Spring Prep Now with Anne Frey (256)

Episode 256 – Spring Prep Now with Anne Frey 

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Jim Tew: Listeners, it's hard winter. Getting colder, getting warmer, getting colder again. One thing is not possible is to go out and do bee yard work. Really shouldn't open them very much. I'm with Anne Frey here from Betterbee.

Anne Frey: Hi, Jim.

Jim: Are you out opening your hives in the winter?

Anne: No, barely at all, maybe once.

Jim: The question is, the winter for the wintering beekeeper, is this when you do what? Something else? Because you can't do bee work. It's go to bee meetings, I guess. We want to talk about that. How can you become more prepared for springtime in the wintertime?

Anne: Yes, don't just wait for spring. Get ready for spring.

Jim: Be in the traces when the race starts, and you're good to go.

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Jim: That's what we want to talk about. Listeners, I'm Jim Tew, and I come to you about once a week here at Honey Bee Obscura, where I want to talk about something to do with plain talk beekeeping. Our treat is that Anne Frey from Betterbee is here. Anne?

Anne: Well, I'm glad to be here.

Jim: She's going to help me get through this. In fact, she may not know it, she's going to do most of it. We were going to talk last time. That's okay, you'll be fine. We're going to talk about getting ready for spring and the wintertime.

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: When we came up with this possible topic, it was just a booster because it gives you a little bit of a jolt that with all the cold and the snow and the ice out there, and even in the warm states, it's still cool, that there's something you can be doing to look toward the bright promise of springtime coming.

Anne: Springtime.

Jim: That just makes your heart flutter, doesn't it? That there is hope. The winter's not all bad. The winter gets a bad rep. There's things about winter that's okay. I think the main thing winter does is make spring look so good.

Anne: So we can get ready. We don't have to just be sad all winter because we can't work on bees.

Jim: I do want to make this point: the bees are getting ready. The bees are always right on time, as are the plants. I'm the one who's always tardy. I'm the one who thought I had three more weeks to do something, and the bees didn't think that. The bees are preparing for it. The plants are preparing for it. Climate's changing. What can we be doing in the dead of winter that lets us be in the start position for the race of springtime?

Anne: Yes, because you don't want to be working like a madman in spring just to get your equipment ready.

Jim: We've talked, in other episodes, about efficiency and beekeeping. We should have had our equipment assembled and nicely painted and foundation inserts. Certainly, that kind of thing is possible. How do you handle that? Do you have a shop where you go work that's heated, or do you have to work in a cool barn somewhere?

Anne: It used to be a cool barn. Nowadays, at Betterbee, everything is heated, so that's spoiling me. The idea of where to work, I think I would start in the kitchen. Just sit down at the table and look at the calendar, and say, "Oh, last year, I put the supers on in May, but I really wished I put them on April 20th. Mark April 20th. This old calendar, it says first swarm appeared May 1st. Mark that." Be aware of when that kind of stuff's going to happen.

You can be more prepped for your equipment needs, things like that. Don't book your April birthday party on the weekend of April 20th. This is going to be putting supers on. That kind of stuff, well ahead. You won't be shocked in the spring. Then get your equipment ready. Find out if anything's busted, those frames that were, you thought, really just fine, in the winter, you may be a little more draconian and chuck them in the garbage and make some more frames, get some more foundation.

Jim: I want to roll this back because you really touched on a nice thought and then kept going. That's this calendar. Have you got a whole series of calendars there that have come and gone from years past?

Anne: Yes, I used to. I used to have a stack of those wall calendars and have songbirds or cars or something on each month. Then I'd go back from, I'd say, "Oh, that's when the pond ice melted a week earlier this year. The dandelions appeared right on schedule." I used to do that, but I've stopped doing that now.

Jim: Do you have to do it if you have those old calendars? Because you've already been through it. Do you have to acknowledge that every year, if you did it for a few years, and you take that average?

Anne: Yes, it's valuable.

Jim: You probably got some valuable numbers there.

Anne: Yes, they were good numbers. They started changing when I got 12 or 15 years' worth of calendars. I noticed that the ice would melt, the dandelions would come, the maples would bloom about a week earlier. It was consistent. It wasn't just a fluke, and then things went back. I did notice that, and that's climate change, I suppose. Now I'm used to the way it is now, and my brain works this way more normally. I don't rely on my stack of calendars anymore.

Jim: Well, I like the idea though, and I'm sure that there's people who are rolling their eyes because we're talking about paper calendars when people a third our age are using nothing but electronic phone calendars and reminders and whatever. The thing I would like to say that you've made me think about is that one of the things I can do to get ready for spring is just set up a simple note-taking system that's calendar-based, so I can generate what you've done over four or five years and begin to get a working idea of when these-- You got to start sometimes. Now you're rolling your eyes at me. Stop doing that. This is a good idea.

