Hi Dawn, I never realized that the bees had no brood at all during harsh winters. I always understood that they kept a small area of brood going right through winter like you see in the video “City of the Bees”.
Sometimes some of my hives reduce the brood to about 3or4 frames during winter & others seem to have it full width. They’re the ones that want to swarm early, well before our winter is officially over.
Getting back to insulating hives during winter. The way I see it is: the better insulated a hive is, the better chance it has of surviving the winter. Plus the less honey or sugar/water they’ll use to survive.
I guess it’s a case of economics. The cost of insulation vs the cost of honey/syrup & or a replacement colony of bees early spring.
Exactly, and that works from both the bee point of view, and the human one! Your comments on insulation are spot-on, from what I have read. I never had insulated hives, because we kept bees in WBC hives. They were not available in polystyrene, and in any case, the whole thing would be very cumbersome to insulate. YOU could probably do it, but most people wouldn’t bother…
I have to say though, we never lost a hive to winter in the UK. We lost hives to swarms in late spring (too busy with day jobs) and to school kids vandalizing them, but they never starved or just died from an unknown cause.
Thanks Dawn, I just now finished editing our “smoke em out” video. 40 minutes down to just over 10. We’re heading out this afternoon to kill a huge paper wasp nest. I always manage to get one or two to do this time of year. They are always on the highest point under the gutter of 2 story houses. They are native but they do sting pretty bad. However, I don’t think they’re endangered. The lady was hoping I could relocate them. But in the interest of my personal safety, I’ll take the easier option.
I think they probably do now…mostly. Much has happened in the last 20 years by way of the types of bees people keep in the UK. But we do get isolation starvation if the colonies are weak. The bees move over to a source of food, leaving behind an empty frame and if we get a really cold snap they don’t find their way back to the rest. Some people leave their surplus winter food in a super above, particularly if they are running the smaller single National box and this is where the queen gets abandoned in the cold.
This winter was strange there was practically no Clustering the bees were flying here in December, January and February it is only now in March we are having really cold weather - I’ve had to wear gloves recently - but not all through winter.
You’ll find @Valli that if you insulate your colonies the way Derek Mitchell suggests with a decent thickness of PIR insulation the bees will not cluster until it gets to about -10˚ . So you won’t get clustering in our normal winters which is a good thing.
Fair enough Jape, my first mentor used to breed them & sell the queens. He’s dead now but his son is still breeding & selling the queens.
I got some at the start. They were easy to handle until one swarmed & the new queens progeny was virtually unmanageable. Well, that’s what I thought as a new beekeeper at the time.
Ever since then, whenever I bought new queens, I got Italians. I haven’t bought any new queens for about 5 years. I don’t look like buying any more in the foreseeable future either.
I’m in West Australia and so in early autumn now. I just did an inspection in my hive and was a little surprised to how the bees had distributed stuff. I have two brood boxes with QX on top and flow on top of this.
They’ve got about 15kg of honey in the flow super, 1 frame in the top brood box against the wall. otherwise there was very little honey in the brood box and not much pollen either. The majority of the brood frames had brood on them, nearly all workers but some drones. However, the capped brood was in small patches with only about one frame with brood across all of it. Overall I’d say there wasn’t a lot of brood - maybe the equivalent of 2-3 full frames. A couple of the frames were really spotty.
Should I be concerned by this? I was hoping to remove one of the boxes before winter (either flow frames or a brood box) but with all the honey in the flow frames, I will leave this on and it doesn’t look like I can remove a brood box because the brood is spread across most of the frames. Any ideas?
ok I’m finally starting to pack down my hive for the coming winter…
I wanted to do it a couple of weeks back but I’ve been away working…
so today I put in a divider between the second and third box (that has a small hole in the middle of it, around 1.5 inches) so that the bees think that the top box is “OUTSIDE” and empty it down to the other boxes…
I did this to all three hives…
I also put in entrance reducers to keep the mice out…
I would advise anyone in the southern parts of Australia to do this RIGHT NOW…
I found a dead mouse beside one of my boxes today… he picked my strongest box and paid the price…
I also paid the price with a sting to the bock of my left leg… and then two more stings (through my bee suit) while putting in the dividers…
the top box maybe 1/3 full… I thought that it was less than this but it has some weight in it… but I didn’t want to pull it apart to see exactly how much as I did not want to disturb the bees too much on this cooler day…
I will check it in a week or two to see if the honey has been moved…
if I recall, last year it took them around 2 weeks to move crystallised honey from the top frames down…
I’m also trying to figure out what to do this winter (Melbourne). I have a brood box with hybrid flow super on top. The super is 90% full and mostly capped. I was going to keep the super on over winter but just read that I need to take the queen excluder off and then find the queen in spring to get her back in the brood box. Now out of all the inspections I’ve done (I’m a newbie, got the swarm in Nov 17) I’ve never seen the queen (only found her later looking at photos on my computer!) So the thought of trying to find her in Spring worries me a bit. I wondered if taking the super off and leaving them just in the brood box would be ok? Or my other thought was to remove the flow frames from the super, leave the 4 full capped frames and add 4 empty frames (then remove queen excluder). Just worried if this would be too much empty space for them? My plan next year is to have 2 brood boxes + flow hybrid super (so this won’t be an issue next year!)
If you don’t want the number of bees you get with 2 brood boxes, you could go for a one deep and one WSP/Ideal box. I think quite a few Aussies do that.
and to school kids vandalizing them, but they never starved or just died from an unknown cause.