August Winter Prep with Anne Frey (245)

Episode 245 – August Winter Prep with Anne Frey

Jim Tew: Listeners, right now, it's hot and dry outside. It's blue skies, birds are singing, clouds are in the air, everything looks nice, but let me tell you, winter is coming. From a beekeeping standpoint, spring is long gone. Most of summer is now long gone. What you got is what you're going to have with your bees. The question is, what can you do now that you should be doing to help them get ready? I'm here with Anne Frey from Betterbee. Hi, Anne.

Anne Frey: Hi, Jim. I'm glad to be here.

Jim: I'm glad you're here. Thank you for being here. We want to talk to you about what you should be doing now to get ready for then, "then" being winter. You do have some responsibility, and you do have some time, so we'll give it our best shot. I'm Jim Tew, and I come to you once a week here at Honey Bee Obscura, where we try to talk about something to do with all things plain talk beekeeping.

Anne: I'm Anne Frey from Betterbee here in Greenwich, New York. I'm glad to join you, Jim.

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 honeybees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honeybees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honeybees.

Jim: Anne, tell me how you would start a discussion of getting ready for winter in August and September

Anne: To somebody that's in the summer, late summer, and they're just getting ready for winter, I would say, "Hey, next year, start thinking about that in July, not August." There's a lot of things that you can do even in May and June that will make your winter successful. We could talk about it systematically. Is it the mites, is it their food, is it how much comb they have, their population? Because that's what they need to stay warm, besides all that honey they gobble up to stay warm.

Jim: What I hear you saying is that each colony is going to have to have its own evaluation-

Anne: Yes.

Jim: -for where it is and what it needs, how you could be helpful.

Anne: You're there to be helpful. You're the steward of these bees. Sometimes they need some help because they swarmed too much, and they never brought in enough nectar to live through a whole six-month winter. Maybe they never actually made enough comb on the foundation. You'll have to help them out in some other way. Certainly, you'll have to help them against the mites. They can't deal with mites and being untreated for an entire spring, summer, fall, and winter. Their honey, what if they didn't get enough honey? You can solve that, too, but pay attention.

Jim: Two things in what you just said. Number one, mites are always going to be here. Always is a long time, but for the foreseeable future, mites are going to be here. If you ignore them, something's going to go wrong. It may go wrong later, but it probably is going to go wrong sooner. I agree that you've got to deal with mites. I also want to tell you the obvious, that bees don't always make honey. They don't always get a good surplus crop. When they don't, you don't get one either.

Anne: Yes, right. We had a year, maybe two, maybe three years ago, all the goldenrod, which is a big part of our late summer flowers, it's goldenrod, like five or six kinds of goldenrod, it all came on early and finished very abruptly, well before it was supposed to be finished. The harvest was tiny. We had to feed thousands and thousands of pounds of syrup to the whole county of bees here. It was horrible.

Jim: It's okay if you shoot a hole in this, but sometimes here in Ohio, it looks to me like, with no science whatsoever, that goldenrod is out there, but the crop isn't there.

Anne: Yes, I've seen that too. I think it has something to do with the groundwater, possibly, like how much moisture is coming up through the plant, and can it give up wet nectar to the insects?

Jim: That's all I could blame it on was rainfall or groundwater, but just because you've got goldenrod doesn't necessarily mean. Does a goldenrod have that characteristic odor where you are?

Anne: The flower doesn't, but when they've brought in a bunch of nectar and they're curing it, around suppertime, you tend to smell that if you're outdoors near the hives. It's a very strange, seemingly bad smell. We like it because we know they're curing some goldenrod honey. Smells like socks.

Jim: [chuckles] I want to go with that for a few minutes. It is a very characteristic odor. I like exactly what you said around suppertime, because it's always late in the afternoon, I guess after they are processing a crop. Anne, I want you to know I've got a good sense of smell, but I don't have a super sense of smell. I've smelled that aroma 60, 70 yards from my hive. I put it in an observation hive here on an enclosed porch. I just about had to move the thing out. [laughter] I couldn't even stay in my shop because of the odor coming through the wall. If that odor is not there, they're not making goldenrod honey. If you were hinging on that for the fall flow, then you need to hinge on something else.

Anne: Did I hear you just say that you don't smell good?

Jim: No, I didn't say that.

Anne: Oh, okay.

Jim: That's what you heard. That may be what you're thinking, but that's not what I said.

Anne: Okay. Yes, there's a lot of things besides goldenrod. They're not as much nectar as goldenrod, though. Asters, some. Mainly, they're just purple and pretty. Bamboo, maybe that's called Japanese knotweed more properly. That's a lot of nectar. Maybe it has deeper taproots. It seems like bamboo never fails as a crop. Yes, you don't assume you're getting a crop or assume the bees have enough food.

You might go out there and be disappointed that your supers are not full, or you might be thrilled that they are full, but have you checked what the brood chamber has? Don't just happily carry your supers away and say, "Well, that was great." Check the brood chambers at least by lifting the bottom edge of your hive up an inch or so and letting it settle down again. It should be PD heavy.

