Plain Talk: Last Chance Winter Prep (250)

Episode 250 – Plain Talk: Last Chance Winter Prep 

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Dr. Jim Tew: Listeners, I'm here in the yard. As the weather cools, I'm really going to miss coming back here. I've always enjoyed talking to you from the bees, even if they didn't have hives open. I've done a true job of keeping you informed. I want to talk to you today about a couple of things, not the least of which is, this is a milestone for the whole podcast team here and me.

This is Episode Number 250. That's 5,000 minutes. That's about 84 hours. That's a lot of Thursday mornings that have come and gone, and a lot of things have happened during those 5,000 hours, some of the biggest things in our lives here.

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Can we chat for a while about this bit of a milestone for us, and then what to do on this day, as we have our last chance to do something to help our bees with the winter? I'm Jim Tew. I'm here at Honey Bee Obscura,where I come to you about once a week to spend just a few minutes talking about something to do with plain talk beekeeping.

Introduction: Welcome to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today Podcast. Join Jim Tew, your guide] through the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honey bees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honey bees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honey bees.

Jim: Listeners, it seems like a lifetime ago that Kim kept coming to me asking me to co-host a podcast with him. That was Kim Flottum. Kim has now passed on. He had to come to me several times because, at the time, I had a YouTube channel, and I was doing a lot of video editing and working on that. I didn't really have the knowledge or the understanding of why I would give up the visual picture and just go with essentially a radio program.

It was intriguing. It was new technology. I had not done it before. I gave it a shot. Kim and I thought we'd talk about 10 minutes. We quickly found out that with an introduction and with a few comments and a few references to the weather and whatever was going on that the show was already almost over. We fairly quickly went to roughly 20 minutes.

Then Kim and I, through the months, through the years, have talked about some of the most useful topics, some of the most mundane topics, topics that just intrigued us, topics that we did because you suggested them, topics that we did a good job on, topics that we did a terrible job on. Every Thursday morning, we tried to come up with the help of Engineer Jeff, who made everything happen behind the scenes and who cleaned up bad audio and misspoken words, and specious sounds in our presentation that he would try to clean up to make your listening enjoyment as much as possible.

Well, I've really grown to enjoy talking to you. In my mind, there's just one or two of you, and you're standing here with me, and you and I are chatting. That was always my and Kim's perception. It was as though he and I were at a table at the break area at a bee meeting, and we were just superficially discussing beekeeping. That was what we wanted the layout to be.

I've really grown to enjoy this. You'd think after 250 times, I would have gotten better at it. I think all that's happened, listeners, is I've gotten really good at making the same mistakes time and time again. Nonetheless, it's been an enjoyable process. It's supposed to be just relaxing for you and me both. You're not supposed to have to take notes and then take an exam when the discussion's over.

We just hope that you think about beekeeping and that you think of different ways and more ways that you can enjoy beekeeping. I hope that in about a year, when we have our 300th show that we will make an official deal of it. I don't know what we'll do. Make a T-shirt or something. I don't know. Jeff may be just cringing now when he hears me just speculating on live mic.

Today, it's an event. There's no cake. There's no singing. It's just a look back on all that's happened in the 250 episodes and how the show always went on, no matter what was debilitating to us at the time. Thank you for listening. Those of you who've been with us from episode early to now, you are one hardcore beekeeper. You are tough. For those of you who are new to it, they're all on the webpage.

You can go back and slog through all 84 hours at your convenience and hear the transition as we evolve through the years. This is an odd place to take a break, but I'm going to take a break at this point and hear from our sponsors.

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Jim: Listeners, it's the last weekend of summer. When I came out here and got set up to do the presentation for you, I got hit with that waft of fall crop being produced. The bees are active. As I've discussed in the previous two episodes, when I would come out here, I was immediately attacked by a few bees. It was not the end of the world. It was not an unreasonable number, but I'm supposed to be making sentences with verb tense agreements and thoughts and whatever.

It is hard to do that when you're about to swallow a bee. I've got on full protective gear that I have not needed at all. On this summer day, it's toasty in this protective gear, but I feel like I can sanely talk to you without wandering all over the page. I got a fairly light week next week, and I  plan to do something significant. I plan to open these hives, position them better for these boxes that they live in, these artificial domiciles, and reposition the honey stores.

I haven't taken honey off now in about a year or two, so I'm fairly certain that they've got enough honey. You all know the routine things for winter and fall, and [00:08:00] winter preparation. We've actually been preparing for winter ever since last spring. Every thought I had, every discussion I had, usually made some reference to the future coming great dearth that would require the bees to depend on those stores throughout the cold months.