Anne: Hey, this is a podcast, they can't see.

Jim: [chuckles] Okay. I can see you. All right, so you made that comment and I liked it a lot. That's one thing you can do is begin to keep records of what you did and how you did it, and when the bees did it, so you can be really well prepared for the next year. Then you were moving on from that, that you'd be preparing equipment and putting equipment together and doing those kinds of things.

Anne: Yes, sorting it, chucking out some of it. Maybe last year you thought, "Hey, I really wanted to start pollen trapping the next year." Then you might learn more about that, say, "When is the month that that starts? What kind will I buy? Do I need any other stuff to buy? Do I need to buy bees?"

Jim: I don't know how people make those decisions. When you're sitting on that kitchen table you were talking about a bit ago, and let's just say you've got 25 colonies and you're suspicious of 5 or 6 of them, do you buy 5 or 6 packages or do you buy 10 packages or do you buy no packages and just wait to see what happens and make splits from your own bees?

Anne: Yes, that's something you got to think about based on your enthusiasm and knowledge. There's probably a time in everybody's career—should I call it career?—when they say, "I'm never going to buy bees again," because they learned how to do splits and they're confident. Earlier on, you might be thinking that you must buy a package or a nuc if you want to bounce back from a winter death.

Jim: One of the things that I look at personally every year when I order packages is that I want to order packages. It's not that I really need them. I just want to do it. I don't want to be sitting at home knowing that everybody's picking up their packages today, and I'm sitting at home watching some YouTube segment on beekeeping or something, and everybody else is actually out doing it. I usually get a few packages even when I don't need them.

Anne: That's interesting.

Jim: I'm probably going to have the 30%, 40% winter kill so I can replace that, and if I don't, I'll make some splits. I'm not a hero beekeeper. I'm not trying to suggest anybody do what I do. I'm just trying to keep my head above water and have a few live hives.

Anne: I used to do it as a standard thing too. I assume a certain percentage would perish. I'm going to keep a steady number, so I got to get some, but then I shifted to thinking, "Well, there's also swarms and there's also making a little split." I'd decrease the purchases and increase those other things, and morphed out of buying bees each year.

Jim: The swarm thing, I like that because, in the dead of winter, that's a good time to be improvising. Some of this equipment you're chucking out, you said?

Anne: Oh, yes, turn it into a swarm trap.

Jim: Turn it into a swarm trap. I know you're supposed to put it 15, 16 feet off the ground, but I'm 77 years old and I'm just going to put it on a hive stand. The bees need a home bad enough, they can find it. I like that notion. If you want to possibly increase by swarm capturing, then have swarm traps out there with some baited hives in it.

Anne: Yes, don't think about creating swarm traps. You got to do something unusual for the top and bottom if you don't want to use heavy telescoping outer covers at bottom boards. If you have ideas, do those things in the winter, not in late April. Swarm season starts May 1st for us. Get this stuff ready, folks.

Jim: It starts on time.

Anne: It starts with a boom. Everything in spring just comes so fast. Anything you can do to prepare ahead is going to help you.

Jim: Anne, let's take a short break and hear from our sponsor.

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Betterbee: Winter is coming. Prepare your bees for the cold months with Betterbee's insulating hive wraps, outer covers, mouse guards, hive straps, and more. Visit betterbee.com/winterprep for tips and tricks to help your hive withstand the harsh weather.

Jim: How do you buy splits? Do you need to contact somebody in the winter to book those splits, or do you just wait and catch as catch can next spring?

Anne: I think the first one's a better choice. If you want to buy a nuc or a split, as you say, it's just as much planning as if you're going to buy a package. Those people have to know how much is committed to other customers, to you. They have to know when to cut off their sales.

Jim: They're having to predict, too, what winter is going to do to them. They're giving a best guess. A good, healthy split is a good thing. A lightweight split is frustrating because it probably costs the same thing. Generally, you get good bees. I've never had somebody sell me a divide that was understaffed or whatever. That's a good time to meet somebody at wintertime bee meetings. The other thing that happens is, not in all cases, but in some cases, December meetings are shut down. A lot going on with Christmas and whatever. It may mean that part of what you do is take a good part of December off unless you've really got some of these things you want to do.

Boy, then don't things heat up in January. One of the things you do to get ready for spring is slog out through the snow and the ice and get to these bee meetings that are all over the country, where people are coming together because that's a good time to come together. There's not much else you can do.

Anne: Yes, and then you learn more things and you get ideas for maybe I'm going to start using insulation or I want to change the type of hive stand. I want to get some lumber and build some hive stands. That guy showed an interest. Those bee meetings spark up all your ideas.

