The beekeeping summer ends with honey extraction. It’s followed by preparing the bees for winter and this post covers both processes.
Extraction was more hands on that usual because I lost the handle for my centrifugal extractor. The only solution was to do it by hand. Collecting honey is always messy and this was exceptionally so, but there was something therapuetic about scraping the frames and being literally wrist deep in the sticky stuff!
Different hives had different cappings – some had repurposed what they had while others used fresh white wax. With a centrifugal extractor you slice off the cappings and spin the frames to remove the honey. This year I scraped the honey cells down to the frame foundation with a spoon. The mix of wax and honey went into a bowl. The contents were then strained to remove the wax before the remaining honey was jarred.
The disadvantage was I couldn’t get the frames clean. Honey dripped everywhere but I was happy to give the bees the unspun frames back.
Within 24 hours the bees had cleaned out all the surplus honey.
This will have boosted their winter stores. It’s vital to ensure the bees have enough food to get them through the winter which can be 4-5 months, depending on when plants and flowers begin to produce nectar again.
The bees are now in winter mode. You might see one or two flying around the hive entrance when the sun shines but their primary occupation is survival.
Male bees are known as drones. They live for around 8 weeks throughout spring and summer but don’t survive the cold months. One of the first signs the bees are preparing for winter is the sight of dead drones around the base of the hives. They’ve been evicted and won’t be allowed back in as they no longer have any function. Drones don’t forage or feed themselves; their only role is to fertilise the queen and after eviction they die of hunger or cold. It’s a survival technique, one which reserves stores for the worker bees and the queen.
The lifespan of a female worker bee in the summer is 6 weeks. They perform a range of different tasks inside the hive before being promoted to foraging, which they do for the rest of their short lives.
Winter bees are different.
They can live for up to 6 months and their physiology helps them adapt to the cold.
Levels of the juvenile hormone, associated with foraging in spring and summer, decreases while their fat bodies increase to enable the storage of vitellogenin, a valuable source of protein which also helps increase lifespan. Bees are clean and try to avoid soiling within the hive. To help this, winter bees have an expandable rectum enabling them to hold larger quantities of waste matter.
Bees prepare for winter by filling any gaps in the hive with propolis. This is a sticky resin collected from tree bark and buds. They use it to seal the boxes together. It can be impossible to separate them by hand. It takes a hive tool and some strength to lever them apart.
As temperatures drop, bees cluster around the queen to keep her warm and maintain a colony heat of around 35C. A winter cluster in the hive looks much like a swarm cluster. A bit like penguins, when the outer ones get chilled, they change places with those in the centre to ensure they keep warm and maintain the overall heat in the hive.
Much as you want to look inside to check on stores, during the winter its best not to try. The last things winter bees want is a cold draft of air and you need to avoid making the bees expend valuable energy to bring the heat back to requisite levels.
Instead, beekeepers practice a technique called hefting. You lift and tilt the hive from the floor. This gives you an idea of its weight without disturbing the bees. Repeating the heft through the winter will tell you if they’ve run short of stores as the hive will get progressively lighter.
Beekeepers often feed the bees a light syrup in the spring to encourage growth and wax production. As the season comes to an end, a stronger syrup will be converted to stores. However, they can’t process the syrup once the temperatures drop. Also if it gets damp the feeders can rapidly become mouldy.
When this happens, syrup is replaced with bakers fondant. Supermarket fondant won’t cut it because it contains additives but buying it wholesale from a baking company ensures quality as well as quantity.
I leave my bees a full super box of stores. Usually they fill the outer brood box frames with honey as well but this year the brood boxes were empty of stores. Bees will take fondant if they need it and leave it if they don’t so it’s a useful precaution against starvation.
Also, as well as the extracted frames, I’d given the bees all the wax cappings. I was away in October so didn’t remove the cleaned up wax on the crown boards. A quick look under the roof early in November showed something I hadn’t seen before.
The crown boards have two holes for feeding and the bees had blocked these with the surplus wax, leaving carefully constructed tunnels for them to come in and out of.
I found this fascinating.
I could have replaced the crown boards with clean ones but it would have meant breaking the propolis seals and I’m thinking the layer of wax will add extra insulation during the cold months. It’s a useful reminder of how the bees have been looking after themselves for milennia. They know what they’re doing even if there’s times I’m less sure if I’m getting it right!
At the moment I have four hives with queens. I merged two queenless colonies at the end of summer and four is a good number for me to manage. However, like everything in beekeeping, nothing is guaranteed. The next few months are the time for winter projects at home, so I won’t know until I open the hives in spring if the queens have survived.
Fingers crossed for a good outcome…
Fascinating – thank you for sharing. I like that behaviours have been around forever, yet, there is adaptation to something that may be new to the hive.