George Imirie's PINK PAGES
January 2002
Starting The Year Right!
It is a NEW YEAR, so some changes have been made. Let us start off with an
INDEX of this month's PINK PAGES subjects:
1.) Reversing Brood Chambers - Perhaps the most important technique to prevent swarming, but it has to be started in February.
2.) Feeding: Why? When? What? How Much? - Many beekeepers just don't feed their bees. Are they uninformed, lazy, or too cheap?
3.) Which Month Do Most Bees Starve? - Many people guess January or February because it is so cold, but they are wrong.
4.) November and First Half of December have had 70° and 80° Days - Is this unseasonable warm weather good or bad for your bees and their winter stores of honey?
Of all the many techniques and management systems used to prevent swarming,
REVERSING THE BROOD CHAMBERS is perhaps the most important manipulation, but the
time to do it is VERY IMPORTANT. In our Washington, DC area, I like to make my first
reversal on the first day in February when the temperature exceeds 50°. YES, I said
February!
WHAT is "reversing" the brood chambers? During the course of the late fall and
winter (November through March), the cluster of bees in the lowest brood body slowly
move UPWARD into the top brood body, leaving the lower brood body empty. For some
strange reason, when the queen has no more egg laying space in the upper body, the bees
either stop the queen from laying or they swarm rather than going to the empty lower
body to lay. Bee scientists cannot explain this characteristic, but know it exists. In
these cool months, even though the bees can fly outside on warmer days, bees just want
to keep their brood area moving UPWARDS, rarely down. Hence, a "smart" beekeeper
helps his bees by reversing the positions of the almost-full top brood body with the
empty lower brood body. This does not require moving individual frames, but just
switching positions of the brood bodies.
How many reversals are necessary in a season? There are many, many variables
involved here, e. g., what size brood bodies, hive population, weather temperature,
race of bees, queen fecundity, food availability, etc.; and therefore, one cannot say
"reverse every 2 weeks", or "once a month". Reversals are made WHEN NEEDED. The
hive population is extremely important, because there must be a large number of
bees to protect the brood from being chilled. I use ALL MEDIUM bodies (no deeps), and
the 2nd reversal is usually about 3 weeks after the first reversal, whereas reversals
done in April or May might be needed as often as 10 days apart. If you use deep bodies
for brood and make the first reversal in February, you will probably make a total of
3 reversals before the nectar flow is strong in May. If you are using medium bodies,
6 5/8", you will probably make 4-5 total reversals.
What does one have to be CAUTIOUS about? NEVER REVERSE WHEN THE OUTSIDE TEMPERATURE IS BELOW 50°.
You don't dare "split the brood", or some of it will chill
and die. What is "splitting the brood"? If brood is in BOTH the top body and the lower
body, DON'T reverse because the brood will be split away from being close together
into two "islands" of brood wide apart, one island close to the bottom board and the
other island close to the inner cover. Wait a few more days until you find 90%-100%
of the brood in the top body and almost zero brood in the lower body, and then, REVERSE.
There are many people who just "can't be bothered to do all this reversing" in the
cool months of February and March, and then WONDER WHY their bees did not make a
sizable honey crop while nearby beekeepers enjoyed a record breaking crop. In our
Maryland area, our nectar flow starts quite early, about April 15th and is almost
always over by June 1st or June 10th. Gathering as much as 20-25 pounds of nectar
per day to make a high yield honey crop requires a LARGE number of FORAGING AGE
bees (FORAGERS, not just bees). A foraging age bee is a bee older than 19 days old!
The gestation period of a worker bee is 21 days, and it spends the first 18 days of
its life doing hive duties, mainly being a nurse bee of the brood larvae; and does not
go out foraging for nectar or pollen until it is 19 days old. 21 days gestation period
plus 19 days of hive duty equal FORTY DAYS between the time its egg was laid and
foraging. Therefore, if you want a foraging age bee ready for foraging at the start of
a major nectar flow on April 15th, the queen had to lay "it's" egg 40 days prior to
April 15th, meaning before MARCH 6th! March 6th! March 6th!
One might say: "All the above is very nice, but how do you get a queen to lay eggs
in the cold of February and early March?" Bees do not use calendars, but their actions
are predicated by the weather conditions. When the skunk cabbage, alders, and maples
start producing pollen in late January, followed by a small amount of weak nectar
from maples or dandelions, these are signals to the bees that spring time is just
around the corner; and that means nectar collecting to make honey for next winter's
survival and that require a tremendous number of worker bees to gather that nectar.
Hence, the worker bees start heavy feeding of their queen to produce large quantities
of eggs, plus cleaning and polishing of thousands of brood cells for the queen to lay
eggs in. Again, the "smart" beekeeper helps his bees by "tricking" them in the belief
of an early spring by feeding them a light sugar syrup, 1 pound of sugar in 2 pints of
water, and adding a teaspoon or so of pollen substitute to the tops of brood frames.