Jim: Can we pivot just a little bit real quickly and then get back on the subject? Do you use hive scales?

Anne: No, we don't. Our hive scales, our arms and backs.

Jim: I've got a set of those electronic scales that I enjoy tinkering with just to tinker. I don't want to go too far that way, but I tilt colonies all the time. It's just right there. I'm right there. If it's a too deep colony, it's easy to do it.

Anne: You got to get used to the way that feels during the whole summer and be aware of what the proper feel is. You certainly don't want to have an easy time tipping it up.

Jim: Just to be clear, everyone knows when you tip a colony, I usually go from the backside of the colony and just give it a lift. If it just comes right off the ground and it's too deep and it's middle of August, that colony is light, and you're really, really depending on the fall flow. If you try to tip it in the middle of August and you can't even budge it off the ground, that colony is probably one that needs supering for a fall flow that's coming up.

Anne: Yes. You're not lifting the whole colony, you're just lifting half, really. You're tipping it up, you're rocking it forwards, you're getting a feel for it. Once you've done beekeeping for a few years and you can recognize, "Hey, I just went through the brood chambers, and I saw there was all this honey, and now I'm going to lift it." Then you coordinate those fields and scenes in your head together so later when you just tip it, you know what's inside without pulling up frames.

Jim: I think you're saying that it's not a strength comparison between a powerful person and a person who's not quite so strong. Everybody learns their own relative feel of what the colony should be like. It doesn't matter about personal strength so much.

Anne: Exactly.

Jim: Let's take a break here and hear from our sponsor. We'll be right back and discuss some of the ways you can help the bees if they're light.

[music]

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Jim: Anne, what if, what if, what if fall has come and gone and goldenrod was just not where you wanted it to be, and nothing really worked out, and you've got some colonies, let's just say they're light, but they could be sage. What are you going to do with them? How are you going to feed? How are you going to supplement? What do you want to do to be helpful?

Anne: I just want to back up a bit, because you said fall has come and gone, and I think that's too late. People should be thinking about this kind of stuff around Labor Day. Beekeepers say "fall" in a different way than normal people say "fall," which is, we are thinking the goldenrod time as fall. Other people think of the time when all the leaves have changed orange and yellow as fall. We don't want to get that far into it because that's after frost. We want much, much earlier attention. What can you do if they're light? You can feed them sugar syrup. That's just granulated sugar with water.

Or you might buy a much thicker syrup from a bee supply that's also made out of sugar and water. It's mixed somehow so that the more sugar is forced into the liquid. It's almost as thick as honey. It's very thick. It's called Pro-Sweet. It's great because the bees barely have to thicken it any amount at all after that. I think the thickest the average person can make in their kitchen is 2:1, like two parts granulated white sugar and one part water. Then the bees have to thicken that after they receive it.

Jim: On that 2:1, do you have to heat that water, or is that just a top water mix?

Anne: I think extremely hot tap water would probably do. Heating is even better. It helps to dissolve all that sugar into the water. Oh, and let me tell you, one time I put the sugar into a big bucket first and then put the water in. I would suggest the other way around because that sugar at the bottom had to be poked and swirled and-

Jim: [laughs] Controlled.

Anne: -forced to pick up off the bottom. I would definitely go water first and then sugar if you have a big, big, deep bucket to do it in. It's no fun to be poking at that. It's just a loose proportion. It's not the end of the world if you're a little off either way. It's not going to ruin the batch. You know what I mean?

Jim: The main thing I hope people understand, and in the past, I don't want to say most people didn't, but some people didn't, by adding a lot of water to a little bit of sugar, that doesn't make a lot of syrup. You've still got exactly the same amount of sugar. You're feeding sugar, not water. You're just feeding water as the carrier to get the sugar to them.

Anne: Oh, I like that. That's a good way to say it.

Jim: Make it just as thick as you can for survival feeding. Now, next spring, if you're going to be stimulative feeding, you might go a much lighter ratio then, but you're not feeding for survival.

Anne: In the late summer, early fall, as thick as you possibly can. If it was earlier, you want it to be more like nectar, which is probably 10% sugar solids. In the fall, definitely, help them out by making it as thick as you can. Then they have to do less work to prep it for their winter food. If they have thin syrup in their combs stored from stuff you fed them and winter combs and they drink that in the middle of the winter, they might end up getting diarrhea all over the inside of their hive. It's just not good for their guts to have all that liquid in their guts in the middle of winter. Honey might as well be a solid food. It's such a different thing than syrup. What is it? 82% solids?

Jim: I'm not sure. I can't even guess on that, but I would think that would sound right.

Anne: Feed. We want them heavy.

Jim: Feed meaningfully. We keep talking about mine and your climate. Yours is a bit worse than mine. If anybody is listening from a warmer area, they have the same issues. It's just the timing is a bit different. You'll have a longer season to prepare, and you may have a milder winter, but that doesn't mean your bees aren't going to be flying all winter using honey stores. Even warmer places have to go into winter in the same way.

