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.
Ultra Bee
High protein pollen substitute
Feeding the bees with Ultra Bee ( left) and sugar water
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.
El Nino is living up to it’s name, dropping a lot of snow on us and bringing in frigid temperatures at night. So what do the bees do? They cluster around the queen and vibrate. This produces heat, much the same way as rubbing your hands together. This keeps the queen warm and the bees circulate outward bringing in the colder, outermost bees into the center where they warm up. All this vibrating requires energy, and that’s why they store the honey. Bees are one of the few insects that can live through the winter as adults, and that’s how they do it. But even all this preparation may not help if the winter is particularly cold and long. I just have to wait and hope they will make it. 
Did you know that they will not poop in their hive? That’s right. They hold it in when it’s cold outside, and when the temperature outside warms up to 45-50 degrees, they will fly out, defecate, and quickly hurry back into the hive!
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