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  • From: Randall Austin <ra41717 AT gmail.com>
  • To: Michael Morrissey <mmorrissey AT fastmail.fm>, Orange Co Beekeepers <ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [ocba] Winter and slow death?
  • Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2015 16:11:08 -0500

Michael,

Re: "Follow-up questions: With a warm spell like this, will the fall and winter bees start foraging, and thereby reduce their own life spans? Will the queen compensate by laying more eggs during a warm winter?": There are physiological differences between winter bees and summer bees that make winter bees live longer regardless, but it makes sense to me that if the winter bees do much foraging, they'll shorten their lives from what they would have experienced otherwise. The queen wouldn't exactly "compensate" by laying more eggs, but if the workers are able to bring in pollen and nectar via their foraging, then that would stimulate the queen to lay more eggs. So yes, the way it all works out, if we have a really warm winter with sufficient flowering plants, the queen may lay all winter long, although not nearly as much as in spring.

To answer the second part of your original question ("I'll do an inspection this weekend, as it's supposed to be in the 70s. Anything special I should be looking for?"):

When I mentor beekeepers, I tell them, "Don't open up your hive unless you have a reason to do so." Please don't take that as encouraging hands-off beekeeping (which isn't beekeeping at all -- it is just irresponsible bee-HAVING), but rather an encouragement to be a thinking beekeeper. So by asking the question you are ahead of the game.

One perfectly wonderful reason to open a hive is to learn. As a first-year beekeeper this is very important, and hopefully will grow in its sense of importance as you go on. The most important thing you can learn at this point is from this exercise:
  • Before doing anything else, observe the bees coming and going from the entrance. Take into account temperature, time of day and time of year. How many bees do you think this traffic represents? You'll find out when you open it up. Then next time you won't need to open it up to get a good guesstimate of the answer.
  • Are the bees that are coming and going bringing in pollen? If so, that means they are raising brood -- you'll see that when you open the hive up. At this time of year, the hive may have brood or it may not -- either condition is normal, depending on how thrifty the queen is. So the presence or absence of brood in December is "interesting" but not important. By mid/late January, the queen should be cranking back up again, fueled by the red maple bloom.
  • This next one is very important: before doing anything else, lift the hive from the back to judge how heavy it is. You want it to be "really heavy" right now. When you open the hive up, you'll want to especially see how much stored honey is making it that heavy. Once you learn that, you can easily judge whether you need to feed or not, any time of year in any weather, by lifting rather than opening. This skill is critical for successful overwintering.
For an experienced beekeeper beyond the initial beginning-learning phase, the question then becomes, "if I inspect my hive and find something wrong, what can I do about it?" If the answer is "nothing" then why disrupt the bees with a mid-winter in-hive inspection?
  • This time of year, what would we do if the hive is queenless? Nothing -- there aren't queens for sale this time of year and the colony cannot raise a new queen on its own that can find drones and mate. So that question can wait until late winter/early spring.
  • What would we do if we find a brood disease? We don't expect to find much if any brood now so that question can wait too.
  • What would we do if the hive is light and needs feeding? We would FEED, FEED, FEED... but we don't need to open up the hive to determine that it is light (see above).
  • What would we do if all the bees were dead? We don't need to open the hive to discover this. Even on a cold winter day, a sharp knock on the side of the hive will either produce a loud buzz that rises and quickly falls, or dead silence. If the latter, shake out the dead bees and store the comb and equipment for later.
  • What would we do if the population is lower than we like? Nothing much -- if we artificially induce the queen to lay beyond the capacity of the bee population to cover the new brood, the brood will be chilled and die. We can get lots of brood by feeding sugar and protein to a large population because they have excess capacity, but we don't need to do that unless we need lots of bees well before the main honey flow (most of us don't).
  • What do we do if we do a sugar shake test and find lots of varroa mites? It is really too late to do anything worthwhile. Varroa treatments should be done in mid/late August/first of September. Treating now will get many of the phoretic mites off of the adult bees but the damage has already been done -- they are sick, virus-ridden adults because they were infested when they were pupa. The only treatment that is really suitable for winter is oxalic acid. You could apply that, but that is like giving prophylactic treatment to patients that are already in the ICU.

During spring/summer/fall, finding the answer to the above questions is a great reason to do an in-hive inspection, but not in December/January/early February.

The above is just my personal philosophy -- others may have different opinions. The article <here> covers some of these thoughts.

Randall



On 12/10/2015 3:13 PM, Michael Morrissey wrote:
1449778421.3706460.463964633.0A928C72 AT webmail.messagingengine.com" type="cite">
Thanks Randall,
 
I suspected and hoped that was the case. The math makes perfect sense, in fact I wondered if any bees are born during cold weather at all.
 
Follow-up questions: With a warm spell like this, will the fall and winter bees start foraging, and thereby reduce their own life spans? Will the queen compensate by laying more eggs during a warm winter?
 
Thanks again.
 
--
Michael Morrissey
Durham, NC
919.236.3230
 
 
On Thu, Dec 10, 2015, at 02:12 PM, Randall Austin wrote:
Michael,
 
Honey bees die at the same rate as they are born, mostly. When they are out foraging, the old, worn-out bees will croak going to or from the hive. When it is to cold for them to get out (below the low 50's for foraging, below the high 40s for quick poop flights), they die in the hive. The carcasses are dumped outside by undertaker bees, often just right outside the entrance. Usually we don't notice them because they are lost in the grass or even carried off by ants.
 
In the winter, far fewer bees are born and the ones that are raised in the fall and winter live for several months, not just several weeks as in warm months. Primarily they live longer because they aren't foraging -- foraging is extremely rough on bees. Their wings will only last about a week and a half of intense foraging, leaving the poor bee dead on the side of the road somewhere when they do finally give out.
 
So... seeing a dozen dead bees in front of the hive isn't surprising at all. If there are something like 20,000 bees in the hive right now and all of those individuals are expected to be dead by the end of March (4 months), that means that around 166 would die every day (if my math is correct). Those are very gross assumptions but you get the general idea.
 
Hope this helps.
 
Randall Austin
 
On 12/10/2015 1:35 PM, Michael Morrissey wrote:
1449772515.3683146.463875465.4DA9010B AT webmail.messagingengine.com">
Hi,
Since this is our first season, I'm not sure how normal it is to find 10 or 12 bees dead in front of the hive. It seems they are dying at that rate daily. The few that aren't quite dead are sluggish, barely able to fly. I picked one up for close inspection and she looked normal -- 2 good wings, no mites, etc.
 
Overall, the hive seems healthy--lots of activity lately, perhaps more so due to the unusually warm afternoons. They have a candy board, cedar blanket and some 5:3 syrup occasionally when its warm. They also appear to be finding a bit of pollen from somewhere.
 
I'll do an inspection this weekend, as it's supposed to be in the 70s. Anything special I should be looking for?
 
Opinions and advice welcome.
Thanks
--
Michael Morrissey
 
 
 
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