Anne: Keep feeding. If they're in the south, they have to actually feed more months just to get through. I personally like a division board feeder or a frame feeder because it's right down in the hive, and it's warm, but sometimes bees who are weaker won't climb down into there and get the syrup.

Jim: And a division board feeder.

Anne: Yes. The bucket feeder right on top of the cluster is probably the best and safest with the upside-down bucket lid on the bucket hidden in another box, which is above them. It's foolproof.

Jim: Anne, I guess I shouldn't assume that everybody knows what a division board feeder is, but it's a--

Anne: True, and why they call it that. Let's just call it a frame feeder.

Jim: Would you put yours right next to the wall? Describe what it looks like.

Anne: It looks like a black rubber frame. [chuckles] It's a hollow frame made out of this plasticky rubber substance, and takes about a gallon of syrup. If the cluster wasn't as far over as the ninth frame, I would not put it by the wall. I would put the feeder next to the cluster. It has to be really in contact with them. There's feeders and there's feeders. People got to have them internal if the bees are going to be drinking on them all those cool September nights. Don't want it at the door where it might get robbed.

Jim: I agree with you. I like that top buckets feeder. It means you got to have a feeder shell to go around it, so you got to have some extra equipment.

Anne: Feeder shell being a deep box?

Jim: A deep, empty box around it to give you space to hide that. In some climates, people would just set it on top. You don't have to have it, but I'd like to put a cover over it.

Anne: I picture what would happen if there was a wind and your bucket was all drank down to nothing, your bucket would just blow away.

Jim: Yes, it would. Unless you didn't mind it blowing away, and then they'd propolis it down. I want to cover it over. I don't know why. I do see pictures all the time of those feeder buckets just sitting on top of beehives somewhere and it's probably a warm climate, but I think also that'd be a robbing issue if any of them leak or seep. Any comments on mites, Anne, how late can you treat for mites, and what should you do if you treat late in the season?

Anne: We can't forget the mites, that's for sure. First of all, I think you should be keeping your mites low all summer. We don't want to have a hive in September getting a treatment for the very first time, because those bees already have a bunch of viruses in every bodily system that they own. We want to keep mite slow, and that keeps viruses low, May, June, July, August, all the way.

If you have not treated at all and you find yourself in the fall, you can treat. Especially if your supers are off, you have a lot of options to treat with products that you might have been restricted from using with supers on. My gut feeling is to just be sad for that person who didn't treat until September or so. That's just classic beginning of the story where the person says, "I went to walk on Thanksgiving and look at my hives, and they were dead." Have you gotten that story?

Jim: I have definitely gotten that story. Yes.

Anne: It's repeated so many times. It's like, "No, they did not abscond. They died, folks. They died. They died little by little as they were flying around on warm fall days. It seems sudden to you, but it wasn't all that sudden to the bees." It's just like when they started with certain number of thousands, and some hundreds disappear every day. Because they don't make it back, it ends up being zero. That's sad.

Jim: It is. I don't even want to go there, but it always is painful when you see a winter kill or a colony that died from Parasitic Mite Syndrome or something. It's just--

Anne: They didn't even really make it to the beginning of winter. They made it to the very end of fall, and they were goners. Please don't underestimate the mites.

Jim: Right now in the middle of August, the colony has to have the basic fundamentals for surviving the winter. It's got to be queenright. It's got to have the population.

Anne: Queenright meaning?

Jim: It's got a functional queen in it, and the population of bees that could withstand the winter, 3, 4 pounds, or even more in some cases. The things we could control, Anne, you've been talking about, are the amount of food stores and controlling the mite population. As I've listened to you talk, those seem to be your major initiatives. We're working with a colony that has everything else that it needs, but it's good to have some help with those two issues, food stores and mites.

Anne: Yes, we could help them out with that. Later on in the winter, you can help them by adding some insulation, but at this time in the summer, you're helping them get ready for winter by getting into winter healthy and not struggling with their food amounts. I like the way you said that, that there's a lot of things we can't control, but we can control a few. I take responsibility for doing that.

Jim: You'll feel a lot better if the colony survives. It's much better to be surprised that a colony is alive next spring than to be surprised that your best colony died in the winter, or, heaven forbid, died in the fall before the weather ever started, due to mite predation, or food stores, or whatever.

Anne: Yes. Winter is coming. I don't know if you're a Game of Thrones fan, Jim, but I can't avoid it.

Jim: I do remember that.

Anne: Can't avoid it. Winter is coming.

Jim: Every time we say, "Winter is coming," I think of that old show that I hung on with years ago now. Anne, I always enjoy talking with you.

Anne: Thanks, Jim. Likewise.

Jim: All right, Anne, until we can talk again. I'm signing off. Are you good?

Anne: I'm good. Thanks. I'll see you next time.

Jim: Okay.

[00:19:52] [END OF AUDIO]