The worker bees interpret this light sugar feed and pollen substitute as the real
thing of nectar and pollen, and get "Mother Queen" rapidly laying eggs in cold February.
Reversing brood chambers plus feeding egg laying stimulants sugar and pollen
substitute is a very positive way of increasing brood production and heavy colony
population which is the basic key to making a large honey crop, provided that the
colony does NOT swarm. What else is necessary to help prevent swarming? Of course,
we now know that a major deterrent to swarming is to have a queen that is less than
12 months old. Another swarm deterrent is to have super space on the colony for nectar
storage that relieves the brood chamber of being crowded with stored nectar. Having a
young queen means requeening the colony every year, and I personally prefer to do this
every September 1st rather than stress my bees in the spring and interrupt honey
production. However, having just one super of drawn comb on the colony ahead of the
major nectar flow is a good insurance policy against swarming. However, so many
people complain that the bees won't go through the queen excluder to make use of the
super, and some unknowledgeable people have even referred to a queen excluder as a
"honey excluder". They are unknowlegeable because they don't know how or just refuse
to "BAIT" a super so that bees will not resist going through a queen excluder to get to
the super. Baiting a super is very simple! On April 1st, set a super directly on the top
brood body WITHOUT a queen excluder, and inspect it at the end of a week. After you
find two or three frames of that super partially filled with something, either nectar
or maybe brood, make sure the queen is back in the brood chamber and add a queen
excluder under that super, because the super is now baited and the bees will freely
go through the excluder now to do their jobs. Of course, you should have an upper
entrance in the front edge of the inner cover so that forager age bees can come and
go from the super without having to travel through the queen excluder causing congestion
in the brood chamber, or you might use an Imirie Shim if you do not have an upper
entrance slot in the inner cover. I use BOTH: an Imirie Shim between supers #1 & #2,
a second Imirie Shim between supers #3 & #4, and an upper entrance slot in my inner
cover, so my foraging bees have can come and go to the supers via 3 entrance holes
without ever going through the brood chamber area. I put the first super, the bait
super, on about April 1st and add another 4 supers of drawn comb on April 15th.
I don't stop the continuous feeding of light sugar syrup until April 15th when I add
the 4 supers, because the nectar flow should take over now.
If you do all this help for your bees, reversing, feeding artificial nectar and
pollen, providing plenty of super space EARLY, and having a queen, you have lessened
the chance of swarming and greatly enhanced the production of a superior yield of
honey. Isn't that what you want to do?
Of course, we still have those who say:" Ma Daddy didn't do all that stuff"; and
they are probably correct, but Daddy's bees rarely produced more than 25-50 pounds
of honey per season instead of the 120-150 pounds/year that my bees normally produce.
With pound jars of honey selling for $3.50 or $4.00 each, that 120-150 pound
yield sure looks better to me than a 25-50 pound yield. Like leading a horse to water,
it is up to him whether he drinks or not; so I have explained REVERSING in great detail,
now the rest is up to you.
Don't just HAVE bees - be a PROUD beeKEEPER!
You have to eat, don't you? Your dog has to eat, doesn't it? Your car has to "eat"
gasoline, or it won't run. Cockroaches eat your birthday cake crumbs unless they are
cleaned up. Varroa mites "ride around" on worker bees and feed on the bee's "blood",
injuring the bee. Even germs and bacteria have to feed to stay alive. When anything
doesn't get fed, it becomes weak or sick, and can no longer work very well or it dies.
MUCH TOO OFTEN, a colony of honey bees does not get fed by the beekeeper and it
gets weak or dies. Package bees, a swarm, a nuc, or a split is put in a hive of foundation
and the bees are expected to make that foundation into drawn comb, and the beekeeper
provides them with a pint of sugar water - ONE PINT! Bees have to consume 8 pounds of
honey to make 1 pound of wax. TOO MANY beekeepers believe that nature is going to provide
enough nectar that the bees can do all of this work without any supplemental feed.
Can bees gather nectar in cold weather, rain, nighttime, or during a dearth? If you want
the bees to produce honey for you, don't you think that you owe them the feed to help
them build the comb (furniture), a large population of workers to get through the winter,
something that contains Fumadil-B to prevent Nosema disease, and some Back-Up food
stores in case the fall nectar flow is meager? Have you forgotten that bees positively
will not build comb (draw foundation) without a nectar flow, or an artificial nectar flow
of sugar syrup? Are you in good spirits when there is "nothing to do"? Don't try
to requeen a hive when the bees have "nothing to do" like out foraging, so you feed
bees when you try to requeen. Brood rearing requires a tremendous amount of feed to raise
all those eggs and larvae into adult bees, so if you want your queen to heavily lay eggs,
feed your bees!
Basically, when you want your bees to do something that you have dreamed-up and it
did not come to past naturally, like requeening, building foundation into comb, getting
them to eat certain medicines, or increasing their population, FEED THEM and feed them
long enough to get the job done.
