Merry Christmas from Christ the King Church Apiaries! Christmas day was in the mid 50’s and gave us a chance to work off a few holiday cookies by checking in on the bees. We are pleased to report that all the colonies are doing well and that they all had enough honey and pollen for the near future. We will continue to monitor each colony to ensure that they have plenty of food to make it through the winter. Curiously, our bees will need more food starting in January as the queen resumes laying eggs and the colony raises the new brood. They will also need more food if the weather returns to being unseasonably warm like it was before the December cold snap. Why? When the bees are out foraging and taking cleansing flights (yes, this is what it sounds like), they expend more energy than when they are clustered in the hive. Since we took some of their honey for our use, we are careful to make certain that they have enough remaining to make it through until spring.
How cold is too cold for our bees? It depends. An individual bee will succumb to hypothermia in temperatures below 45F. Together, a colony will cluster together in the hive and flex their flight muscles to stay warm. In this configuration, a colony can survive in temperatures down to -40F or less. Their challenge then becomes being able to move the cluster around to get enough food. As it gets colder, bee’s ability to move the cluster around to feed becomes increasingly limited. If it stays below 0F for a week, the bees will begin to struggle for food. Since it rarely gets this cold in Virginia (and has never been known to stay this cold for a week) we usually don’t worry about the cold, except when our colonies are very small.