Bee Prepared

As summer winds down, it is time to start thinking about preparing our honey bees for winter.  The first thing we need to think about is creating the strongest possible colonies.  For us, this means consolidating weaker hives into a strong one and feeding sugar syrup to help the bees build up their winter stores.

Three weeks ago, Hives 2 and 3 showed signs of preparing to swarm.  A honey bee colony will swarm when the bees decide that their hive has reached capacity.  Swarming involves the queen bee and a large proportion of her subjects leaving the hive to find a new place to live.  Swarming is a natural part of a hive's life cycle; however, mid-August is late for a swarm and does not leave the remaining colony much time to recover from the loss of their queen and the significant population reduction.  I was not thrilled about the idea of losing my laying queens nor a huge number of my bees, and so instead of letting the hives swarm naturally, I created artificial swarms by splitting each hive into two.  I moved the queen and one brood box off the existing hive to a new stand and left the second brood box where it was.  I added an empty box on top of each to give the bees more space.  This made the hive think it had swarmed without actually doing so.

While splitting a very strong hive into two weaker ones solved my problem three weeks ago, today as I begin preparing the hives for winter, I am looking to consolidate those two weaker hives back into one strong one.  To do this, I placed the hives back together separated by a sheet of newspaper.  The newspaper divider gives the bees a chance to get used to each other again and they will slowly disintegrate the paper as they reintegrate themselves over the next week or so.  Hopefully the season for swarming is over now so the bees will be happy to be part of a nice strong colony again and the urge to find a new home will not return.

I also began feeding the hives I consolidated.  In the fall, beekeepers often feed hives sugar syrup (2 parts sugar to 1 part water) to help them store up enough honey inside their brood nest to get through the winter. There are still lots of flowers in bloom, particularly goldenrod, clover and bee balm, so there is still ample food for the bees in nature but it cannot hurt to give them easy access to sugar syrup as they get used to their new consolidated colony.

Bee balm in our woodland garden.

And so, on this last day of August, the preparations for winter have begun.