Last week’s 16″ of snow is still around. Daytime temperatures in the mid thirties (at most) for the last two weeks. Continue reading →

Today was a good bee day  with temperatures in the mid 50°F. Bees made their first flight in weeks.

I opened the hives for a quick look and found the clusters were mostly in the top supers. Continue reading →

January’s cold brings a chance to enjoy a bit of reading about different uses of beehive products. Mankind and honey bees have a long history including dentistry going back 6500 years.

Record Temperature set today, 70°F. Bees and I both enjoyed the first day of Winter. Per the day length chart only 9 hours and 25 mutes of daylight today.

I could not resist a picture to celebrate the  start of longer days!

Hive activity on December 21, 2013. The first day of Winter.

Over wintering a few Nucs is something I have done for a couple of years. I never gave it much thought other than I had good success doing it and full size hives from over wintered Nucs are very strong. Nuc production has been almost an after thought around the bee yard and something I did not spend much effort producing. I have for many years made splits to help control swarming, grow my hive count and back fill for losses. Nucs were almost just left overs from the Spring management process.

After watching The Sustainable Apiary by Mike Palmer, I now want to actively produce Nucs. I found this talk that he gave at the UK’s National Honey Show to be very enlightening.  Thank you to Mr. Palmer and the people that made the video available.

“This doesn’t look right” is how I usually determine my beekeeping preventive action plans.

I had been a bit slow removing the top feeders from the last hives that needed Fall feeding. When I got to it last weekend, I was surprised to see one hive with bees in a loose cluster on the frames of the top super. It was warm and there were bees flying but this hive was different from the other hives that still had feeders. The hive was heavy so there was the normal amount of stores when compared to the other more normal looking hives.

I thought about this for the week and decided that the cluster would not move down (after all it is December) so the most likely outcome is that the hive would starve with a full super of honey below and nothing above. Yesterday was in the high 40°F so I took a long shot (just before a predicted temperature drop) and added a super of honey to the hive. I keep extra frames of honey for just this type of situation. Spring will tell if I made the right decision. I’ll keep track over January and February adding candy as needed. One other option would be to switch the supers on a warm February day if there are still frames of honey below the cluster. I plan to also follow the checker boarding swarm control method in late February 2014.