During the fall and winter, our main focus is on monitoring our bee’s health and food supply. We do this by tracking weather patterns, testing for pests and inspecting the apiary. We have stopped weekly hive inspections and have replace them with limited observations when weather permits.

The unusually warm and dry fall has set up a potential food shortage for our bees in late winter. Earlier this fall, we fed our bees to make up for the sparse fall flower bloom because of the dry weather and got our hives well set for fall. Because the weather has continued to be warmer than usual our bees have keep making brood and foraged for resources much more than they otherwise might have. Checking on our hives last week, we found that they have used up more of their food resources than we expected for this time of year and we are now concerned about them having enough food to make it through the winter. To address this, we made up candy boards this week and will place them in the coming days on the hives.

Candy boards are frames filled with a block of sugar. We set them on top of the hives below the outer cover. They provide needed carbohydrates the bees use to keep warm through the winter and adsorb excess moisture inside.

For the past three weeks we have been treating our hives for Varroa Mites with Oxalic Acid vaporization.  We have also been using “Swiffer” sheets to entrap and remove small hive beetles that have exploded on population.  For our efforts so far, we have managed to stabilize and make small gains against the Varroa and Small Hive Beetle infestations.  We were hoping for better management of these pests, so we have now pivoted to a strategy that adds additional treatment to our hives.

For small hive beetles, we have deployed additional “Swiffer” strips in each hive and added more “beetle blaster” style traps.

For Varroa, we are going to add Formic Pro strips to hives that have more than 3 mites per 250 bees as determined by alcohol wash assay. 

Lastly, with our help, the bees have managed to put enough resources on the hives to over winter.  We are going to leave the hive top feeders on but not feed for the next week and then decide if we are going to remove them for the season or if we are going to give the bees on last feeding before winter.

For the past month, the bees have been experiencing a “dearth” of nectar because of a seasonal lack of flowers that accompanies the heat of summer.  All bees during this time become more aggressive and will steal resources from weaker colonies.  To ward off these attacks, bees also become more defensive.  This combination makes the beekeeper’s job more challenging.  To prevent robbing, we need to work more quickly to prevent robbing, and we need to smoke more and move deliberately, to prevent antagonizing the bees.  It can be a delicate balance and no matter what, by the time we are in the last hive doing inspections, there are just a lot of “spicy” bees swirling around the apiary!

This week we continued to feed the bees.  We changed out three jar feeders for three new hive top pan feeders from Mann Lake Beekeeping Supplies, Inc.  These feeders allow us to place more feed at once on the hives and only go out once per week to feed and inspect.  We also reduced hive 2 down to one deep and two medium boxes.  This hive is bulging with bees such that we will likely take some more out and place them in hives 3 and 4 to equalize the numbers of bees in all our hives later in the season.

This week we moved hive 4 back to the apiary.  The hive successfully created a new queen after their queen was lost when we cut out the colony from the eve of the church.  To help it build up and be ready for winter we took some resources and brood from hive two and added it to hive 4.  With a laying queen and plenty of resources this hive should thrive.

We entered our summer harvest honey into the judged competition at the Fairfax 4-H fair.  We took first place in our class and are co-champions in the strained honey division.  Congratulations to everyone who helped work the bees and make this award possible.

Some time ago, we noticed that a colony of bees had taken up residence in the soffit of the sanctuary. Yesterday, as part of our irregularly scheduled volunteer property clean up events, we removed the bees from the church and moved them to a remote location in Arlington. We will return them to the church property in our apiary in a couple of weeks.