All right. When I open those colonies up next week, one of the things that I would be looking for, one of the things that you would be looking for, is the productivity and the apparent health of the queen] Now, in these plain talk sessions, you put these things in a book, and you're limited in space and verbiage, so you got to be brief and succinct and say it. In speaking to you now, I can tell you that you're guessing.

It's just a guess. I would say that at this time of the year, from my personal opinion of my beehives, it's got to be a real bad queen for me to go through this late season, this late time of the season, and try to replace that queen. Do I dare suggest that the queen you've got now is probably 90% of the time the queen you're going to go through winter with? If the colony is weak and seems like its chances for survival are not good, do you requeen that colony?

Well, then you got to have what? By the time you requeen,] get the other queen out, get the new queen in, get her accepted, get everything in position, you're looking at weeks. You don't have weeks before she's going to be having any new brood come from that new queen. May I say it again and not be annoying to you that I'm suspecting that the queen I've got right now is the queen I'll be going through winter with?

I have never said this. I've never had the thought till now, but I think that most of my requeening initiative, interest, possibility is in late spring and early summer. Anything after that is just disrupted. You have to look at your time. Kim always said, "What's your time worth? What's your time worth?" Well, you do have to look at your time and your money. If I end up looking and finding out that I've got several weak colonies that are not going to make it, I suspect that I would just combine them and try to make a useful potential colony for winter survival, which brings up the second issue, and that's your colony numbers.

After all these years of keeping bees, I've still had the same feeling that once I get to X number of colonies, if you go down from that or backwards from that, somehow you're not winning the bee game. Those numbers, I think, should be based on the potential for survival, not just going through the winter with 10 colonies or 30 colonies or 2 colonies at all cost.

Make every effort to get through the winter as strong as possible, and then keep that colony healthy, and then next spring, you would split back out and restart, and it'd be another year with all the potential the new year offers. Try to coexist with the fact that our beehive numbers and our yards are always going to fluctuate. How many swarms did you pick up?

How many queens went bad? How many queens just didn't do a good job, and the colonies waned? There's always going to be that. I just wrote an article for one of the bee magazines on equalizing colonies. I will do some modest equalizing when I review these colonies. I'll be shocked if these colonies are in at least two deeps. Most are in three deeps.

These colonies better be deadweight heavy. I don't plan on equalizing anything. I just plan on being certain that the honey is in the right position and that they are as set as they can be in these thin-wall artificial domiciles. I plan on putting insulation on. Anne Frey, a frequent speaker on this podcast, has often said, "You can put on that insulation well into winter, even into the next spring."

I'll have my coldest months in late January and early February. It doesn't really mean a lot that I come out here in mid-September and put insulation on, but I should help these colonies. I'm grown more and more convinced that those insulatory procedures would be helpful. Be careful with those small colonies. Combine them if you can. Late to re-queen. If I could quote Kim again, he always said, "Take your losses in the fall, not during the winter."

That way, you can get the equipment put away, and you don't have to deal with the dead cluster next spring, get it all cleaned out, and get the combs cleaned up and get them back into circulation if you reuse those combs. All right, I mentioned equalizing colonies. What if you have colonies that are light? Feeding is always a damnable process, but in the book, it looks like it's just a band-aid that works every time, but it's messy.

It's hard for you to do when you feed for survival, like you'd be doing now. Then you want to feed the thickest syrup that you can make up. Some of you would even consider buying high-fructose corn syrup. Those early make-it-quick, make-it-fast sugar solutions where you're trying to stimulate brood in the spring, that's not what you're trying to do here in early fall on the last chance you've got to do anything.

If you need to feed them, feed them seriously and feed them thick syrup and feed them today because the bees have got to process that syrup. They've got to get it in the combs. They've got to cap it if they're going to. It's probably going to granulate, but they can still use that granulated sugar stored in the comb as an energy source during the winter. Feed now if you have to.

I really like using those gallon jugs and putting on an empty feeder shelf. Top feeders are okay if you've got them. I don't want to go through a review of feeders here. The last-ditch effort would be the Boardman entrance feeder. If you think they need feeding, you need to start doing that at this very minute, as soon as possible. It's always a band-aid. Something went wrong.

If your bees need feeding, something went wrong. Either you had a really poor nectar flow and the bees couldn't make anything, or there was something wrong with the genetics and the function of that colony that let them be less than productive about foraging for their own. On this very day and this warm, pleasant stink of fall season goldenrod coming in, the bees are just as energetic as they can be.