Jim: They really show you what other people are coming up with. Beekeeping is so old. It's got an idea trash heap that must be a small mountain high of all the ideas that have come and gone.

Anne: Then the trash heap gets recycled over and over.

Jim: I'm wanting to get off the subject and review equipment that's come and gone. Sometimes it's pretty good stuff, but the reasons for it has come and gone. I'm thinking specifically of all that basswood suction equipment that we used for so many years. You can still get it, but it's in its final phases. None of that really is a problem. If you wanted to produce comb honey, then you can be exploring those options that you've got now with the clamshell packs and the things that I honestly have no experience with.

Anne: Learn about it and pick people's brains, watch videos, go to classes, and then you're ready at the moment you're supposed to pick which hive is going to be your comb honey production hive or your choice hive for what you're going to raise queens from. This is not something you're going to figure out in the last half hour before you go out to a bee yard in the spring.

Jim: I would probably give it a shot and do as good as I could in the last half hour because I had every intention. It'd be so much better if I did exactly what you said, that I planned early, chose the technology I wanted because the old technology is just about gone. There's people who use antique hand tools and do things the antique woodworking way. I'm sure there's beekeepers who want to use 1946 M-fences and produce 4x5 sections again and do all those kind of things. That's fine because they maintain an old way of beekeeping, but this is a good time to decide what new direction you want to go.

Anne: Yes. It might not be what new technology you want, but just learning the techniques and getting together with experts. Try to get those relationships going when you're at a meeting and then you'll have the in to contact the person by email and ask your questions, that kind of thing.

Jim: A bit ago, you mentioned someone might consider collecting pollen. I did that very thing years ago. I built my own pollen traps. I got five mesh hardware cloth and built my own traps and studied. I did that in the winter. I'd like to add it this way: I got that out of my system.

Anne: [chuckles] You start things, you stop things.

Jim: It took about five years, and then I collected all this pollen. I had a good time. It was beautiful pollen. I improvised pollen dryers, and then I moved on. Before that, I'd been raising queens. Beekeeping has a menu of life, doesn't it? You don't have to produce gargantuan amounts of honey your entire beekeeping career. You can do things with wax and mold candles.

Anne: Yes, there's so many different ways to have fun with it.

Jim: That winter quiet season, when you're at that winter meeting, is an opportunity for you to select new ways to do new things to keep beekeeping fresh for you.

Anne: Sounds good.

Jim: Having said that, there are some small, sideline, full-time businesses that'll be producing all the honey they can produce ad infinitum because that's what they do to provide food and stay profitable. For those of us who are doing this just for fun, go buy a book and spend all winter building your own equipment. That'll take you about two years to get that out of your system, but it's fun while you're doing it. Then after you're done with that, there's just so many things.

I really enjoyed raising queens. I got stuck in that for a decade. I really had a good time raising queens. That's something you spend the winter months reading and going to meetings and studying and getting the technology down and then murdering queens, trying to move cells, and then heaven forbid, trying to do the instrumental insemination work. That was a whole three years.

Anne: You make mistakes, you learn.

Jim: I just want to make the point that, while you do this thinking during the winter, this is you being ready for the spring season because you're just going to get one shot at it for this year. We just get one spring per season. If you're not ready for it, then you're going to come out of the gate slow.

Anne: Yes, I can't agree more. It's not going to work out to start raising queens in August. You just lost the whole spring and decide to try it anyways. No. You got to do it in the right season. Same with comb honey. Same with getting your supers on for extracted honey. It's like if you had a garden and you didn't plant your peas at the right time, it's suddenly going to be too hot to grow peas. You're not going to get any peas. It's very much connected with the idea of gardening. I think gardeners will probably understand the idea of prepping and timeliness of things better than someone who started beekeeping and never had done anything out in nature before.

Jim: Springtime and the winter, you need to prepare your equipment. You need to get your plans made. You need to order the bees you think you're going to need. You need to order the bees in the format you think you're going to need them. You need to go to meetings and see what entices you. Then whatever entices you, go back home for the seasons, learn about it, prepare for it, get ready. Then, when spring is here, you're good to go.

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Anne: Hopefully, you're good to go.

Jim: Hopefully, you're good to go.

Anne: It sounds so simple.

Jim: It is simple. Why don't I do it? I don't know. [chuckles] I always enjoy talking to you.

Anne: Well, I guess you got to go.

Jim: They've got to go. Hey, listeners, you know we wouldn't have a job here if you didn't listen to us. Anne and I deeply appreciate it. If you've hung on to this point, you're hardcore.

Anne: [chuckles] See you later. See you later, everybody.

Jim: Bye, listeners. Bye-bye.

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