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Winter is coming

Well, it has been several months since my last post. That has mainly to do with some personal issues with family,  but rest assured that in the time that has past, I have been busy helping the bees prepare for winter.

Late summer and early fall are the times when the bees get ready for the long state of relative inactivity. They have to store up a lot of food to get them through,  and since the beekeeper was busy taking away those hard worked for stores from spring and summer, it is only fair that the beekeeper give something back.

I fed my two colonies and the one nuc several portions of Apiinvert syrup. The syrup is a syrup mixture that also contains enzymes that help the bees to convert it to honey for storing for the winter. This syrup is also relatively odorless making it difficult for robbers (other honey bees and wasps) from detecting it. The bees can process the food rather quickly and the job of feeding them for winter is over rather quickly.

For my artificial swarm, I had to feed them a constant flow of 1:1 syrup. 1:1 means one part sugar to one part water. This gets the artificial swarm excited and they tend to draw out comb faster and the queen lays more eggs. Once the bees have drawn out all the comb, we can switch over to 3:2 mixture. The problem I had was that the swarm didn't draw out all the comb, so they also got 3:2 mixture in the last two weeks of feeding.

This year we had more wasps then normal or at least that was how we perceived it. The wasps soon figured out where they could get some food and began invading all the colonies. I made the error of leaving the openings to the hives larger than they should be at that time of the year. They say that when you are feeding the bees, the opening should be no wider than the width of two bees. This is a tremendous help for the guards. As I said, I had left the opening too wide and the wasps were gaining entry much too easily.

I was two weeks away from my bees and luckily on my next visit I saw how the wasps were simply going in and out of the hives unchecked. I immediately narrowed the hive opening and about 20 minutes later the guards had the entry on full lock down. No wasps were getting in!

Wasps are pretty stubborn though, as they do not back down so easily from such a rich source of nutrition. They would return in the early morning hours or late in the evening when the guards were a little slower in their movements due to cooler temps. The bees still managed to defend against the infiltraters, but the threat remained.

Thankfully, the temps dropped significantly at night in the past five days to a point where I think most of the wasps have died off. Now it is time for the bees to snuggle up next to one another and settle in for a long winters nap. 

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