Wow. It has been a while since I last posted. And you know why? Not much has happened to my hive. The colony went into winter strong and healthy, but I only harvested one bar of capped comb in early November. I’d rather have them have too much honey than not enough. I can always harvest the excess in the Spring. The queen was strong; the hive had about 10 bars of brood, and about 6 full bars of honey… which made it just a little over half full. I wished them all a healthy and Happy New Year and left them alone. The workers seal all the cracks of the hive with propolis, which is like a “bee glue” that the bees make by mixing saliva with beeswax and resin and sap from tree buds and bark. The bees allow some air flow into the hive for good circulation and to prevent moisture from building up. Opening the hive, and breaking the seal too much in the winter when it’s very cold will stress the bees as they then have to go around and re-seal the cracks. Temperatures now are reaching the 50’s during the day, and that means that the bees emerge from their hive to defecate and find water. There is nothing blooming now but they are determined to find something to eat. What to do? Feed them! I mixed up a solution of 1 cup sugar to 2 cups water and poured in into a pan with stones and sticks in it. Honeybees are very poor swimmers and will easily drown unless you provide them lots of climbing spaces to grab onto in the sugar water. Once they discover the sugar water, they go back to the hive, tell the others and within a short time they will eat it all up. The sugar is an energy source, but they will also look for pollen, a protein source. A beekeeper friend of mine told me about providing them a high protein pollen substitute and gave me a sample to try out….. the bees loved it and made short work of it. They collect it on their hind legs and take it back to the hive just as if it were real pollen. It’s an interesting mix of vitamins , lipids, minerals and a complete amino acid profile. I gave some to another friend who has bees and she had the same result. So we decided to buy our own.
We ended up getting a 10 pound bucket of “Ultra-Bee” from Mann Lake, a great source of everything dealing with apiculture. Ten pounds of pollen substitute is a lot! We divided it up into 1 pound bags so we could pass it on to other bee keepers. Today was another bright sunny day and temperatures got up in to the mid 50’s so I put out a tray of Ultra Bee and a pan containing a quart of sugar water. By the end of the day, they had finished off almost all of the Ultra Bee and all of the sugar water. If tomorrow is in the 50’s again, I will go in to the hive and check on the colony. The queen should be starting to build up the colony in anticipation of spring. That might be why the bees are so eager to bring sugar and pollen back to hive.
Ode to spring-!!!–living here in north Georgia (just west of Atlanta) it was a nice enough day yesterday to roll out the citrus trees that I move each winter into the basement.
They don’t like cold winters and will not survive a hard freeze. In winters past, I have been able to leave the trees out at night for a few days at a time…but not this winter. The trees actually bloom during the winter and I know they need bees to pollinate all the blooms otherwise there won’t be much fruit. Ususally there are a few hardy souls flying about on day’s like yesterday—but I’ve not seen any bee or wasp activity yet—that’s one indicator of just how cold its been this winter here in Georgia—a little too cold for our liking 🙂
Hope your bees are an indicator that Spring can’t be too far behind…
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Hi Julie, Santa Fe is about 7,200 feet, so normally we get cold temperatures and lots of snow. Unfortunately, it has been a relatively mild winter and almost no precipitation. This warm spell can be dangerous, as the queen may start producing more brood. We are still a long way away from Spring, with much more cold weather ahead of us.
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Ahhh, Sante Fe—I new you were somewhere west but wasn’t entirely sure where—so yes, you do still have a good bit of winter left —as it appears we do as well this year.
We have a local Game Warden who is also a bit of a “honey man” on the side.
He and the family I use for our dry cleaning are a sort of partners in the honey production business.
The wildflower honey the warden gathers is from all from with the county and the dry cleaining business sells it. In the fall, the game warden moves some of his hives up to the north Georgia mountians to some property the dry cleaning family owns, gathering honey from the sourwood blooms.
This fall was a disasterous sourwood season.
I don’t know if that is true throughout North Georgia, North Carolina, Tenn, etc…but it was for our little honey gatherers….and the sourwood honey has usually been the reserve honey that’s kept the fresh honey available throughout the winter months—I’m about to run out of what “local” honey has been available and fear I might have to resort to store bought….
Please know how much I appreciate your blog as I thought about getting a few bee boxes and tending bees once I retired from teaching but that has yet to come about…so instead I am opting to anxiously await the fruits of the labors from both bee and keeper!!!
Happy Hives!!! 🙂
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I’ve had bees all winter (when it’s 50 degrees and up) in my manzanitas and winter jasmine.
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Nice! Good to know the bees have something to forage on!
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As always, so informative! A bee keeper is truly a bee lover. So much to think about and do to keep the hives going. I never knew what all was involved. Again, I learn so much from your postings. Enjoy the fruits of your labor one day soon.
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