Starting a new colony in April with a package of bees is a good example. That colony
is going to require the building of at least 20 deep frames of foundation into drawn comb
that will hold a minimum of 70 pounds of honey to get it through the coming winter, and
all this work will require a large population of bees to get it done. Yet beekeeper after
beekeeper only feeds this new colony maybe one jar of sugar syrup. The proper way to
prepare a really strong colony is to feed it CONTINUOUSLY, WITHOUT STOPPING, from
the day it began in April for another 4 months into September! You might even get some
foundation drawn for supers. This might require about 50 pounds of sugar which costs
about 30¢/pound or $15. Isn't building a real strong colony ready to really produce a
large honey crop next year worth an extra $15, rather than have a pitiful weak colony
that might not make it through the winter? Are you a beeHAVER or a beeKEEPER?
WHAT do you feed? Just plain table sugar is by far the best feed you can use. Any
thing else, such as honey, high fructose, coke syrup, left over candies, molasses, or
you-name-it might have disease germs like Foul Brood spores, or starches or indigestible
minerals that give a bee diarrhea. Just plain sucrose (table sugar) dissolved in water
is absolutely the BEST feed. Someone is going to ask: Why not honey that they made
themselves, and hence it is their "favorite" food. Honey is NOT the favorite food of a
bee! Honey is an emergency food used in the winter when no nectar is available.
NECTAR, which is a watery solution of primarily SUCROSE (table sugar) is the favorite
food of a bee!
Sugar syrup can be made up into three different strengths, and you use different
strengths for different purposes and at different times of the year, as follows:
- 1:2 - 1 pound of sugar dissolved in 2 pints of water is primarily used as a egg laying
stimulant for the queen in late winter and early spring
- 1:1 - 1 pound of sugar dissolved in 1 pint of water is primarily used as an artificial
nectar to get bees to build comb and feed brood larvae in spring and summer
- 2:1 - 2 pounds of sugar dissolved in 1 pint of water is a winter feed substituting
for honey in the fall or early winter
Records show that more colonies of bees die of starvation during the month of
March than any other month, with February running a close second. Many beginners
think that January is the most difficult month because it is so cold, and the bees
have to eat more honey to keep warm. That is not true, and what is the reason that
March is so bad?
Bee scientists have investigated this for 200-300 years, and all have shown
that bees actually eat practically nothing during November, December, and early
January when they are generally tightly clustered to maintain body warmth, and there
is little or no brood being raised during this time. But when the queen starts laying
eggs in January, brood rearing requires a lot of "heat", because the brood nest must
be kept at a temperature of 91°-96° for the queen to lay eggs, and feeding all those
thousands of bee larvae for 6 days when their weight increases from 1 milligram to
about 100 milligrams each requires a tremendous about of feed. By the time March
gets around, the queen is laying at an accelerated pace, maybe 1500 eggs per day, and
this means the bees have to warm a much larger area brood nest to 91°-96° and feed
a tremendous number of larvae each of which increases its egg weight 100 times in
6 days. There is a tremendous use of food supplies in February and much more in March;
and there is very little nectar available in March to replace that stored winter honey.
If you remove the telescoping top cover of a colony during the winter months and
you see a large number of bees through the inner cover hole, immediately begin to be
concerned that the colony is SHORT of honey stores, because the bees should not have
eaten honey that far up in the colony before the spring nectar flow. Immediately (not
tomorrow) put a feeder of sugar syrup over that inner cover hole. On the next day (not
the next weekend) that the temperature is over 50°, take off that inner cover and
inspect the frames in that top body for stored honey. If the outside frames have honey,
but the center frames are almost empty, switch these frames. When it is cold and the
bees are clustered, bees will NOT move to the outside frames for honey, but starve to
death on the center frames. A bee cluster moves UPWARDS in a colony like smoke in a
chimney, and does not spread out sideways.
Why do I insist that you do something IMMEDIATELY, or the first day the temperature
is over 50° and NOT wait for a weekend? 24 hours may be the difference between live
bees or dead bees, and if they died because they were short on stored food, it was not
an Act of God or an unusual cold spell, but rather, IT WAS YOUR FAULT! You killed your
bees, because you did not have a full 70 pounds of honey in the colony by December 1st
for them to get through the winter!
I was removing the last few strips of Apistan from my colonies during the first week
of December when the temperature hit 80°, and I found frames with open brood in
quantities the size of my hand! Is this good or not good? It is good to have nice young
new bees going into the cold winter, because they will have a longer life span to warm the
brood nest when the queen starts heavy laying in February. However, it is bad to have
weather warm enough to have brood, because it opens the door to female varroa mites
to lay new mite eggs with the bee larvae, and these new adult mites will feed on the new
adult bees during the winter. This unseasonable warm weather plays havoc with the
winter feed stores for the bees, because it is brood rearing that uses so much stored honey.
KEEP A CLOSE EYE ON YOUR WINTER FOOD SUPPLY.
George W. Imirie, Jr.
Certified EAS Master Beekeeper
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