They are just flying like crazy, except for this one hive who's got a lot of bees on the landing board, and they are just occasionally flying. Most of the colonies are just flat-out, full-sorty flying to bring back whatever it is they want, pollen and nectar, except one colony here, which seems to be taking Sunday off. What are they doing? I don't know. It's just beekeeping.

I always like to watch colony entrance activity. This colony has always been healthy. I think it's warmed. It's got a good population of bees on the landing board. It's just not taking the day as seriously as the other colonies are. Feed if you think you should. If you think you need to feed, you need to do it as early as you can in the season. The old beekeepers would say, "Well, you got to watch for the bees using that resource to begin a brood production cycle," something you really don't want unless there's a low population.

You don't want fresh bees; you want that honey to be a food source for the upcoming winter. Then there's ventilation. I'm reluctant to even bring it up for all of my life until about a year and a half, two years ago. I would come out about this time of the year and break the propolis seals and wonder why the bees were so adamant to propolize everything.

Then I would raise that inner cover, as I have been taught and as I have done hundreds of times, I would raise that inner cover about a quarter of an inch to "let that moisture-laden air out so it won't rain back on the bees." Well, Dr. Tom Seeley and others have been saying now, don't break that propolis seal, that the bees need that water throughout the winter to dilute nectar and to maintain the humidity source.

That is haunting because in episodes past, I and Kim, I think Kim was involved in it, talked about the insanity that I would see of bees flying on days when no bee in the world should be out. It was 37 degrees, and they were trying to collect water. There was only 25 or 30 bees doing it. They were like something doing a bombing raid in World War II. Many of them went into the drink, where they became immediately chilled and were unable to get out.

I stood there all those years ago, marveling that "What were these bees doing?" I like bee mysteries. I love bee mysteries all the time. What were these bees doing with this  insane water collection? When these authorities said that the bees actually needed that water inside, is that what I was causing? Is that why the bees were out foraging for water, because I had released so much of the humidity content from the hive by raising and letting air waft through?

Well, then there's just no end to the questions. What were the old beekeepers doing who put on those quilts? There were quilts, Q-U-I-L-T-S, made by beekeeping companies that went on top to absorb the moisture. At least the moisture, the humidity, was held in the quilt. What I was doing was actually letting it out because that's what I was told to do, and that's what I've told you to do.

I bring up this issue now of winter ventilation because I feel like I've been told a lifelong truth may not be true, and I'm not sure what to do with that information now. I thought that it would rain back on the bees and keep the cluster wet and damp and make everything moldy. Apparently, there's another view on that issue that says that nope, the hive needs that internal metabolic water to get through the winter.

Make a decision on the queen. It's probably going to be to live with it. Make a decision whether or not you're going to feed. You probably need to start feeding right away, and you probably need to accept the fact that if that colony seriously needs  feeding, then it's going to have a serious wintering potential, too. If you've got small colonies, don't try to boost them at the expense of taking from the strong colonies, but work with the small colonies to see if you can combine several.

Don't worry about hive numbers. See if you can combine several and make one functional colony out of it. Winter ventilation, at least insulate. That seems to be helpful, especially in the climate that I'm in and those of you who are in truly cold climates, that seems to help. That's something that you can put off till later because you can do it in dead winter when the colony truly needs insulating, not here in early winter on a day when it's 84 degrees outside, that they probably don't need winter insulation today.

The last thing I went over is what in the world to do with this whole concept of ventilation. I told you the pros and cons as quickly as I could, as best I understand them, and as I stand here looking at my bees and look at their general productivity, I can tell you that I don't know what I'm going to do because once you break that propolis seal, then the bees can't repair it.

When I go into these colonies next week to close up the slip-backs that I've got where I put up upper entrances, and I'm going to close those off, I will be breaking seals. Maybe there's enough time left for the bees to repair the damage, maybe not. I don't know. I'll close on this note. Us keeping bees in these artificial domiciles is not a natural, normal procedure for them.

The bees are still trying as mightily as they can to maintain their natural demeanor in an artificial nest. You and I are trying to figure out how to help them as much as possible endure that artificial hive. We've been trying to do this now for several hundred years. We've gotten better at it, but we're still not good at it. Listeners, help your bees as much as you can.

Never hurt as much. As possible, let the bees be bees. Try to help them get through the winter. That's all any of us can do. That's pretty much plain talk. I have enjoyed talking with you so very much. I always enjoy talking to you. You're very patient, as you hypothetically stand here beside me. You don't interrupt with questions. You're very quiet. You're a good audience. Thank you so much for being an audience. I look forward to talking to you next week for Episode Number 251 on our way to 300 episodes. Jim telling you bye. Goodbye.

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