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Subject: Orange County, NC Beekeepers

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: Randall Austin <ra41717 AT gmail.com>
  • To: Mary Lou Bethune <marylou909 AT bellsouth.net>
  • Cc: bees <ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [ocba] no brood
  • Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:27:24 -0400

Mary Lou,

Is your queen there? Is she laying eggs? Are there still a lot of bees? These are the critical questions for you right now.

The fall honey flow has already begun. That's what the goldenrod, blackeyed Susans & all the various asters are doing for us right now. They are just picking up and will run strong (hopefully) through September and October. You can tell when the bees are making good use of these fall flowers from the sour smell the honey makes as it is curing. In our area, we don't expect these flowers to give us enough honey to harvest, but they should give our bees plenty of honey to overwinter on.

If you have a laying queen and a good population of bees, the fall flow plus the supplemental feeding you are doing should work out fine with regard to having honey for the winter. We've still got a couple of months of relatively bee-friendly weather left in the year. That's plenty of time for your bees to build up for the winter as long as everything else cooperates. A great way to tell if you have enough honey for the winter is to lift your hive up an inch or so from the back. Do it now while you don't have any honey so you know what "empty" feels like. When it gets to where it feels like the hive is nailed to the ground, you've got a lot of honey. If the weather is nice when you do this, lift to judge the weight, then open the hive up to see how much honey inside is causing that much weight. Once you learn the correlation, you'll be able to judge the amount of remaining honey in the dead of winter without opening the hive.

Randall Austin


On 9/7/2010 10:15 AM, Mary Lou Bethune wrote:

 

 

We checked out hive today and there was neither honey nor brood.  Is anyone else seeing that?  WE started feeding them immediately. 

Does that mean we will have to feed them all fall and winter or will there be another honey flow in the fall?

Mary Lou Bethune

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