Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
You'll want to continue feeding the hive until there is a good
nectar flow.
After you have new
worker bees hatching out, and there are plants in your region providing nectar for the hive, they
will decrease the amount they are feeding from the artificial feeder. This can happen in around
two to six weeks, depending on how quickly your hive takes off.
deFinitiOn
Apiarists call a
nectar flow
(sometimes called
honey flow
) the time when there is a surplus of nectar
coming into the hive and the bees are rapidly expanding their colony, food stores, and brood.
When you see that your bees have used six frames in a box, you'll want to add another super.
Check often enough during a nectar flow that you can add more supers as needed. This flow will
continue all through spring and early summer.
When July and August hit, there are often a few weeks of famine, often called
dearth
. It's common
in many areas of the United States and is a good time to decrease the number of empty frames
available to the bees above the queen excluder. The bees will switch out their storage habits and
begin exchanging some of the brood frames in the deep supers to nectar and pollen storage for
surviving the famine. This is totally okay.
Think about it this way—the more there is to harvest, the more worker bees (new brood) you want
available to work the nectar flow at its peak. After the nectar flow begins to decline, you want
fewer mouths to feed because not only is there less to harvest, but now there are fewer bees to feed
heading into the winter. The queen lays fewer eggs as the winter approaches, so as workers born in
the summer months begin to die, they are not replaced at the same levels and the overall popula-
tion level of the hive drops slightly over the winter.
One of the best ways to minimize the number of supers in the hive during this transitional period
is to harvest the frames of honey that are totally capped, and leave the unfinished frames. This
allows your bees plenty of space to continue harvesting and producing more honey for you. But at
the same time it encourages them to settle into the task of filling each cell left in the super and not
leave any gaps so your harvest will be maximized.
This late-summer harvest is when you get to harvest the surplus. Not all the honey, by any means.
Remember when I mentioned leaving one or two boxes as the hive body? Those boxes are for the
bees. The supers on top with the excess honey (if you get any excess the first year) is what you get.
When you reach October, you'll want to have at least 70 pounds of honey in the hive for your
colony to survive the winter. We've lost a hive to winter before and it had nothing to do with the
cold. A well-fed beehive is capable of surviving extremely cold temperatures if they have enough
food. Our drought conditions were so severe in 2011 that our brand-new hive never had a chance
to become well established.
