 week treatment window. Apivar is just about your only option. You may need to reduce hive entrances to 1 inch to protect from wasps and nuc entrances might need to be set to just 1 bee space. If you have a late heather honey crop, you can borrow the SBKA press to extract it as it is ‘thixiotropic’ meaning it won’t spin out unless agitated. 

Feeding – Hopefully you made your decision when you extracted your summer crop about feeding your bees. You can leave them a super of honey, but make sure you remove the queen excluder. The super can go either above or below the brood box.

If you don’t leave a whole super, you need to assess how much to feed your colonies. 1 standard brood frame of stores is about 2 kg. It is said that a large colony needs about 20kg. We heft the whole closed box using a luggage scale hooked under each side of the hive. Add both numbers to get a total. Based on stores present, we work out what the critically low weight with no stores would be. If they get close to this in mid winter we feed fondant, so buy it in now (it must be bakers fondant or from a bee supplier, not the stuff in the supermarket which has other additives, we get ours from Hukins in Healey).

 In September we use a rapid style feeder, such as an English feeder, to feed heavy syrup (or ready made feed like invertbee syrup) for them to store (1l of water to 2kg granulated sugar). We add Thymol to prevent mould. We make a solution of 20g Thymol crystals in 100ml isopropyl alcohol and add 1ml per 3l of syrup. Whilst this is not an approved treatment, there is also some evidence that this may help reduce presence of Nosema spores, which may not be bad thing given the high levels locally. (Nozevit in feed may also help reduce the number of Nosema spores if you have an infected hive and there is some evidence that using an oxalic dribble such a Apibioxal in October also helps. There are a number of us, with microscopes if you want to test your bees). 1 l of heavy syrup is equal to about 0.8 kg of stores by the time it is capped and you can end up feeding them a lot of sugar. Remember any supers or brood frames from this point cannot be extracted as honey for sale in future, whether or not you add Thymol, as they will have sugar and/or brood in them.

Bees will still be foraging on ivy through the autumn, so if you have ivy nearby you might need to feed less, but keep hefting to make sure. 

The last full inspection –  Do not be tempted to keep looking in the brood box. We sometimes check the brood box one last time, some time in early September when we have finished treating to make sure they are queen-right and then don’t go in again until the end of March. It can be hard to let go, but you risk more harm than good. If you damage your queen they probably will not be able to raise another as there will be too few drones to mate with, so resist temptation! If they are queen-less now, we add a mated queen, queen-right nuc or combine with another colony and then leave them to it. 

Nights are drawing in. It’s not over yet, but you can book your winter holiday! 

References

BBKA special edition ‘Feeding bees’

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9319372

Ron Brown ‘Beekeeping – a seasonal guide’