Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Mice can't chew through an expandable, fits-all-hives guard such as this one. It's the
best there is.
Fall and Winter Management
When you've finished extracting, put the supers or frames you extracted back on the
colony and let the bees reclaim the sticky bits left behind. After a day or two, leaving
the cleaned frames in the super, remove the whole super used for storing surplus honey.
This leaves the three brood boxes, where your bees will spend the next few months.
Fall medications—Fumagillin for nosema, antibiotic treatments for AFB, grease pat-
ties for tracheal mites and certainly any needed varroa mite control—should be applied
after honey is removed. While your treatments are progressing (six weeks for most
varroa controls, at least three for antibiotics), schedule a thorough examination of the
broodnest as early in the late summer or early fall as you can. Check for diseases, the
queen, brood pattern (there may be almost none this time of year, but look closely), and
honey stores. Recall the 60 pounds (27.3 kg) or more the bees will need that should be
stored in these three boxes. If the honey stores are insufficient, feed, feed, feed sugar
syrup to supplement their food stores.
The sugar syrup you feed now, however, is a different mix than you used when es-
tablishing your package in the spring. Mix a thick 1:1 syrup—one part (by weight or
volume) sugar to one part water. Thick syrup has less water in it, and this time of year,
the thicker the better.
If you are feeding to get those 60 pounds (27.3 kg) or more of honey stored, don't
measure syrup; rather, measure the sugar used. Ten pounds (4.5 kg) of sugar in a gallon
of syrup is only 10 pounds (4.5 kg) of sugar. Don't skimp here.
When you're finished feeding, the stored food should be at the sides of the broodnest
and above the broodnest. And, the broodnest should be mostly in the bottom two boxes.
Honey, then, should be in the outer two frames, plus some in the frames next to the out-
side frames. The top box should be almost all stored honey.
You can estimate how much food remains by looking to see where the bees are any-
time you check during the winter. The closer to the top they are, the closer they are to
running out of food. There's an old beekeeping axiom that says, “The top is the bottom,
as far as food goes.”
If your bees didn't read this, you may need to rearrange some honey frames while
it's still warm enough to do so to ensure this configuration is close.
